Tipping Point: A Critical
Case Study
ETEC 511 Winter 2 2023
Elaine Jiang
One significant technology
migration for 21st century is the replacement of pencils and papers, notebooks
with keyboards, laptops and tablets. As we
stand at the crossroad by witnessing the brewing of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) revolution, the emergence of AI wearables as the next evolution in
technology, potentially superseding laptops, is much anticipated. These
advancements have the potential to revolutionize education, displacing
conventional teaching tools and reshaping pedagogy in the process.
COVID-19 saw accelerated
change of educational technology. With the emergence of ChatGPT and SORA, the
latest revolutionary product from Open AI which enables text to video
conversion with just a click of mouse, the content generation becomes faster,
easier, more accessible for educators and parents.
This study focuses on the
discussion of pros and cons of education media evolution by looking at the
history of the displacement of pencil and paper with tablet & laptop and
the implications we can learn from the literature exploration. Next the study
aims to discuss the potential strength and weakness if massive replacement of
tablet / keyboard by AI wearables happens especially regarding classroom
teaching.
Since the
dawn of early human civilization, new found tools and technology were
constantly being used and innovated in the quest for propagating and preserving
knowledge and to improve the overall edification process of society. The use of
sticks being used as pens on sand, gave way to colored stones and dyes used on
cave walls and cliffs and, soon after, leather to write and to write on. Later,
as technology improved in the middle ages, man started using quills and liquid
ink leading to fountain and ball-point pens by the Twentieth century. Film,
television, projection and the recent addition of computer assisted education
have all been important steps in this long saga of integrating technology in
improving the propagation of knowledge. While Information Technology remains a
relatively recent phenomenon, the promotion of educational reform resulting
directly from classroom use of new tools and equipment has been around for more
than a century. Efforts to reform education through computer infusion and the
histories of deploying earlier audio-visual technologies such as film, radio
and television have been applied in many parts of the world. "The question
is no longer whether to use technology in education institutions but how to use
technology to change practice to reach new goals-as a catalyst for change and
as a tool in creating, implementing, managing and communicating a new
conception of teaching and learning, as well as the system that supports
it" (Cradler and Bridgforth, 1996). A close look at technologically
leading nations clearly shows that Educational Technology (ET) is considered to
be an indispensable part of the education delivery process.
Quill pens, made from bird
feathers, were commonly used for writing in Europe from the 5th century
onwards. Ink was typically made from a mixture of water, carbon, and gum
Arabic. Quills were effective for writing on parchment, vellum, and paper, but
they required frequent sharpening and dipping in ink. The modern pencil as we
know it today was invented in the late 16th century. Unlike quill pens, pencils
were reusable and did not require frequent sharpening. The invention of the
graphite pencil, which replaced the earlier lead-based pencils, made writing
and drawing more convenient and accessible. Paper, which had been
used in China since ancient times, gradually became more widely available in
Europe during the Middle Ages. Paper was more affordable and
easier to produce than parchment or vellum, making it a popular choice for
writing and printing. Pencils do not require ink, that could spill or smudge,
they can be easily erased and corrected. The Industrial Revolution in
the 18th and 19th centuries brought about advancements in manufacturing and
technology, leading to the mass production of pencils and paper. This made
pencils and paper more affordable and accessible to a wider
range of people. The migration from quill and ink to pencil and paper
represented a significant shift in writing technology, making writing
more accessible, convenient, and efficient for people around
the world. That explains why it still coexists alongside new digital writing
technology for writing and communication.
The shift from pencil and
paper learning to typewriter, keyboard and tablet learning has been a gradual
process that has accelerated in recent years with the widespread adoption of
technology in education. Computers started as early as the 1960s and 1970s
without much household applications. These early computers were mainly used for
basic programming and games. The 1980s and 1990s saw the widespread adoption of
personal computers in homes and schools. This enabled students to use word
processing programs but only on a very basic level. The rise of the internet in
the late 1990s and early 2000s brought about a significant shift towards
digital learning. Students started using online resources, multimedia content,
and interactive learning platforms to explore, search with self-motivation. The
introduction of tablets and smartphones in the late 2000s and early 2010s
revolutionized the way students interacted with technology.
