Tag Archives: Replacing teachers

YouTube! Automating Education and Teaching Machines Audrey Watters

Automating Education and Teaching Machines Audrey Watters
“Can computers replace teachers?” The Atlantic recently asked. “Can AI replace student testing?” another publication queried. These sorts of headlines are appearing with increasing frequency. But do they reflect technological advances in “artificial intelligence”? Or are they reflections instead of culture and political desires to see education automated?

This talk will explore the history of “teaching machines” — a history that certainly pre-dates the latest hype about artificial intelligence. It will also examine the ideological (and technical) underpinnings of Silicon Valley’s recent push to automate — or as it calls it, “personalize” — education.

I liked this on YouTube to fix it on my lifestream so that I can watch it later.

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Reading List! The Rediscovery of Teaching

Alan Sensei https://www.flickr.com/photos/91591049@N00/12521467433

Gert Biesta’s paper calls upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to explicate his argument that students are not served by adaptive teaching in spite of the rhetoric surrounding such ‘prevailing educational imaginary’ (p.378). He contends that this type of auto-didacticism means that the student remains ‘in her own mind’, able to make meaning of the world as she perceives and learns about it, yet,

“the self … can never out of its own generate a criterion with which to evaluate that which it is adjusting to” (p.388).

Biesta, arguing with Levinas, states that the student in this situation crucially lacks an intervention or, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say considering Levinas’ philosophy, an intercession, from another, an exteriority, who addresses her and in so doing, makes revelation. Without this,

the very ‘thing’ that cannot happen, the very ‘thing’ that can never ‘arrive’ in their universe, is the event of being addressed, that is, the event of being taught (p.388).

Levinas’ philosophy and Biesta’s explication is far more complex than can be summarised in this short comment, but I believe it revolves around an understanding of the teacher as generously and without expectation of return, interceding for the student by providing something akin to Sartre’s ‘look’ which reveals her to herself and awards her proper subjectivity and apprehension in and of the world and without promoting his own view of it.

I need to read this again to gain a better understanding of it.

Biesta, G. (2016). The Rediscovery of Teaching: On robot vacuum cleaners, non-ecological education and the limits of the hermeneutical world view. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(4), pp.374-392.

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