For educators, it’s hard not to fall into a Billie Eilish-esque state of existential confusion as you read headline after headline about AI in education. “What was I made for?” (AI all This one.)
Integrating generative AI into education is complicated. The field of AI is currently something of a frontier; we are figuring it out as we go. As an assistant professor of EdTech, I often think about the impact of AI on teaching and learning, especially as I experiment with different practices and approaches with my teacher education students.
As excited as I am about the possibilities of AI, one thing that gives me pause is the concept of time. This isn’t surprising, as some of my favorite movies touch on this theme: Benjamin Button, About Time, and the Back to the Future trilogy all make you think about what it means to be alive and to live life to the fullest with the time you have.
in Recent Books Two researchers investigating the impact of generative AI on teacher education, Punya Mishra and Marie K. Heath, posed a question that stuck with me: “How do learners… Zone of proximal development “How do we make knowledge creation more accessible?” Mishra and Heath acknowledge they don’t have the answer, but they believe it’s an important question for educators and scholars to consider.
This question leads me to wonder whether we are so focused on reducing the time it takes to do things that we forget to consider the value of the experience we gain in the time it takes to do things.
My curiosity about AI extends beyond work and into my home life. Recently, my husband and I spent over an hour weeding our yard. As I knelt on the ground, digging my hands into the dirt, my muscles aching, shaping the space bit by bit, I found myself thinking, not thinking. I found myself thinking about the things that make me love or hate gardening.
A few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about the value of the time I’d spent on the project. I felt a sense of satisfaction as I washed my hands to remove the remaining dirt. These kinds of time-consuming home improvement projects are often featured on social media. Time Lapse VideoScroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find people revamping their gardens, painting walls, and redecorating rooms. These scrollable videos give us a quick look at the before and after of their projects. Fun to watch, they’re only an echo of the satisfaction we feel when we see the finished product of our hard work.
Time is an obvious part of our lives, but we don’t often think about how it shapes us. Time often passes by without us realizing it, much like David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College novel, “A Fish Out of Water.” Graduation SpeechWe are swimming in time and do not notice it passing by.
Sure, there are machines that can clean up your yard, and you would gladly let go of the hard work that is in the middle of it, but seeing a hard job done makes you feel good, somehow more alive, and you come to understand your yard and yourself better.
There’s a word I love to use to express this idea. “Meraki” is Greek for “It’s about doing something with soul, creativity, or love – putting “something of yourself” into what you do.“My mom’s handmade quilts are not like the ones you can buy at Walmart. There’s a reason we add handwritten notes to store-bought cards.”
In 2023 interviewProfessional basketball player Caitlin Clark talks about the source of her confidence: “The time I spend in the gym, the time I spend working on my game, that’s what builds my confidence.” Does Clark’s magical quickness and knowledge of how to shoot set her apart? Is her accumulated experience just as valuable as her on-court thinking and movements?
I am not against the use of AI. In fact, I believe AI has great potential to enhance human creativity and support effective teaching and learning. But too often, discussions about AI in education get caught up in notions of cheating and miss more interesting questions: How do these new tools enhance our creativity? Do these tools make us more human? Do they make us less human, rather than more human? A lot depends on the intent and how we use them.
When I learned citations in high school, my teacher required me to physically create citations on index cards, even though citation generators could auto-generate them for me. Even though I hated it, I created my own citations, so I have a deep understanding of how citations work. Is this a concept worth knowing? That’s debatable, but we won’t debate it here. Instead, I’m calling for us as educators to continue to think about what we gain and what we lose in pursuing purposeful uses of AI.
What does it mean to get the job done so quickly? How much does it cost? essayIn his book Five Things You Need to Know About Technological Change, educator and social commentator Neil Postman writes that “technology is biased,” adding that “it tends to lead us to favor and value certain perspectives and outcomes.” Postman explains that in preliterate cultures, memory is important, but in literate cultures, memory is considered a waste of time. “The literate person favors logical structure and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraph person favors speed, not reflection. The television person favors immediacy, not history. And what shall we say of the computer person? We might say that the computer person favors information, not knowledge, much less wisdom.”
What values will be lost as we become humans using AI?
As AI goes mainstream, it raises philosophical questions, but on a practical level, I think it’s interesting that many of the things I’ve learned that mattered most to me were hard. It took effort and time. But learning them was worth it.
I never want to forget how satisfying it is to clean up a yard, or to become good at something after hours of practice, or to build something from scratch. I don’t want schools to forget that, either. As Tom Hanks says in “A League of Their Own,” “It has to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s hard, which is why it’s great.”
