Learning in a Time of Abundance: How Search, The Internet, and Gen AI change what and how we can teach
CALL 2024 - Dave Cormier
Today’s menu
https://www.flickr.com/photos/90371939@N00/4344878104
Just because you’re doing the same thing, doesn’t mean you’re doing the same thing.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
Incremental vs. Transformational
Information abundance
seems transformational to me
Information used to be HARD to come by
https://outreach.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_orthodox_monastic_book_from_Ethiopia_-_sheepskin_parchment.jpg
https://sarahemilybond.com/2016/04/04/sacrificial-lambs-livestock-book-costs-and-the-premodern-parchment-trade/
Scarcity of Scribes(1700 BCE)
“Those who wish to scrutinize the bosom of nature to the inmost can hear [at the University of Toulouse] the books of Aristotle which were forbidden at Paris.”
- University of Toulouse Flyer, 1229 (Translated by Lynn Thorndike)
Scarcity of books (1229 CE)
This is how my father learned new stuff (maybe 1955?)
I learned to learn things directly from people or from books (Early 90s)
Can you imagine a book, in 2024, that was ‘all about’ anything?
Our schools were designed to solve the problem of information scarcity
Scarcity to Abundance
Increasing specialisation
https://www.uwindsor.ca/people/rehse/sites/uwindsor.ca.people.rehse/files/sunspot1002_soho.jpg
Youtube can teach you anything… right?
And, well, who really knows what GenAI can and can’t do?
How does that impact our learners as people?
The true hero of abundance
I mean, not really google, and maybe not a hero, but search…
“If you ask me a published question, the answers are literally RIGHT THERE!!!”
GenAI
A symptom of a broader abundance.
AI uses all that abundance and…
“In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/im-a-student-you-have-no-idea-how-much-were-using-chatgpt
TLDR…
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-of-reading
Students can ‘generate/find’ the answer to almost any ‘question’.
The technology has broken our narrative
We’ve lost the leverage of scarcity.
The technology ‘can’ turn everything you do in school or at work into a chore.
Not this kind of chore
But an endless series of chores…
The hidden curriculum -> Right answer-itis
Thinking that every question you get asked has one answer that the questioner already knows, and your job is to figure out what it is.
Which is fine if the life our students faced looked like this
But it mostly looks like this…
What we might want to do about it
If our students are going to do the work when we’re not watching, they will actually have to care about it.
We can’t be in the business of hiding answers…
We need a pedagogy of abundance (Weller, 2011)
One example, Stay with me…
The Essay
http://davecormier.com/edblog/2023/10/05/why-im-advising-that-people-stop-assigning-essays-and-its-not-just-because-of-ai/
CTRL F
Learning to choose:
Guided search
We need to learn to check our work AFTER we have done it
“You’ve got an answer -> how good is it?”
Analog film photography still, portrait of a woman on a bicycle riding on the sand in front of a stormy ocean, grainy fujifilm film, anaglyph effect.
The move from information scarcity to information abundance fundamentally affects what and how we learn.
Abundance
https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5347237755
The tech will just allow our students to win the game of school
Uncertainties are full of shoulds. Full of decisions. Full of a student’s thoughts.
Prototyping vs. idea generation
https://hbr.org/2023/07/how-generative-ai-can-augment-human-creativity
This is Linus Pauling
He REALLY liked vitamin C
Should I like it too?
(This is the complex one)
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling
Three literacies for helping us confront uncertainty in a time of information abundance?
Approach learning with humility.
Think about the way we make meaning and how we trust
Learn with our values
You can’t pour from an empty cup.
Take care of yourselves.
(and each other)