Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 23 Dec 2015, 19:38
Bayne (2015)* on
Teacherbot
Sian Bayne and the Edinburgh’s school’s newest publication
is both an extension of her application of postmodernist accounts of ‘p-leisure’
in the work of learning but also an attack on the hegemonic claims of ‘humanism’
within educational discourse. Pedagogies which stress the necessity of human contact – whether mediated
face to face or digitally – may ignore the increasing dehumanisation of the
field of knowledge, where human/body/machine are part of an interactive play of
elements in both what the modern world offers as knowledge, and the means of
knowing it (at the level of acquisition, storage and retrieval).
Issues of educational quality increasingly have become (see
QAA criteria for instance) matters of mechanical recording of ‘quality’ processes
and protocols and increasingly avoid notion of qualitative judgement. A machine
can easily spot and monitor such processes. Teachers may increasingly feel
forced to teach according to protocol and a serial set of processes. In these
cases, Clarks (1980 cited Bayne 2015:465) statement is a strong and not
necessarily fearsome one: ‘Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should
be!’
For after all, Bayne and her colleagues found that employing
a robot code to take student queries on a MOOC on distance learning, actually
ensured that the group of participant learners gained sure and metacognitive
grasp of how ‘the technical, medical, informatics and economic’ has decentred
the role of the human in information acquisition, storage and retrieval whilst
still wearing the mask of ‘being human’.
Education that is attested by the monitoring of processes still
evokes notions of the value of human communication whilst displacing those
things that once characterised such communication and made it efficacious:
judgement, wisdom and tolerance of uncertainty.
Bayne (2015:463) shows how student play with ‘Botty’ as a query
system generated ‘profound reflection on course concepts’: ‘’There was plenty
of active prodding of ‘botty’ by the students to unveil the limits to its proxy
humanity”.
In an age where teachers are asked to ‘standardise’, are the
products of that process subjected to the same scrutiny and the limits of the proxy
humanity of process-based teaching and learning exposed. My recent experience
of HE, in static university institutions, suggests not. These institutions
thrive on ticking the boxes across whole sets of serial processes involved in
teaching and learning without engaging learners in a process of complex
intersubjective decision-making and reflection, much as does the very simplest
and least ‘expert system’ oriented computer code. Teacherbot allows students to
‘see double’ according to Bayne (2015:465) offering simultaneous vision of the
meaning of the human and the technological non-human, ‘without trying to strip
either away’. This offers us democratic choices and judgements – indeed they may
become the central focus of a true education for the future.
Bayne (2015)* on Teacherbot
Bayne (2015)* on Teacherbot
Sian Bayne and the Edinburgh’s school’s newest publication is both an extension of her application of postmodernist accounts of ‘p-leisure’ in the work of learning but also an attack on the hegemonic claims of ‘humanism’ within educational discourse. Pedagogies which stress the necessity of human contact – whether mediated face to face or digitally – may ignore the increasing dehumanisation of the field of knowledge, where human/body/machine are part of an interactive play of elements in both what the modern world offers as knowledge, and the means of knowing it (at the level of acquisition, storage and retrieval).
Issues of educational quality increasingly have become (see QAA criteria for instance) matters of mechanical recording of ‘quality’ processes and protocols and increasingly avoid notion of qualitative judgement. A machine can easily spot and monitor such processes. Teachers may increasingly feel forced to teach according to protocol and a serial set of processes. In these cases, Clarks (1980 cited Bayne 2015:465) statement is a strong and not necessarily fearsome one: ‘Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!’
For after all, Bayne and her colleagues found that employing a robot code to take student queries on a MOOC on distance learning, actually ensured that the group of participant learners gained sure and metacognitive grasp of how ‘the technical, medical, informatics and economic’ has decentred the role of the human in information acquisition, storage and retrieval whilst still wearing the mask of ‘being human’.
Education that is attested by the monitoring of processes still evokes notions of the value of human communication whilst displacing those things that once characterised such communication and made it efficacious: judgement, wisdom and tolerance of uncertainty.
Bayne (2015:463) shows how student play with ‘Botty’ as a query system generated ‘profound reflection on course concepts’: ‘’There was plenty of active prodding of ‘botty’ by the students to unveil the limits to its proxy humanity”.
In an age where teachers are asked to ‘standardise’, are the products of that process subjected to the same scrutiny and the limits of the proxy humanity of process-based teaching and learning exposed. My recent experience of HE, in static university institutions, suggests not. These institutions thrive on ticking the boxes across whole sets of serial processes involved in teaching and learning without engaging learners in a process of complex intersubjective decision-making and reflection, much as does the very simplest and least ‘expert system’ oriented computer code. Teacherbot allows students to ‘see double’ according to Bayne (2015:465) offering simultaneous vision of the meaning of the human and the technological non-human, ‘without trying to strip either away’. This offers us democratic choices and judgements – indeed they may become the central focus of a true education for the future.
Bayne, S. (2015) ‘Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching’ in Teaching in Higher Education 20 (4) 455 – 467, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783