TechTrends Volume 67, Issue 3 is now available online and includes a special Issue on Race and Racism in Educational Technology.
Please share with interested colleagues our call for papers for a special collection to be published by the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education.
Submission details and guidelines are available here.
Our societies face enormous economic, demographic, political, ecological, and social challenges. In this environment of uncertainty, doubts about the future of higher education have proliferated, particularly as demographic changes take hold, technology rapidly advances, wealth inequality increases, and climate destabilizes. In the face of these challenges, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have argued the time is right to not only tinker with the status quo, but to imagine otherwise, to imagine alternative higher education futures that are more hopeful, more equitable, and more just.
This collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like.
This is not a call for papers grounded in technological solutionism or technological determinism. The educational technology literature is replete with papers which are optimistic about the possibilities of technology. Rather, this call invites writing that imagines higher education and its practices otherwise, writing that engages the imagination from diverse and justice-oriented perspectives. In Houlden and Veletsianos (2022), for example, we noted that hopeful futures are shaped by themes such as “connection, agency and community and individual flourishment” and we have suggested that “hopepunk, solarpunk, and visionary fiction” can serve “as models of storytelling grounded in hope which imagines more liberatory education and learning futures.”
We are especially interested in scholarship that engages critically with educational technology issues while resisting oppression and despair; scholarship that begins with the ongoing undoing of colonial, racist, ableist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures of power; and scholarship that invites hope as a practice of change and not as a return to an idealized past.
This collection is open to diverse forms of research and scholarship, including empirical, theoretical, speculative, and anything in-between.
Topics of interest include higher education futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology that engage with
- Speculative methods and pedagogies
- Indigenous, Black, Queer, and (Dis)ability issues and methods
- Reimagining technology in higher education
- Co-creation with learners and/or other communities
- Local and contextual realities
Research questions of interest may include but are not limited to
- What does the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology look like, or ought to look like?
- How do current education systems need to transform to enable just and hopeful education futures?
- How can we understand hope and justice in the context of higher education futures?
- What is the role of hope and justice in imagining diverse education futures?
- What are the roles and limits of technology in desirable, just, and hopeful higher education futures?
- In what ways are hopeful and/or just technology-infused higher education futures similar or different across contexts?
- How can hopeful futures be enacted beyond envisioning in higher education systems? For example, how might speculative futures scholarship address problems higher education faces today?
- What do hopeful, speculative futures approaches reveal about current contexts and future orientations for higher education practices and policies?
- What methods might be used to support generative higher education futures that are at the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology?
- What might empirical approaches to such futures look like within higher education settings?
- Whose voices and perspectives are made explicit in generating hopeful educational futures, and how?
Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2022). Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00348-7
Call opens: May 1, 2023
Call closes: October 31, 2023
Guest editors:
George Veletsianos, Royal Roads University, Canada
Shandell Houlden, Royal Roads University, Canada
Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sakinah Alhadad, Griffith University, Australia
Camille Dickson-Deane, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
The Globe and Mail published an op-ed I wrote. As a condition of being featured in the publication, the paper has first publication rights for the first 48 hours. Since it’s been more than 48 hours, and for posterity, I’m making a copy available below.
Making ChatGPT detectors part of our education system prioritizes surveillance over trust
George Veletsianos is a professor of education and Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University.
Imagine a world where surveillance technologies monitor and scrutinize your behaviour. Imagine a report that you write at work being compared with myriads of others and flagged for additional inspection when an algorithm deems it to be “very similar” to others.
Students don’t have to imagine this world. They are already living in it, in the form of plagiarism detection software, remote proctoring technologies, and now, tools aimed at detecting whether the students used ChatGPT – including new software that promises to catch students who use ChatGPT to cheat.
While taking online exams, students’ webcams scan their surroundings; their microphones monitor sounds and background noise, and their body and eye movements are tracked. Unexpected movements may indicate something as innocuous as stretching a tight neck or as problematic as catching a glimpse of Post-it notes on the wall, while unexpected sounds may indicate a child playing in the background or a roommate whispering answers. The essay assignments students submit are compared to a vast amount of writing by others. And a battery of scores might indicate plagiarizing from Wikipedia, passing off text created by ChatGPT as one’s own, or simply using common expressions. Any of this will get students flagged as potential cheaters.
That there are technologies to identify text written by artificial intelligence shouldn’t come as a surprise. What is surprising is that educators, administrators, students, and parents put up with surveillance technologies like these.