Three
levels of computer-student interaction have been investigated to date: (1)
"drill and practice" systems which are designed to supplement a
regular teacher taught curriculum; (2) "tutorial" systems which take
over the main instruction responsibility from the teacher; and (3)
"dialogue" systems which provide the opportunity for discussion
between learner and computer. The first two levels have been, and continue to
be, utilized and investigated. Level three exists only as an early
prototype.
These devices offered
more mobility and interactivity compared to traditional
computers and made digital content available to students anytime,
anywhere at a rather low cost. Then comes e-books and digital
textbooks, which turned reading, note taking and assignments into digital. One
typical example is Amazon’s Kindle. Complaining about a
screen too small to read on your iPhone touchscreen? Too heavy to bring a
tablet around? Kindle offers you a light, book-like reading experience with
e-books you can buy and download into your read-only tablet at a lower cost vs
a real book. This solves parents’ concern about students/kids’ concentration
issues when using smartphones or tablets to learn. It was once such a
blow out till one day tablet becomes lighter and more digital content
contributor offers multi-platform access to the educational materials.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced schools and universities around the world
to shift to remote learning and online education. This global health incident
accelerated the adoption of digital tools and platforms for education,
including video conferencing, online collaboration tools, and learning
management systems and gradually pushed teachers and students to get used to
the higher portion of digital time even after COVID - three years can mean a
lot to develop or break a habit.
By looking at the history,
shifts in teaching and learning methodology in pedagogy can be summarized with
3 big leaps: smartphone/portable gadget, internet, and global health. Behind
which, is the industrial and technology revolution that drives the migration. Gadgets
and the emergence of the internet make digital learning accessible. The
global health incident accelerated the shifting process.
While social media does
help motivate kids/students to communicate and express themselves, there seems
to be a trend or observation of a tremendous shortening of the average document
students’ output. A counter argument could be, we can use an Apple pen to
“write “, take note, and highlight. I tend to agree that pen and paper will
hardly disappear completely, even after decades of technology revolution.
Personally, still believe pen and paper is a better way to memorize,
internalize the learning content, especially basic knowledge. Yet with the help
of new tech, teachers are able to identify potential plagiarism by copy and
paste content, upload to software/app, e.g. Turnitin, within
a minute, the tool would tell you how much percentage direct quotation was used
in the article. This significantly improves the efficiency to check research
credibility thanks to the powerful Python technology.
Looking around the world,
school writing systems vary from country to country based on their language
and cultural heritage. For example, schools in English-speaking
countries predominantly use the Latin alphabet, while schools in countries like
Russia use the Cyrillic alphabet, and schools in Arabic-speaking countries use
the Arabic script. For schools with a multi-lingual teaching mandate, students
may get access to Latin alphabet, Chinese characters, Japanese script, Hangul
etc. just to name a few. Learning the QWERTY keyboard has become a basic skill
set for primary school kids around the world, especially English-speaking
countries. The layout was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1878. It stands
with the test of time and was designed to alternate between hands and fingers
to reduce strain and increase typing speed, prevent jamming when typing fast
and became a standard.
The migration from pen and
paper learning method to pen plus keyboard reminds us human beings, in
particular, educators, of the implications of the next fundamental change in
teaching-learning method. To make this happen, several factors are indispensable: hardware (technology
revolution), usability (including accessibility, mobility,
affordability, availability), and big backdrop change (global health).
Usability refers to “a quality
attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word
“usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design
process” (Nielsen 2003). From educational perspective, Educational usability,
thus can be reasonably deducted as the effectiveness of students / learners to
get access to the knowledge, the learnability of information provided for
students to self-taught and implement, the flexibility to use different media
and system for human computer interaction, robustness of the system or learning
tool designed to provide immediate support and track progress for learners, the
easiness for users come up with error during implementation, the easiness to
memorize knowledge and skills learned without repeatedly go through the whole
learning process again and overall level of joy for using the learning
application. Putting usability in educational context could mean the valuation
standard and goal which demonstrates the effectiveness to establish a pedagogy
prototype and test by learner configuration.
