Digital borders, pattern-dependent personalized learning, demotivation and other lesser explored implications of AI in education

• In Event: Highlighted Presidential Session: Digital Societies and Learning Equity: Exploring our multiple futures

Proposal

This presentation will share critical ideas about how AI and other digital innovations are changing education, based on recent UNESCO research and findings on remote digital learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, captured in the book ‘An Ed-Tech Tragedy?’. It aims to raise and explore topics that have not been widely covered in writing about the ripple effects of technology integration in teaching and learning. Issues to be overviewed include: the distillation and homogenization of knowledge, treating AI as modern oracles, and AI that is used for both the completion and assessment of assignments, in addition to digital borders, pattern-dependent personalized learning, and demotivation. These ideas form a sort a ‘underbelly’ of AI in education and raise questions about what might be done to address novel challenges introduced by new technologies.

Author

• Mark West, UNESCO