Aug
26
Here is a problem.
A problem that we must tackle now, and quickly, before the prevalent use of AI in education becomes fully established. If we as a society , ourinternational organisations and governments , professional groups and educators individually do not decide on a framework for the positive use of AI in education, then our neglect will build a framework for the misuse of AI in education.
It could go one of two ways. Either AI becomes the greatest gift to learning and literacy, and to skills-based education generally, that we could have ever imagined, increasing the ability of human beings to acquire skills and knowledge and develop their intellectual capacity beyond the scope of our current educational systems Or AI could become an educational straight-jacket more rigid than anything that we have previously thought possible. To put it in Orwellian terms , it could becomea substitute for education itself, condemning children yet unborn to a serfdom derived from a device culture that delivers the “solutions” that those who created the systems thought were appropriate for learners to have. it could become ultimate political and social control.
I started this train of thought at the beginning of the week as I read through the Eighth biennial report published by Scholastic( see link below) , detailing literacy levels and reading skills through a survey of children of different ages and their parents. There has been a gap between this survey and the last because of the pandemic, but Scholastic are to be commended for staying loyal to this vital public duty. As I read this excellent document, I reflected that I started my working life as an educational publisher, and in the decade that I spent developing learning materials for schools, there was the comforting and satisfying feeling that we were working in a world where literacy was inexorably increasing. As the Scholastic survey shows historically, that trend ceased in the 21st century, and in the pandemic literacy levels declined. If they are now stabilising and even picking up slightly, there is no room for complacency. The survey underlines the importance of literacy by linking it to mental health and happiness, and underlining its importance, in communications in general, but particularly in social and family life.
So what, I wondered, can we do to get literacy off its plateau and begin a steady increase again? Obviously AI could be a key factor. I’ve written elsewhere about the potential for AI in providing personalised tutoring and learning journeys for individuals adjusted much more closely to the l appropriate base of learning and level of accomplishment. AI could be instrumental in finding to right style and presentation of content the maximise learning readiness. It could also help teachers to diagnose learning difficulties as well as suggesting ways around those problems. I am an optimist, and I want to believe that AI can help us to create a better world of education where more young people are able to optimise their skills to a greater level and contribute more effectively to the society in which they live.
At this point I turned to the work of the UK National Literacy Trust for further evidence, and found their current survey work on the use of devices (aka smartphones), and their effect on literacy. This makes depressing reading. I include some headline findings at the bottom of this blog , together with a link, but reading their work reminded me that I was so old that I had lived through the Calculator Moment. After my formal education was over, schools in the UK were instructed to forbid the use of electronic calculators in the classroom. Since I had failed mathematics twice and had to retake it, I was personally unmoved. And it does seem strange now, with a calculator function in every smartphone, but outcry and lamentation went up from every parent and teacher in the land. A vital skills base was going to be lost. What will happen when we run out of batteries? Did this mean the death of algebra and geometry as well as basic computational skills? I feel forced to wonder now, as Apple prepares to launch Apple Intelligence, a generalised AI environment for consumers on devices, whether we are at the beginning of a process where the AI in our device defines what we need to read, and then reads it to us, and which understands what we need to write, and writes it for us. I do see the paradox, I do get the irony. I am an old man with impaired vision and I glory in the fact that voice is now the driver of my interaction with machines, while worrying about the idea that voice driven devices using AI may undermine the very skill sets that I most value.
Friends console me. They pointed out that mankind survived the transition from the gearstick to the automatic gearbox. They point to the huge advances made as we moved through robotic process transformation into fully automated AI workflows. But I have lived in countries and at times when there was not enough electricity to go round and the lights went out every day for a number of hours. So I would just like to see us build the skills= based, literacy enhancing AI modelling before we get to a totally device-dependent, skills-denuded world. My late father, a farmer, decided that if I was not going to follow in his footsteps then I needed to enter the world with some basic skills. He taught me to “lay“ a hedge, build a dry stone wall and thatch a roof. I was not so ambitious for my children and grandchildren: I simply deeply desired that they should learn to read and write so that they could share some of the great pleasures that I have derived from those activities. When I use ChatGBT or Perplexity in my daily work then I feel pleasure that I am extending my skills and building on my knowledge. So, please, can we use AI to develop the literacy skills and knowledge of the learners in our schools today? And can we do it before we tell them that they do not need any of those old literacy skills anymore, because all of the answers will always be available on the device (a charged battery and bandwidth availability will always, of course, be available to everyone everywhere!
PS I did ask Perplexity and ChatGBT4 for guidance on this issue,, and they both answered judicially that, on the one hand, good things would happen, and on the other hand, bad things would happen! Just as I feared!
UK National Literacy Trust survey 2024
- Almost 1 in 2 (47.4%) young people said that, when they use AI, they usually add their own thoughts into anything it tells them, while 2 in 5 (39.9%) said they checked outputs from generative AI as they might be wrong.