COIVD-19 pandemic is a big
bang on global education system which accelerates or, to some extent, push all
education institutions to reflect the teaching model when no in-person
instruction could take place, whether agree or not, accept or not, across all
ages and grades, rural area or urban, developed or underdeveloped regions. I
would call it “techceleration” in education system.
Global health crisis lays the new
foundation of education, technology makes it executionable and becomes the main
teaching method under the big backdrop. The fast growing technology in
education further strengthen the development of technology itself – the fast growing
new apps, new gadgets, new education content provider – making technology in
education more accessible across all levels of audience – adult or kids,
science or art, language or geography – you name it. While it is still
debatable regarding learning effect, mental health issues / study motivation,
the shift of accountability from teachers to parents, tech capital expense
increase for schools, it is undeniable that seems next wave of Artificial
Intelligence to replace, or at least partially replace keyboard and laptop is
around the corner.
The
emergence of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") wearables as the next evolution in technology,
potentially superseding laptops, is much anticipated. Artificial Intelligence
provide special support to learners through academic sustainability or
discontinuation predictions. While AI research remains in its early stages, by
utilizing AI in education, we can increase students' engagements in learning
content, enact changes with its visualization and repeatability. There are
numerous specific benefits to incorporating AI in education, which
include in-depth learning, storage of large electronic data, teaching
from remote locations, engagement of fewer personnel in teaching, quick
feedback from responders, innovative assessment methods and user-friendly
alternatives. AI has long been a part of medical diagnostics and
treatment planning. Extensive literature is available on uses of AI in clinical
settings, e.g., in Radiology, but to the best of our knowledge there is a
paucity of published data on AI used for teaching, learning and assessment in
anatomy. In the future, studies with AI in anatomy education could be
advantageous for both students to develop professional expertise and for
instructors to develop improved teaching methods for this vast and complex
subject, especially with the increasing paucity of cadavers in many medical
schools. AI could be incorporated to deliver augmented reality experiences,
especially with reference to complex regions in the human body, such as neural
pathways in the brain, complex developmental processes in the embryo or in
complicated miniature regions such as the middle and inner ear. AI can change
the face of assessment techniques and broaden their dimensions to suit
individual learners.
We are
witnessing the dawn of a technological revolution in which robots will replace
the ordinary workers (Industry 4.0), unimaginably fast mobile communication
(5G) will connect billions of autonomous devices, and Quantum Super Computers
that will perform 100 million times faster than our standard laptops. This is
essentially a paradigm shift that requires non trivial forms of teaching and
learning methods for preparing the millennial students of today and
future-proof workers of tomorrow to succeed in the increasingly complex and
digitally driven AI based Smart Societies.(in the increasingly complex and
digitally driven Smart Societies).
New
technologies pose challenges and also possible solutions in pedagogy,
curriculum design, ICT skills and outcome-based education.
Learning process can be visualized
through EITL cycle below which help to understand whole picture of cognition
and understand knowledge acquisition process. Learning is a continuous process
with constant improvement in knowledge, repetitive process for
memorizing.
Figure 1 Pervez, S., Alandjani, G.,
Abosaq, N., Shahbaz, M., & Akram, A. (2018).
From society perspective as global village, open course
ware and content sharing becomes common, normally freely available to all. On
training platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, Harvard Online Learning etc offer
free online courses that help students at all ages to get access to concepts at
any time of their convenience in a self-paced mode of learning. UBC MET
curriculum is a good example.
From industry perspective,
flexible and modular open source IoT (Internet of Things) platforms can provide
students real-world applications at campus or through online courses. This
experience help them perform better when comes to real life industry and
deliver better solutions without requirement of formal on the job
trainings. As CTO of Boeing mentioned in his keynote presentation to
American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) that “We need these young
people to come in and have the ability to look at a problem, understand how
they could make that situation better, and then do the complete lifecycle of
conceiving a solution with a detailed design, figuring out how the
manufacturing process could be put together, actually building the thing, testing
it, knowing how to service it, understanding how the finances work — we want
someone with that full lifecycle of knowledge”.
