FINAL WORD
Zoe Hurley , Assistant Professor ,
Zayed University
Lecturers are experimenting with its exciting pedagogic opportunities , beyond banking models of learning , and working in tandem with students to explore the possibilities and push its boundaries .
CIS are viewing AI , not merely as an inevitable teaching and learning aid , but as a pivotal moment to disrupt business-as-usual .
Across its multidisciplinary programmes , the college is challenging stale-binaries surrounding technology , considering it as neither a panacea nor a dystopian threat to humanity . Across CIS ’ s disciplines , of Social Innovation , Business Transformation , Computational Systems and Sustainability , students are testing , experimenting , playing and reimagining how AI might contribute to learning and our everyday lives .
incorporating AI into project work , role-plays , realworld-scenarios and vivid learning events . Generative AI , like ChatGPT or Midjourney , is helping students to formulate complex ideas , generate multi-levelled tasks , scaffold , map , and rethink conventional ways of doing things . In short , AI ’ s capabilities are being harnessed to circuit CIS students ’ truly innovative learning .
By positioning CIS students to explore the limitations of AI , including plagiarism , the erosion of literacy , mental arithmetic , handwriting , lack of creativity and empathy , it will be up to them to develop strategies , alternatives and ethical procedures for confronting its pitfalls .
In some respects , this approach to AI aligns with Jacques Rancière ’ s notion of deschooling . In his influential book , The Ignorant Schoolmaster : Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation , original title Le Maître ignorant : Cinq leçons sur l ' émancipation intellectuelle , published in 1987 through the story of Joseph Jacotot , Rancière asks educators to abandon misguided attempts to provide students with prescribed , predetermined and alienating ends .
Alternatively , he argues that educators need not know anything , and may be ignorant because the important thing is to explore , debate and experiment with how knowledge might be constructed , viewed , felt , experienced and redefined .
Although AI is currently being considered as a disruption to education , it will eventually seem as mundane as Excel .
In the Social Innovation Bachelor of Science , for example , courses like Media , Data and Social Innovation ask students to think about how AI might be applied to address wicked , intractable problems like poverty , gender inequality and pollution . While AI ’ s power rests in its promise of speed , efficiency and ability to analyse vast data sets beyond the capabilities of the human brain , its allure is not a simple matter of producing prompts for ChatGPT essays or answers , since everyone has the same information at their finger-tips .
While generative AI can supply us with a series of facts and statistics , it is up to learners to teach themselves whatever it is they want to know , feel and do with this via informed rationales , ethics , compassion and emotion . Consequently , with the right tools , information and intellectual mindset , everyone has the potential to learn , lead and innovate .
Generative AI means we are less bound to experts or reliant on traditional definitions of knowledge , value judgements or even prescribed notions of intellectual emancipation . While Jacques Rancière would not have expected educators to define AI ’ s next-gen educational scope , he certainly would have encouraged students to get stuck into the debate and navigate its intellectual evolution . p
Alternatively , CIS students are being facilitated into
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