You Can’t Automate Good Teaching
I
recently finished listening to the journalist Alexis Madrigal's eight-part
podcast series on containers — the large cargo boxes that have
revolutionized both international trade in general and the shipping industry in
particular. The last episode includes a section on the possible automation of
trucking, the last step in delivering so many manufactured goods to the stores
that will eventually sell them.
My
heart went out to the workers who suffered when containers made their jobs
obsolete, but listening to Madrigal's podcast made me wonder about the future
of my own profession, too.
According
to Madrigal and his guest experts, it is relatively easy to automate the task
of shipping goods from one place to another, but the job of trucker includes
much more than just driving cargo between ports to big-box stores. Robots can
drive trucks, it seems, but they can’t tie down the load or fix the truck if
something goes wrong. That's why the task of driving a truck can be automated,
but not the job of trucker. That’s a very important, widely applicable
distinction.
Like
self-driving cars, self-driving trucks aren't quite a thing of the present,
Madrigal explains, because of the possibility of so-called “edge cases.” An
automated truck can handle an uneventful delivery between a port city and a
Target store, but what happens if something weird happens along the way? To use
what Madrigal described as a famous example from Google's self-driving car
program: Could your self-driving vehicle recognize someone in a wheelchair
chasing a wild turkey down the street as a situation that it should avoid? It
will take time for all the computers that run self-driving trucks to store
those kinds of possibilities.
Like
a lot of critics of educational technology, I hate the frequent analogies that
proponents often use to make the major changes they advocate sound perfectly
normal. For example, I was just explaining
why edtech isn't really like
refrigerators or washing machines. Sticking to that same vive la différence
vibe, I want to try to explain why — even though teaching isn't really at all
like trucking — Madrigal's distinction is still useful.
A
few years ago, I spilled an awful lot of pixels over at
my blog trying to come to grips with the implications of Massive Open
Online Courses (or MOOCs). They were supposed to be the innovation that would
not only make most college professors obsolete, but force countless colleges to
close as every student would prefer to hear Harvard's best lecture rather than
get their course content from the community-college professor in their
neighborhood.
Of
course, any college professor who cares one whit about teaching understands
that education involves a lot more than just conveying information. There's the
teaching of particular skills. There's applied learning. There's the
unpredictable relationship between two humans whenever they try to to
accomplish anything complicated.
In
other words, good teaching is just one long series of “edge cases.” You may
come into class with the same lecture notes every semester, but unless you
spend all your time staring up at the ceiling, how your students interpret the
material you're teaching is going to affect the way you choose to teach it.
They don't even have to stop you and ask questions while you're talking. So
long as you and they are in the same room — with you conveying information in
real time — you will see how your material is going over and can adjust your
presentation accordingly.
Even
if you really could deliver the same exact lecture every time, you will never
get the same result twice because the learning process is never entirely
predictable. If we automated learning, information would still travel from the
brain of the professor to the brain of the student, but we’d never know exactly
how well students understood it. You might as well just hit “play” on a tape of
someone else's lecture, then leave the room to do something else.
Education
shouldn't work like that but shipping goods actually does. Nobody cares exactly
how your box of diapers got from its point of production to the place where you
bought it. Those diapers will still do their appointed task just the same. But,
some will argue: Isn’t the same true for information? Whether you read it in a
book or hear it in a MOOC, students still know something that they didn't know
otherwise, right?
Only
if you have an incredibly narrow definition of education. A definition that
narrow should make anyone who's ever been inspired to learn anything truly
interesting from any teacher of even limited skill weep like a baby.
If
college professors want every day to be the educational equivalent of a milk
run, we can teach with the same rote presentation techniques that MOOC
purveyors imagine we do. But unlike truck drivers, we can actually use
technology to determine our own future. Teachers and professors can employ
technology themselves to automate the parts of the process that ought to be
automated, and keep the most interesting, unpredictable parts intact. That way,
the edge cases that inspired us all to become teachers in the first place will
still be around to keep our jobs interesting no matter what technology holds in
store.
Source | https://chroniclevitae.com/
Note | My today’s
update dedicated to Prof. Rahul Khandare, Librarian of S.V.P Arts & Science
College, Ainpur Tal Raver Dist Jalgaon (we lost him in an accident, a great loss
to LIS family)
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Event | MANLIBNET 17th
Annual International Conference on 15-16 September 2017 at Jaipuria, Noida,
India
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