For educators, it’s hard not to fall into existential confusion in the vein of Billie Eilish’s “What Am I Made For?” as we read headline after headline about AI in education. all This one.)
Integrating generative AI into education is complicated. The field of AI is currently something of a frontier; we are figuring it out as we go. As an assistant professor of EdTech, I often think about the impact of AI on teaching and learning, especially as I experiment with different practices and approaches with my teacher education students.
As excited as I am about the possibilities of AI, one thing that gives me pause is the concept of time. This isn't surprising, as some of my favorite movies touch on this theme: Benjamin Button, About Time, and the Back to the Future trilogy all make us think about what it means to be alive and to live life to the fullest with the time we have.
In a recently published book about the impact of generative AI on teacher education, two researchers, Punya Mishra and Marie K. Heath, posed a question that I just can’t get over: ‘What does it mean for learners to sacrifice their zone of proximal development in exchange for greater access to knowledge creation?’ Mishra and Heath admit that they don’t have the answer, but they believe it’s an important question for educators and scholars to consider.
This question leads me to wonder whether we are so focused on reducing the time it takes to do things that we forget to consider the value of the experience we gain in the time it takes to do things.
My curiosity about AI extends beyond work and has seeped into my home life. Recently, my husband and I spent over an hour weeding our garden. As I knelt on the ground, digging my hands into the dirt, my muscles aching, shaping the space bit by bit, I found myself thinking, not thinking. I found myself thinking about the things that make me love or hate gardening.
A few hours later, I couldn't help but think about the value of the time I'd spent on the task. As I washed my hands to remove the remaining dirt, I felt a sense of satisfaction. These time-consuming home renovation projects are often showcased in time-lapse videos on social media. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you'll find people renovating their gardens, painting walls, and redecorating rooms. These scrollable videos give you a quick look at the before and after of a project. Satisfying to watch, these videos are just an echo of the satisfaction you feel when you see the finished product of your efforts.
Time is an obvious part of our lives, but we rarely think about how it shapes us. Time often passes without us realizing it. Like the fish that didn’t recognize the water in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, we swim in time and don’t realize it’s passing us by.
Sure, there are machines that can clean up your yard, and you would gladly let go of the hard work that is in the middle of it, but seeing a hard job done makes you feel good, somehow more alive, and you come to understand your yard and yourself better.
There's a word I love that captures this idea: “Meraki” is Greek and means “to do something with soul, creativity, and love; to put something of yourself into it.” My mom's handmade quilts aren't like the ones you can buy at Walmart. There's a reason we add handwritten notes to store-bought cards.
In a 2023 interview, professional basketball player Caitlin Clark talked about the source of her confidence. “The time I spend in the gym, the time I spend working on my game, that's what builds my confidence.” Does Clark's magical quickness and knowledge of how to shoot make her different from other players? Is her accumulated experience just as valuable as her thoughts and movements on the court?
I am not against the use of AI. In fact, I believe AI has great potential to enhance human creativity and support effective teaching and learning. But too often, discussions about AI in education get caught up in notions of cheating and miss more interesting questions: How do these new tools enhance our creativity? Do these tools make us more human? Do they make us less human, rather than more human? A lot depends on the intent and how we use them.
When I learned citations in high school, my teacher required me to physically create citations on index cards, even though citation generators could auto-generate them for me. Even though I hated it, I created my own citations, so I have a deep understanding of how citations work. Is this a concept worth knowing? That's debatable, but we won't debate it here. Instead, I'm calling for us as educators to continue to think about what we gain and what we lose in pursuing purposeful uses of AI.
What does it mean to get work done so quickly? And at what cost? In his essay “Five Things You Should Know About Technological Change,” educator and social commentator Neil Postman writes that “technology is necessarily biased,” adding that “it tends to lead us to favor and value certain perspectives and outcomes.” Postman explains that in preliterate cultures, memory is important, but in literate cultures, memory is considered a waste of time. “The literate prefers logical structure and systematic analysis, not proverbs; the telegrapher prefers speed, not reflection; the television man prefers immediacy, not history. And what shall we say of the computer man? We might say that the computer man prefers information, not knowledge, much less wisdom.”
What values will be lost as we become humans who use AI?
As AI goes mainstream, it raises philosophical questions, but on a practical level, I think it's interesting that many of the things I've learned that mattered most to me were hard. It took effort and time. But learning them was worth it.
I never want to forget how satisfying it is to clean up a yard, or to become good at something after hours of practice, or to build something from scratch. I don't want schools to forget that, either. As Tom Hanks says in “A League of Their Own,” “It has to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's hard, which is why it's great.”