Big challenges ahead of
developing novel teaching and learning strategies along with measurable and
unbiased evaluation mechanisms that can cope with the steep practical
requirement of the smart society. This raises the bar for teachers' digital
literacy and technical competency in the use of emerging technologies, such as
AR, interactive online collaboration platforms, social medial, multimedia
content generation and delivery systems, IoT enabled hardware. This requires
educators for future generations of students to be excellent communicators as
well as technologically proficient in their specialized area of teaching
subject.
The 2nd challenge could be
how to reduce the disparity between learning experiences of students belonging
to different geographical areas.
Curriculum design for Smart
Society can be the next challenge as new flexible and customizable curricula
have to be developed to challenge the students for using their own abilities
immersively in the taught content and make the concepts learning applicable to
real-world problems. The design of curriculum shall be the right balance of
progressive difficulty level, introduction of new concepts, application of
ideas, measurable level of understanding, maximization of knowledge delivery
and outcome-based assessment in a fair, transparent and subjective way.
Next challenge could be the
early and timely identification of student who lags behind and how to address
individual learning requirement by offering tailor-made solutions.
Augmented Reality allows
layering of computer-generated 3D objects on top of real-world objects, such as
paper drawing, block moving, allow learnings to have immersive and interactive
experience over conventional teaching method. The future classrooms will
leverage AR with 3D holograms and gadgets like Google Glasses, Apple Vision Pro
or Microsoft HoloLens Mixed realty product.
Advanced application of
gamification of learning. MineCraft Edu and Scratch allow students to learn
coding in exciting graphical environment and such training techniques will
become common where AI enabled languages and development platforms to assist students
in learning and building practical applications for complex problems solving.
In summary, with the
digitalization of literature and scientific learning materials previously in
the form of books and manuscripts, students now gain easy access to electronic
knowledge archives anytime anywhere. Open-source platforms provide peer to peer
collaboration to share and produce learnings contents that can be cloud saved
for long. The role of educators has to be migrated from knowledge provider to
curriculum designer, motivator, observer and valuer with dynamic classroom
interaction physically and virtually.
References:
- Randeree, K., & Al Rashdi, H.
R. (2010). Educational technology: Pedagogical lessons from a study in the
persian gulf states. Ubiquitous
Learning, 2(2), 29–42.
https://doi.org/10.18848/1835-9795/cgp/v02i02/40450
- Cradler, J.,
& Bridgforth, E. (1996). Technology as a catalyst for education
reform. San Francisco, CA: Far West Laboratory for the California
Department of Education. Retrieved September 25, 2007, from
http://www.wested.org/techpolicy/techreform.html/
- Suppes P.
Scientific
American (1966).The uses of Computers in Education.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-uses-of-computers-in-education/
- Sydney Johnson (Oct
23, 2017) Pencil Versus Keyboard: What do We Know About Learning
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-23-pencil-versus-keyboard-what-do-we-know-about-learning-how-to-write
- Nielsen, J.
(2012). Usability 101: Introduction to Usability. All
Usability, 1–69. Retrieved from
http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/usability-101-introduction-usability/
- Abdellatif H., AI Mushaiqri M.
(2022) Teaching, Learning and Assessing Anatomy with Artificial
Intelligence: The Road to a Better Future. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph192114209
- Hooda M., Rana C. Hossain M.S.
(2022) Artificial Intelligence for Assessment and Feedback to Enhance
Student Success in Higher Education. DOI: 10.1155/2022/5215722
- Pervez, S.,
Alandjani, G., Abosaq, N., Shahbaz, M., & Akram, A. (2018). Emerging
Technologies for Implementation of Education System for the Citizens of
Smart Societies. In 5Th International Conference on Education and
Social Sciences (Intcess 2018) (pp. 943–949). Retrieved from
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shahbaz_Pervez/publication/323143825_EMERGING_TECHNOLOGIES_FOR_IMPLEMENTATION_OF_EDUCATION_SYSTEM_FOR_THE_CITIZENS_OF_SMART_SOCIETIES/links/5a82a498aca272d65019edd8/EMERGING-TECHNOLOGIES-FOR-IMPLEMENTATION-OF-EDUCATION
- Boeing CTO
Keynote presentation (2015),
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/boeing-cto-heres-what-ilook-for-when-hiring-recent-grads/
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