These technologies are harmful to education for two main reasons. First, they formalize mistrust. As a professor and researcher who has been studying the use of emerging technologies in education for nearly two decades, I am well aware that educational technology produces unintended consequences. In this case, these technologies take on a policing role and cultivate a culture of suspicion. The ever-present microscope of surveillance technology casts a suspicious eye on all learners, subjecting them all to an unwarranted level of scrutiny.
Second, these technologies introduce a host of other problems. Researchers note that these tools often flag innocent students and exacerbate student anxiety. This is something I’ve personally experienced as well when I took my Canadian citizenship exam online. Even though I knew the material and was confident in my abilities, my webcam’s bright green light was a constant reminder that I was being watched and that I should be wary of my every move.
To be certain, such tools may deter some students from intentionally plagiarizing. They may also improve efficiency, since they algorithmically check student work on behalf of educators.
But these reasons don’t justify surveillance.
A different world is possible when schools and universities dare to imagine richer and more hospitable learning environments that aren’t grounded in suspicion and policing. Schools and universities can begin to achieve this by developing more trusting relationships with their students and emphasizing the importance of honesty, original work, and creativity. They need to think of education in terms of relationships, and not in terms of control, monitoring, and policing. Students should be viewed as colleagues and partners.
Educators also need to come to terms with the fact that our assessments generally suffer from a poverty of imagination. Essays, tests, and quizzes have an important role to play in the learning process, but there are other ways to check for student achievement. We can design assessments that ask students to collect original data and draw inferences, or write and publish op-eds like this one; we can invite them to develop business and marketing plans for real-world businesses in their cities; we can ask them to reflect on their own unique experiences; we can require them to provide constructive peer-review and feedback to fellow students, or have them engage in live debates. In this light, ChatGPT is not a threat, but an opportunity for the education system to renew itself, to imagine a better world for its students.
Educators and administrators should stop using surveillance technologies like ChatGPT detectors, and parents and students should demand that schools and universities abolish them – not because cheating should be tolerated, but because rejecting the culture of suspicion that surveillance technologies foster and capitalize upon is a necessary step toward an education system that cares for its learners.
This is a wonderful event that pushes the boundaries of imagination and possibility. Consider joining.
The 4th annual Speculative Education Colloquium is focused on Intergenerational Speculation. The colloquium will take place on Saturday May 13, 12-3pm ET.
This year’s event features the incredible children’s authors/illustrators Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey and the inimitable Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University, Detra Price-Dennis.
As always, this will be a free, virtual event. We are encouraging attendees to invite children and families to join in our collective dialogue and storytelling. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/speced2023
If you’re looking for a home for your generative AI paper, you now have a few special issues to choose from:
We welcome proposals for original research articles and theoretical papers that explore the potential of integrating Generative AI in education. We encourage submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:
1. Personalized learning experiences that address learner needs and preferences;
2. Language learning, such as offering practice in conversation or helping with translation;
3. Coding/programming education or computational thinking, such as supporting debugging;
4. Assistance during writing process, such as brainstorming, editing, character generation;
5. Teaching support, such as answering frequently asked questions, generating question prompts and examples, evaluating students’ writing;
6. Student engagement and motivation, such as providing feedback and human-like interactions through natural language output;
7. Higher-order thinking, such as enhancing analytical, critical thinking, and reflection.
8. Collaborative learning process, such as supporting group discussion or interaction.
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education call
The call for papers is intended to invite contributions that address the recent development of AI in HE in light of new applications such as ChatGTP, aiming to provide more comprehensive and collective answers to the following questions:
• What is the actual impact of AI on different aspects of HE institutions (e.g. student support systems, administration, professional development, and infrastructure)?
• What is the actual impact of AI on different aspects of learning and teaching in HE? (e.g. assessment, data literacy, design of learning activities)?
• What is the actual impact of AI on different subjects in HE? (e.g. students, teachers, administrators, causal workers, other stakeholders)?The Special Issue Editors are also interested in making sense of the impact of AI on educational accessibility and (in-)equity regarding the cost, quality, and access in different forms of open, distance, and digital education. Both theoretical and empirical works will be considered to be included as long as they demonstrate rigour, criticality, and novelty.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies call
The successful design and application of generative AI require holistic considerations of theoretical frameworks, pedagogical approaches, facilitative ecological structure, and appropriate standards. Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
- Studies on the pedagogical or curricular approaches to teaching and learning with generative AI.
- Discussion on the theoretical frameworks of generative AI to provide the basis for the understanding of systems and their capabilities for teaching and learning.
- Discussion of the extent to which the design of learning environments with generative AI aligns with different theories of learning (e.g., behaviorism, cognitivism, (social) constructivism, constructionism, socio-cultural).
