May 1, 2019, by apyjlt

The Machines Are Taking Over!

My dream after I graduate is to become a teacher. You can imagine how excited I was when I went to Andy Fisher’s lecture today and heard this lecture’s philosophy was all about teaching! However, according to Fisher and Tallants’ paper ‘What does it mean to teach?’ it may be that in the future teachers could be replaced – by robots! Time to rethink my future?

 

 

Teaching has traditionally been looked at as either from a learning angle or from the actual intention of the teacher. But Fisher and Tallant have a new concept – the best way to see if teaching is going on is by having the learner judge whether they have learnt something or not. They call this idea judgement dependent.

 

 

But what if you can judge you have been taught, have learnt something, by a non human? Can you say you have learnt from an instruction manual? What about an online training programme? If you can judge that teaching has taken place, perhaps there is a place for robots to teach. Fisher and Tallant tell us that in Singapore, robots have been teaching in preschool. In Finland, one primary school has a language teaching robot that speaks 23 languages!

 

However, there is hope for me yet. The paper did say that teaching appears to involve a complex human interaction which I think is true because learning has a social side too. Anyway, I could always apply for a MA in Learning, Technology and Education here at Nottingham. It looks at theories  and case studies of new technology enhanced learning. Research = advantage human. So maybe the machines are not going to take over just yet!

 

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