I was honoured with the opportunity to present my reactions to the UNESCO Guidance on generative AI in education and research during the launch as part of the Digital Learning Week in Paris. Let me share with you some of my words. 💬
This is not AI generated feedback on the Guidance 😁 I read Guidance by myself and commented by myself because this Guidance deserves my time and effort.
🐾The same is with our teaching and learning – our students deserve our time, our expertise, compassion and support. We shouldn’t outsource teaching to AI. We should not get enfeebled or deskilled by the AI. Otherwise our years of expertise are wasted on prompting.
🤡 We should be honest with our students, our colleagues how we are using AI and why. If we can’t say why – we are already making mistakes!
The Guidance follows UNESCO path for #TechOnOurTerms helping us to answer questions Why tech, What we are aiming for…
⚖️ UNESCO Guidance pointed to important aspect of creating balance between regulation and promotion of generative AI, importance of age limit ( I would add age verification too). Importance of monitoring and validation, especially pedagogical validation, testing locally and building evidence. We had the opportunity to see some examples of how partnerships between researchers, government and education could answer those challenges. We know that those are complex issues, but this is not an excuse for not doing it!
🏋️♀️Unburdening teachers, solving teacher’s problems are some of the buzzwords we hear as promises of EdGPT – but how do they know what teachers really need? Do they have teachers in teams, have teachers been asked – or is this one more “big thing” dumped on the teacher’s shoulders?
The Guidance correctly put more responsibility for GenAI on the providers and institutions not individual teachers.
🎨In the chapters about facilitating creative use of GenAI, the Guidance present excellent examples, among which I suggest automated feedback and assessment should be added (Do we know how students react to AI feedback? Do our students know that we use AI to write feedback for them?)
🌌 The Guidance on generative AI in education and research finish with ideas about GenAI and Future of Education. 🌑 My comment was that one of the possible futures is with a human teacher available only for the rich while the rest of us are stuck with an artificial teacher. I hope that this Guidance and our collaborative effort will steer us away from that version of the Future of Education.
🎉 Thank you Fengchun Miao for the invitation and opportunity to contribute to DLW. Looking forward to the implementation of the Guidance.
✒️ Now is you turn! Read the Guidance (or ask some AI tool to read it for you 🤓) and do your best to create better future of education.
