As an educator reading headline after headline about AI in education, it’s hard not to get lost in an existential twist to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” (if HE can do everything from this.)
Integrating generative AI into education is complex. The field of artificial intelligence is the Wild West at the moment – we’re solving it as we go. As an assistant professor of edtech, I often think about the implications of AI for teaching and learning, especially as I experiment with implementing different practices and approaches with the pre-service educators I teach.
I’m excited about the potential of AI, but one part of the equation that gives me pause is the notion of time. It’s no surprise since my favorite movies have this as a theme. Benjamin Button, About Time, and the Back to the Future trilogy all leave me thinking about what it means to be alive and live a good life with the time we have.
In a recent book exploring the impact of generative artificial intelligence on teacher education, two researchers, Punya Mishra and Marie K. Heath, posed a question that I can’t shake. “What does it mean for learners to exchange the area of proximal development for ease of access to knowledge creation?” Mishra and Heath admit they don’t have the answer, but say they think it’s an important question for teachers and researchers to consider.
The question has left me wondering if in our pursuit of reducing the time it takes to do things, we’ve forgotten to consider the value of the experience we gain in the time it takes to do them.
My curiosity about AI extends beyond my work into home life. Recently, my husband and I worked for over an hour weeding our garden. As I knelt on the ground, hands in the dirt, my muscles ached and I found myself thinking “and not thinking” as I left the space. I noticed that my thoughts went in and out of loving and hating gardening.
Hours later, I couldn’t help but think about the value of that time spent working. I felt satisfied as I washed my hands to remove the remaining dirt. This type of time-consuming home improvement task is often depicted on social media in time-lapse videos. Scroll through Instagram and TikTok and you’ll find someone weeding their garden, painting a wall or renovating a room. These moving parts show before and after visuals from the project at speed. They’re fun to watch, but these videos only offer an echo of the satisfaction you feel when you see the finished product of your hard work.
Time is an obvious part of our lives, but we don’t often think about how it shapes us. It often passes without us knowing it, like the fish that didn’t recognize the water in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, we are swimming through time, not noticing it as it passes.
Yes, there are machines that can clean my garden and amidst the hard work, I would have happily passed the task. And yet, as I look at a difficult task well done, I feel good – somehow more alive. I know my garden and myself better.
There is a term I love that comes from this idea. “Meraki” is a Greek word that describes “doing something with spirit, creativity, or love” when you put “something of yourself” into what you are doing. My mom’s homemade quilt is different from what I can buy at Walmart. There’s a reason we put handwritten words on store-bought cards.
In a 2023 interview, professional basketball player Caitlin Clark shared where her faith comes from. “The time I spend in the gym, the hours working on my game, it just builds my confidence. Is Clark different if she somehow magically and quickly knows how to shoot? Is her skate of experience as valuable as she thinks and moves on the field?
I am not against using AI. In fact, I think it has great potential to enhance our human creativity and support effective teaching and learning. But too often, in discussions about AI in education, we get bogged down in the notion of gimmickry and miss the more interesting questions: How can these new tools make us more creative? Can these tools make us more human, not less? Much depends on the purpose and how we choose to use them.
When I learned to do citations as a high school student, our teacher required that we physically do the citations using index cards, even though it was possible for a citation generator to generate them. As much as I hated it, I have a deep understanding of how quotes work because I built them by hand. Is this a concept worth knowing? This is debatable, but I’m not debating it here. Instead, I’m challenging us as educators to continue to think about what we gain and lose as we pursue the intentional use of AI.
What does it mean for the work to be done so quickly? What is the cost? In his essay, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” Neil Postman, an educator and social critic, wrote that “every technology has a bias,” adding that “it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and achievements Postman explained the importance of memory in a non-writing culture, but as in a written culture, memory is considered a waste of time. The person who writes favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not the proverbial words. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The TV person values immediacy, not the story. And what about the computer people? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom
What values, I wonder, will fall by the wayside as we become humans using AI?
As AI becomes more widespread, it leads me to philosophical questions, but on a practical level, I find it interesting that so many of the things I’ve learned that matter most to me were hard. They made an effort. They took time. Their teaching was rewarding.
I don’t want to forget how satisfying it is to clear a garden, get strong at something through extended practice, or create something from scratch. I don’t want our schools to forget either. As Tom Hanks says in A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everybody would be doing it. Hard is what makes it great.”
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