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:

1. 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
2. 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/
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Scientific American (1966).The uses of Computers in Education.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-uses-of-computers-in-education/

4. 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
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8. 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
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