George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: scholarship Page 2 of 27

Traxler’s review of our book: Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education

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On July 13, 2023

In papers, scholarship, work

Johh Traxler wrote a very kind review of Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education, the open access book that Suzan, Chris, and I co-edited. In it, he begins by noting that he is concerned of a growing chasm in digital education, as

there seem to be two parallel universes of learning, of two different sets of ideas about how we learn, what we learn, who we learned it from, and we show we have learnt it: one inside higher education, the other in the world outside. On one side are the closed systems around the dedicated EdTech systems in higher education, and around the different cadres and professions that develop, sell, procure, install, and deploy them to deliver the formal curriculum. On the other side are the ever fluid and informal groups and relationships that exploit social media and Web 2.0 to produce ideas, images, information, identities, and opinions, and to share, store, transform, merge, and discard them.

After reviewing individual chapters, he concludes that each chapter populates the spaces in the chasm and “makes an extraordinary contribution, tackling the chasm from a surprising variety of angles and should be valued and explored accordingly.”

I’m filing this into the “positive words” folder, which is a folder that I refer to when I need reminders that gloomy days are temporary.

So very tired of predictions about AI in education…

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On July 7, 2023

In futures, generative artificial intelligence, my research, scholarship, short reflections, teacherbots

By people who aren’t AIEd experts, education technology experts, education experts, and the like.

Case in point: “AI likely to spell end of traditional school classroom, leading [computer science] expert says.”

I appreciate cross disciplinary engagement as much as I love guacamole (which is to say, a lot), but I’d also appreciate that we stop wasting our time on these same unfulfilled prophecies year after year, decade after decade.

Will AI impact education? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t. Will education shape the ways AI comes to be used in classrooms? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t.

Truth be told, this negotiated relationship isn’t as appealing as DISRUPTION, AVALANCHE, MIND-READING ROBO-TUTOR IN THE SKY, etc, which are words that readers of the history of edtech will recognize.

Public version: Making ChatGPT detectors part of our education system prioritizes surveillance over trust

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On April 27, 2023

In generative artificial intelligence, my research, open, scholarship

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.

#oer23 presentation: open access to research

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On April 13, 2023

In papers, scholarship

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).

 

opening up research through self-archiving practices

EdTech, magic mushrooms, and magic bullets

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On January 16, 2023

In my research, online learning, scholarship, short reflections

In my inbox, an email says:

Alberta’s new regulations on psychedelics to treat mental health issues come into effect today, making it the first province to regulate the use of hallucinogens in therapy.

Today in The Conversation Canada, Erika Dyck of the University of Saskatchewan walks readers through the new regulations, as well as the history, potential and pitfalls of hallucinogens both inside and outside clinical settings.

Psychedelics — from magic mushrooms and ayahuasca to LSD — are having a moment in the spotlight, with celebrity endorsements and a new generation of research on potential clinical uses. There is certainly a need for therapeutics to treat mental health issues, the growing prevalence of which could place a strain on the health-care system.

“Psychedelics are being held up as a potential solution,” Dyck writes. “But, magic mushrooms are not magic bullets.”

That last line captures so much of what is happening in our field, and education more broadly, that it is worth repeating.

  • AI is being held up as a potential solution, but it is not a magic bullet.
  • A return to in-person learning is being held up as a potential solution, but it is not a magic bullet.
  • Online learning is being held up as a potential solution, but it is not a magic bullet.
  • Microcredentials are being held up as a potential solution, but they are not a magic bullet.
  • … and so on

These things – and others – can be solutions to some problems, but they consider them to be part of a Swiss army knife, part of a toolkit. And while sometimes your Swiss army knife will work, this isn’t always going to be the case, especially when we’re considering some of the most major challenges facing higher ed, the kinds of things that we’re not talking about (e.g., precarious employment and and external regulations that encourage and foster conservatism, etc).

And perhaps, that’s the crux of the issue: That these solutions are used to respond to the symptoms of larger problems, of the things we’re not talking about, rather than the root causes of them.

