I love reading about education, and these days, I cannot ignore the effects of AI, so I have found a substack newsletter (free) that I really enjoy reading. It is called “The Augmented Educator,” written by Michael Wagner, who is Professor of Digital Media and Head of the Digital Media Department at Drexel University. His posts integrate his technological expertise with a deep concern for the fundamentals of educational practice. The posts I have read have all been related how AI is affecting educational practice, especially in higher education contexts. Most recently, he wrote about “Corporate AI Psychosis.” The article was about the apparent disconnect between the enthusiasm of companies building out AI and the growing antimosity of young people especially. For example, he was focusing on the boos from graduates during recent graduation speeches when AI was discussed in speeches.
He himself is an AI-enthusiast and is using it even to help write his substack posts. So, he is not against AI. However, he critically assesses how it is being used in education, and in the “Corporate AI Psychosis” post, he points out the gap between the companies gaining riches from AI and the people whose communities and livelyhoods are or likely will be being negatively impacted. Most people following AI already have heard of communities fighting against having data centers built nearby, and as he cites, polls show discontent among a significant portion of the public when it comes to what AI will bring.
I tend to be enthusiastic about AI’s use and potential for education, and so I like the name of Michael Wagner’s substack, “The Augmented Educator.” When I first saw ChatGPT in November 2022, my first thought was that it could eventually eliminate jobs for English teachers in Japan (and foreign language teachers everywhere). I still think that could happen, but I see another, better outcome. Like the title of Wagner’s substack, I can see educators’ abilities being augmented. So far, I see the backlash against AI as a growing appreciation for humans. As I have written elsewhere, teachers are the essential workers at the intersection between young people and society. They are there to help young people contend with social media influence, and now AI. Teachers are there for young people through most of their formative years. There is home, and there is school. If AI can serve to augment the educators, then I can see great outcomes for education in general.
The key will be for teachers to be in control and not have independent study with AI dominate. Meanwhile, teachers can use AI tools to create more dynamic, interesting, exciting materials to educate with. They can use AI tools to speed up processes and administrative work (or administrators can use it for the same purposes). I think it will take time for teachers to explore the possibilities, and unfortunately, the negative perceptions about AI might make many educators eschew the new potential that AI offers.
I am very careful about the footprint AI has in my actual classroom. We all should know after years of educational technology tools that more technology does not equal better education. As a teacher, it is our job to figure out what mixture and dosage of technology augments our teaching and classes. I have so far found that AI has been most useful for me in everyday tasks that I can make a little bit better thanks to AI tools. For example, I have always wanted to give students my feedback along with peer feedback on presentations. However, it can extremely time consuming to gather peer feedback after presentations. I have tried it with paper comments which works pretty well, but for large classes, it involves printing paper, cutting it, handing it out in class, then coallating it, and students taking home the paper comments. Actually, it’s not terrible, and I still use that process in smaller classes. Paper allows for drawings and other types of feedback beyond writing. However, with bigger classes, I have starting gathering student feedback through forms through which they can give ratings on presentations according to objectives, and they can also give written feedback. In the past, organizing all of the comments and collating them and copying and pasting so that they could be given individually to each presenter…well, it was inconceivable. Now, I can get average peer ratings and comments collated within minutes, and with AI I could improve an Excel macro I had previously written by hand so that it efficiently creates gradesheets to upload for my students on our LMS. I have both shortened the time it takes to get feedback to students, and I have increased the amount of feedback they receive. In fact, I might be spending just a little more time now with this augmented process than I spend previously with a process of no feedback from peers, but I feel my new process is better education. For me, this example feels like the tip of the iceberg. I have written in other posts about creating a vocabulary study app that will be adapted to my students’ needs, with more pertinent information and function than they can get on the “best” vocabulary study app currently available on the app store. Yes, I am finding that using AI takes more of my time than before, but it feels worth it. I feel like I am becoming an augmented educator, and I am doubling down on making my classes full of human interaction, taking a critical eye to the lazy uses of AI that make us worse, not better.
So, I highly recommend Michael Wagner’s substack…I am not a paid user, but he generously makes his paid writing available after a time delay.