Can AI make us efficient?
I missed a couple of weeks, but that's what travel and a nasty cold will do.
📰 AI IN THE NEWS
Dr. Oz thinks AI can replace frontline healthcare workers. He's wrong, but his attitude is increasingly common.
🖊 ON MY WRITING DESK
I've been focused on doing some research! Good writing, after all, should be grounded on a solid foundation of reading.
📖 AI SCHOLARSHIP
Can an AI chatbot increase student motivation? Recent work suggests: "maybe."
🎨 ON MY PAINT DESK
My diorama is done! I had a lot of fun with this one and am pretty happy with how it came out. It explores good, evil, and intention.
🎥 YOUTUBE
I reflect on burnout, how to mitigate it, and why it's important to stop it.
Until next week!
Stephen J. Aguilar
📰 AI IN THE NEWS
AI Healthcare?
One of the most common arguments I hear about AI is the "efficiency" argument, i.e., "AI can do it cheaper and at scale!" This week, Dr. Oz made this point about healthcare.
Every time I'm confronted with this logic, I lament at the fact that too many people in influential positions have fetishized notions of "efficiency." Whether such ideas are in good or bad faith is irrelevant. The notion that we should constantly try to minimize costs at the expense of human-to-human interaction is ludicrous—and dangerous.
When it comes to learning and education, for example, being inefficient is pretty important; a learner has to keep failing in order to understand the boundaries of success vs. failure. There is, of course, a limit to how often failure is productive, but zero failure (i.e., perfect efficiency) leads to stagnation. Having a sense of community and belonging is also crucial when it comes to learning. Removing a human educator may be "efficient," but doing so presupposes that human beings are simply products to be developed in cost-effective ways. This logic only works when one sees human beings as unidimensional "workers." Human development is an investment, and one that should not over-attend to notions of efficiency.
🖊 ON MY WRITING DESK
Research!
Reading research is often "invisible labor" when it comes to the writing process. It's essential work that ensures what I write is grounded in sound science and scholarship, but the payoff isn't as immediate as cranking out a few thousand words. My notes will undoubtedly go unread by everyone except me, but they'll serve as little nuggets that I will expand on as I write specific chapters.
So, for the past couple of weeks I have been doing a fair bit of research that will inform the middle parts of Authenticating Intelligence. It's nice to dive into topics and synthesize what I read. My reading has focused on design, EdTech successes (and failures), and some commentaries on Plato.
📖 AI SCHOLARSHIP
AI + Motivation
How emerging educational technologies affect student motivation is basically my entire professional identity at the moment, so when I came across this study I had to dig in!
I'll start with the good news. Based on the analysis by the authors there are clear implications that using an AI chatbot increased students' motivation. The core issue, though, is that "motivation" was measured with one question:
To what extent do you feel motivated to practice listening next week?
The authors note that collapsing motivation to this one question was a pragmatic choice that limits what they can say (and I agree). Motivation is a complex phenomenon, and it's limiting to reduce it to a type of commodity one can have "more of" or "less of."
Still, their results suggest that there was an upward shift in motivation from phase 1 (using a pre-scripted chatbot with "canned" answers), and phase 2 (an AI powered chatbot). Therein, however, lies the second issue: starting with a static script and then introducing a dynamic chatbot later in the course introduces a number of confounds that makes it hard to detect cause/effect.
That said, I'm glad folks are asking these sorts of questions!
🎨 ON MY PAINT DESK
Done!
I finished my swamp scene. This was a fun project where I got to explore light, shadow, and narrative elements. Who are the "bad guys" in this scene? Is it the pygmies, since they are sneaking up on the priestess? Or perhaps they're justified, as the priestess is clearly drawing power from a beheaded pygmy? In the end I don't really think there's an answer; good and evil are crude ways we use to organize intention.
Just kidding—it's the priestess—she's a jerk.
Weekend of pushing myself
A couple of weeks ago I spent the weekend at a wargaming convention. Most folks attend so that they can play tabletop war games, but I spent all of my time taking painting and sculpting classes so I could push myself. Here's a few of the projects I focused on.
🎥 YOUTUBE
Burnout—throwback
Burnout is something that sneaks up on you. One day you feel like you can do everything, and the next day you realize that you can't do anything. While burnout affects everyone differently, it has a habit of sneaking up on folks during graduate school because we work in our offices, at home, in coffee shops, etc., so there isn't always a clear indication of when work should stop. Here I reflect on some strategies to mitigate and/or prevent the effects of burnout.