- Studies on the applications of generative AI for assessment of, assessment for, and assessment as learning.
- Development of the environmental structures that facilitate the employment of generative AI in education.
- Development or implementation of relevant standards governing the proper use of generative AI in human learning contexts.
- Exemplary use cases and practices of generative AI… [more bullet points in the CFP]
Update (Eamon Costello alerted me to an additional one): Learning Media and Technology call
We invite theoretical papers and theoretically-informed empirical studies that explore emerging practices and offer new imaginings of generative AI in education. Papers may use a variety of methodological approaches including feminist, critical, new materialist, interpretive, qualitative, rhetorical, quantitative, or experimental.
Topics may include, and are not limited to:
- Critical pedagogy and generative AI
- Ways in which generative AI further complicates notions of authenticity–of authorship, ideas, ownership, and truth
- Creative and productive uses of generative AI and how can they be harnessed in education
- Ethical, political, and epistemological issues of generative AI in education
- Socio-technical explorations of generative AI and equity, power, inclusion, diversity, identity, marginalization, (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, race, class, community, sustainability, etc.
- Development of methodologies to critically assess generative AI in education
- Alternative imaginaries for the development of future generative AI tools for education
Update Apr 16: One more from the Asian Journal of Distance Education
…to better understand what generative AI promises us, we need to examine its philosophy, develop a theoretical understanding, and investigate “how human tutors and machines (ChatGPT) could work together to achieve an educational objective, as well as the changes and outcomes brought to the education field (e.g., evolutionary or revolutionary)” (Tlili et al., 2023, p. 22). Based on above the thoughts, Asian Journal of Distance Education seeks papers on generative AI with a focus on open, online, and distance education. Research papers, systematic reviews, and opinion papers with a critical stance are welcome.
Enilda, Josh, and I are working on a project examining the degree to which access to education research is available to the public, bringing together research interests that all three of us have had for a long time now. Enilda presented some of our early findings this week at OER23 in Scotland and shared her reflections here. Our slides are available at tiny.utk.edu/OER23
Part of the fun in this work is figuring out how to bring together a set of APIs to allow for programmatically retrieving data about published journal papers from different services (e.g., see Josh’s post).
A few weeks ago, I was invited to offer input to a committee at a Canadian university examining issues that hybrid, online, and blended modes of teaching and learning introduce to collective agreements and bargaining. I appreciated that the committee identified experts to speak with in order to gain an evidence-informed understanding of the issues they were facing rather than allow their deliberations be guided by assumptions and beliefs (which, to be honest, many of the conversations around modality default to!).
I thought the questions I was asked were relevant to many, and so I am sharing them below. The gist of my responses follows each question.
- What is your sense of the future of online, hybrid, and blended course delivery in Canadian universities?
- Necessary, valuable, and growing. Ignore them at your own peril.
- How do you see the work, the workload, the rights, and the responsibilities of faculty changing within this shifting terrain?
- Rising workloads at first, but shifting over time (similar to how workload is higher when assigned a new course; opportunity to learn & explore relationship between online/hybrid and pedagogy, which may transfer to other settings). Responsibilities around quality similar, if not higher (which is unfortunate given that conversations around quality are different in relation to in-person courses). Rights: an opportunity for expanding the conversation to encompass in-person practices: reflect on ownership and where the real value of faculty lies – it’s not content.
- What would you suggest are the biggest advantages to these delivery modes, and what would you flag as the biggest challenges that institutions face in moving towards these modes?
- advantages: rethinking pedagogy, flexibility, supporting justice and EDI, reaching and supporting different kinds of learners; challenges: institutional infrastructure to support online/hybrid learning quality at the same level as supporting in-person.
- What kinds of supports—technological, training, in-class, infrastructural, workload-based, or other – do you see as necessary for faculty to successfully deliver course through online modes?
- This is the right question to ask. It’s not just about individual skills, competencies, and perceptions – it’s about how the institutions will support these learning modalities at the system level. In addition to the ones mentioned in the question, my answer highlighted that online/hybrid learning is a team sport and noted the need for instructional design support.
- As part of our own deliberations, we are concerned with the process through which mode of delivery for particular courses is determined. Do you have any advice on how this best happens? Are there any lessons from experiences at other universities about this?
- This is a difficult one, especially at a time of many circulating viruses. I emphasized the need for flexibility and a decision-making process that is based on mutual trust and cooperation, and that is informed by student input. Ideally one where decisions aren’t top-down and aren’t solely guided by individual preferences. Also: the proportion of courses that are online need not be uniform across departments.