As an educator reading headline after headline about ai in education, it's hard not to get lost in an existential tailspin to the sound of Billie Eilish. “What was I made for?” (if ai can do all this.)
Integrating generative ai into education is complex. The ai field is the Wild West right now – we're figuring it out as we go. As an assistant professor of educational technology, I often think about the implications of ai in teaching and learning, especially when I experience the implementation of various practices and approaches with the future educators I teach.
I'm excited about the potential ai has, but one part of the equation that gives me pause is the notion of time. It's not surprising, since my favorite movies have this theme. “Benjamin Button,” “About Time,” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy leave me thinking about what it means to be alive and live a good life with the time we have.
In a recent book In exploring the influence of generative ai on teacher education, two researchers, Punya Mishra and Marie K. Heath, raised a question that I can't seem to shake. “What does it mean for students to exchange the zone of proximal development To facilitate access to knowledge creation?” Mishra and Heath admit they don't have the answer, but say they believe it's an important question for educators and scholars to consider.
The question has left me wondering if in our quest to reduce the time it takes to do things, we have forgotten to consider the value of the experience we gain in the time it takes to do them.
My curiosity about ai goes beyond my work and seeps into life at home. Recently, my husband and I worked for over an hour cleaning our yard. As I knelt on the ground, hands in the dirt, my muscles ached and I found myself thinking, and not thinking, as I sliced through space. I noticed my thoughts drifting in and out of loving and hating gardening.
Hours later, I couldn't help but think about the value of that time spent working. I felt satisfied as he washed my hands to remove the remaining dirt. This type of time-consuming home improvement task is often described on social media in time lapse videos. Scroll through instagram and TikTok and you'll find someone renovating their garden, painting a wall, or renovating a room. These scrollable nuggets show before and after images of the project in an instant. They're rewarding to watch, but these videos provide only an echo of the satisfaction you feel when looking at the finished product of your own hard work.
Time is an obvious part of our lives, but we don't often think about how it shapes us. It often passes without our knowledge, like the fish that didn't recognize the water in David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College. graduation speechWe are swimming in time, without noticing it as it passes.
Yes, there are machines that could clean my garden and, in the midst of the hard work, I would have gladly completed the task. And yet, when I see a difficult task well done, I feel good, somehow more alive. I know my garden and myself better.
There is a term that I love that addresses this idea. “Meraki” is a Greek word that describes “doing something with soul, creativity or love, when you put “something of yourself” into what you are doing.“My mom's homemade quilt is different than what I can buy at Walmart. There's a reason we put handwritten words on store-bought cards.
In 2023 interview, professional basketball player Caitlin Clark shared about where her confidence comes from. “The time I spend in the gym, the hours working on my game, it just builds my confidence.” Is Clark different if he somehow magically and quickly knows how to shoot? Is the patina of her experience as valuable as she thinks and moves on the court?
I am not against the use of ai. In fact, I believe it has enormous potential to enhance our human creativity and support effective teaching and learning. But too often in debates about ai in education, we get stuck on the notion of cheating and miss more interesting questions: How can these new tools make us more creative? Can these tools make us more human, not less? Much depends on the intention and how we choose to use them.
When I learned how to make quotes as a high school student, our teacher asked us to physically make quotes using index cards, even when it was possible to have a quote generator to produce them. As much as I hated it, I have a deep understanding of how dating works because I built it by hand. Is it valuable to know that concept? That's debatable, but I'm not debating it here. Instead, I challenge us as educators to continue thinking about what we gain and lose as we pursue intentional use of ai.
What does it mean for work to be done so quickly? How much does it cost? In its rehearsal, “Five things we should know about technological change,” wrote Neil Postman, educator and social critic, “every technology has a bias,” adding that “it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and achievements.” Postman explained the importance of memory in a culture without writing, but how in a culture with writing memory is considered a waste of time. “The writer prefers logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television presenter values immediacy, not history. And the computer scientists, what can we say about them? Perhaps we can say that the computer scientist values information, not knowledge and certainly not wisdom.”
I wonder what values will fall by the wayside as we become humans using ai.
As ai becomes more common, it leads me to philosophical questions, but on a practical level, I find it interesting that many of the things I have learned and that matter most to me were difficult. They required effort. They took time. Learning them was rewarding.
I don't want to forget how satisfying it feels to clear a garden, get stronger at something through prolonged practice, or create something from scratch. I don't want our schools to forget it either. As Tom Hanks says in “A League of Their Own,” “It's supposed to be hard. If it weren't difficult, everyone would do it. The difficult thing… is what makes it great.”