- However, 1 in 5 (20.9%) said that they usually just copied what generative AI told them and 1 in 5 (20.6%) did not check outputs, suggesting greater support may be needed to ensure this group of young people have the information and skills they need to critically evaluate AI responses.
Aug
4
The World After OA
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I could use up acres of the blogosphere in detailing my deficiencies as a blogger. But one deficiency is particularly applicable here. I do not by and large, place too much faith in polls or surveys, especially where the identity of the respondent is known to the organisers. I have entertained these suspicions for a long time: they were the subject of my first published letter in the Guardian newspaper in 1964. I had been working as a Gallup pollsfer and had begun to appreciate how responses to my questions varied with the reading made by the respondent of who I was and what my expectations might be. If this could happen as I patrolled the pavements ofthe Angel, Islington, I reasoned then, how much more likely is it to happen now . To happen, for example when, research academics respond to the latest survey on the Towards Responsible Publishing proposal promulgated by cOAlition S.(https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-welcomes-the-findings-from-the-consultation-on-the-towards-responsible-publishing-proposal/)
Let me hasten to add that this is not because I think that researchers would falsify their position in order to curry favour with the research organisations conducting the survey. I think it is more the case that the 11,000 people responding to the survey would have a clear idea of the probable direction of cOAlition S policy and would be anxious to help drive it forward while those in disagreement would be less likely to respond at all. I do not say this to denigrate the cOAlition S direction, since I have a great deal of sympathy with their conclusions. And I largely agree with most of them. However, my experience of efforts to talk about the future has led me to different conclusions. my belief now is that we get a better fix in the future if we look at The working problems of current information distribution in the context of networked ecosystems over the past 30 years. The issue is not so much the practices of publishers; network communication will redesign itself around the critical dissemination needs. in the history of these changes, OA (open access)will be a really interesting historical footnote. But aa footnote all the same.
And then I encounter another difficulty. Revolution : what do we mean when we describe change as revolutionary and would we recognise a revolution if we saw one?. In watching the development of publishing in the scholarly research field, as a participant and as a advisor and as an observer for well over 50 years, I conclude that usually when we hail a “revolution“ it is a hoped for event rather than an actual one. And that the real revolutions, meaning far reaching or complete changes in systems and services, happen quietly and usually take a little retrospective time for recognition. So it is with OA (open access). The revolution here was “free to me as a researcher at the point of use“. I am confident that this will never be reversed. whatever the arguments about the level or affordability of author publication charges.The issue of how this is paid for, such a momentous issue for publishers, is not a great issue in the larger picture of research funding as a whole. As a useful corrective think through the issues from the point of view of a senior official responsible for scientific research in the Indian or Chinese governments. China today and India in a decade will be the major sources of research articles: will they be creating major budget for publishing charges?
I think also that, starting in Western Europe,we are seeing the slow disentanglement of research article productivity from issues of pay and preferment. here it is the USA which seems to be the exception. i have also experienced the anxiety of researchers and academics, particularly in medical research in recent years, to use the corpus of published research from their institution to attract more researchers and more funding.
And then people , especially in physics and life sciences, tell us about the other great problem. Speed. Getting it out there while the issues are hot, and while the research team and its institution gain kudos from being in the argument and feeding it with fresh evidence and new discoveries. Apparently something like 10% of research articles published last year first appeared as pre-prints during the year. I think this can only grow, and when we reach, in the sciences in particular, the position where most articles come from pre-print servers initially, we shall see, as well, an impact on journal branding and it’s importance.
I do not see the branding of the great journal names altering at all: Nature ,Cell, Science are in a very safe place. But when, as I read recently, a communications letters journal publishes 21,000 articles in a year, it is not so much a brand as a channel. I see a potential consolidation of brand to institutions. In an age where all publishing of this type is digital, all processing can be effectively accomplished in AI moderated environments: when peer review can be semi- automated as well , subject to human supervision and approval, then it is surely not hard to imagine that the research institutions will want to secure the branding and represent their corpus of knowledge and their productivity in one place? . And publishers of today will surely become their collaborators with this tomorrow. those who are despondent about the disintermediation of publishers and publishing should cheer themselves up with the huge prospects offered by collaboration with research institutions on one side to create secure branded repositories for articles and attached evidential data, while on the other side looking at the intelligent commercial reuse of such data in industrial and commercial AI applications. this is not the time for publishers to have a Gutenburg moment and retreat to the scriborium
Anyone still looking for revolutions? Try the revolution in article reading – some now believe that more articles are initially read by machines in the sciences than by people, and others assert that this happened at least 10 years ago. At the same time it is clear that the volume of research could not be handled at all if machine based summarisation was not available. This makes the idea that some publishing majors are still not employing metadata which facilitates machine to machine communicationtotally bewildering. Perhaps it really is time to accept that all research has to be free at the point of academic use, forget OA, and settle down to working on the real problems of the research ecosystem in the 21st century..?
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