Tag: Greg Thompson

Bookmarked Five thoughtful ways to approach artificial intelligence in schools (aare.edu.au)

The use of artificial intelligence in schools is the best example we have right now of what we call a sociotechnical controversy. As a result f of political interest in using policy and assessment to steer the work that is being done in schools, partly due to technological advances and partly due to…

Greg Thompson, Kalervo Gulson and Teresa Swist provide five recommendations when considering the use of artificial intelligence in schools:

Ultimately, we suggested five key recommendations.

  1. Time and resources have to be devoted to helping professionals understand, and scrutinise, the AI tools being used in their context. 
  2. There needs to be equity in infrastructure and institutional resourcing to enable all institutions the opportunity to engage with the AI tools they see as necessary. We cannot expect individual schools and teachers to overcome inequitable infrastructure such as funding, availability of internet and access to computational hardware. 
  3. Systems that are thinking of using AI tools in schools must prioritise Professional Learning opportunities well in advance of the rollout of any AI tools. This should be not be on top of an already time-poor 
  4. Opportunities need to be created to enable all stakeholders to participate in decision-making regarding AI in schools. It should never be something that is done to schools, but rather supports the work they are doing.
  5. Policy frameworks and communities need to be created that guide how to procure AI tools, when to use AI, how to use AI why schools might choose not to use AI in particular circumstances. 

I was reading Greg Thompson’s introduction to The Education Assemblage. I was left wondering about space as a component of the assemblage.

Concepts, for Deleuze, are more than ideas – they are novel incursions into creation that exist in combination, a concept is defined by its components.

If an assemblage always ‘exist for purposes’, what does this mean for a concept? Just as Stanley Fish says that ‘a sentence is never not in a context’ I wonder if a space is always understood as a part of an assemblage even if we are not always aware of the various components? For Steve Collis it is about the physical, information and shared social. I wonder how this lens is limited and if such a framework is always itself incomplete?

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Congratulations Greg, really interested in this
and the various findings with the work that I do.
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This is one of the challenges I have with Taleb’s Black Swan. It would seem you cannot have your cake and eat it to.

📓 Ideology

Ideology is often used as a criticism, however, as Greg Thompson explains, saying something is ‘ideological’ misses the point:

I read it, everything we believe is already ideological because we are necessarily social (for example, through language). Saying this, however, does not imply that any position held is necessarily right or wrong, rather that within the ontological and epistemological assumptions of any belief system ideology invariable precedes consciousness. For this reason, I don’t mind being called ideological (of course I am) or suggesting that others are ideological (of course they are).source

Bernard Bull adds his own take on ideology:

I’ve come across this countless times in education, with any number of stakeholders declaring that the problem with education is ideology. If only we focused on scientific and evidence-based practice, then education would be in great shape. Only that statement represents an ideologysource

French Marxist Louis Althusser argued in his paper Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses that there is no beyond or outside within which we can exist. Instead, we are always already interpellated, called into existence.

Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always already are. This proposition might seem paradoxical. source

Adding to this, Althusser highlights that there is no point outside of ideology:

What thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical
denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, “I am ideological.” Source

Coming from a different perspective, Michael Foucault discusses the challenges of identity in Archaeology of Knowledge where he states:

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Liked Testing is not a moral agent (drbeardface.net)

We should stop treating tests like moral agents that can define the future. I agree with David Rutkowski’s point about agency, perhaps we’d be well-advised to think about what is enabled, and what we don’t have to do, when we cede our agency to tests and ask whether we really breath a sigh of relief that it is our responsibility we can explain away. The desire for a testing regime is a symptom, not a cause, and it seems to me if you better understand those individual and collective desires at work, you may understand why it is that reconciliACTION and social justice remain distractable.

Replied to #Ascilite17 by Greg Thompson (drbeardface.net)

Stiegler argues, the double potential of technology is that it also has the potential to deliver what he terms “singularisation”. One of the ways of thinking about this is to consider how it is that culture can interrupt (or catch up) with the ultrarapid technological change that students, schools and school personnel are increasingly contending with.

The history of personalisation, automation and machine learning is something that cannot be spoken about enough. EdTech seems to have a habit of seemingly surpressing many of these aspects in the desire for simplicity. People like Audrey Watters, Ben Williamson, Naomi Barnes and yourself do a good job of at least maintaining an alternate dialogue.

What I find interesting is that in placing hope with ‘big data’ we embrace a particular approach to data and identity. Firstly, it seems based on the premise of collecting coapieus amounts of data. Secondly, it depends on a rigid foundation of personal data collection.

A part of my current position involves aligning schools with SIF compliance. Along with APIs, such standards seem to be assumed. This world is far from simple and it consequences are not always clear.

I am intrigued with the idea of a ‘politics of technics’ and ‘singularisation’ wondering what that might actually mean in practice for the classroom teacher? School principal? EdTech coach? System leader? Researcher? Is it about identifying other possibilities? As I read Jenny Mackness’ recent words about changes in ‘learning and teaching’, I wonder if this is a part of it? At the very least we need different and divergent stories and I don’t know that we hear enough of them.