Image credit: Wall-e output in response to the prompt “a magic bullet in the style of salvador dali”

The business case for edtech startups engaging education research

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On September 9, 2022

In my research, online learning, scholarship

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve been advocating for edtech companies to collaborate with education researchers for a long while now. At the 2014 SXSW EDU  conference for example, my colleagues and I organized a panel titled Startups Should Talk with Researchers and Educators to highlight mutually beneficial relationships. Much has changed since then, but I often come across startups that can’t seem to grasp that the histories of online, distance, and digital learning can be informative and beneficial.

There are lots of reasons for this – and to be sure universities and researchers aren’t blameless, as a variety of factors limit the reach and impact of our scholarship.

Many have made the pedagogical case for education startups to  use the research available. In this post I want to make the business case for edtech startups to engage education research. Because it’s a win-win. And it’s simple.

By consulting with academics and/or learning designers, reading the research literature, exploring various pedagogical and learning design models, and understanding the relationships between teaching/learning and technology, you (i.e. startups) can save money and time.

How can you save money and time?

By identifying potential pain points and what education research has to say about your value proposition early on, you’d be able to develop minimum viable products that are at the very least  reflective of what we know about teaching and learning.

I’ve seen many startups fail because they took too long to understand the space. And too many startups accidentally stumbling upon what is common knowledge in education research after they’ve burned through initial investment rounds.

You (i.e. startups) do not need to start at 0 to get to 10. You can start at 3, 5, 7 even by engaging education research.

To make this example concrete, below is an excerpt of an email from an edtech startup that I received yesterday. This is a startup that’s been around for 2+ years and raised 2 rounds of funding.

Something unexpected keeps happening in our post-course surveys.

As you might guess, we regularly hear about the quality of [our company’s] instructors and the knowledge they pass on.

But we didn’t expect to hear so often of the value of the other course participants, of taking courses live, alongside other ambitious, generous professionals.

Turns out—it’s the other students in each cohort that make it special.

The power of peer learning and community isn’t a secret. Really, it’s common knowledge. All that post-course surveys do here is confirm what those of us who have been studying distance and online learning for decades already know. Only when startups fail to engage with the rich and long history of this field do they call the realization that motivated and knowledgeable peers working in community foster powerful learning experiences an unexpected discovery.

What if this realization came 18 months ago?

Before it’s too late: On Neil Selwyn’s introduction to “studying digital education in times of climate crisis”

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On July 5, 2022

In futures, scholarship

With the same criticality and thoughtfulness that characterizes the rest of his work, Neil Selwyn recently gave a talk for our friends at the U of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Digital Education titled “Studying digital education in times of climate crisis: what can we do?” It’s a great talk, and worth watching and reflecting upon.

At the beginning of the talk, Neil makes this comment:

This is a really unfamiliar topic for me to be thinking about and talking about…But I’ve been working since 1995 on various critical lines of digital technology in education and never thought about sustainability, really. I’ve basically spent 27 years pointing out why things don’t work. But, coming over to Australia 10 years ago has given me just a real personal visceral wake-up call to climate crisis and I’ve quickly become super mindful of the need to get my own work, and also my own area of work, edtech, up to speed with issues relating to sustainability, climate breakdown, possible eco-compromised futures to come and all the rest of it. So, the fundamental challenge that I’m currently wrestling with and the challenge which I’m now gonna burden you with, I think is terrifyingly simple. Do we actually need digital education? Is digital education a realistic part of a livable future or even just a survivable planet? And if we think it is, in what form and what do we do about it?

These are important questions, and I expect that more and more researchers in our field will explore facets of them. I would like to add another one that doesn’t quite have to do with edtech, but I think deserves the attention of researchers and designers in our field: How do we help people understand and respond to issues of sustainability and climate catastrophe before they become personal?

Like Neil, i didn’t grapple with climate change in any concerted and scholarly way until recently. I don’t think we’re unique in this regard. The broader literature that I’ve been engaging with over the past two years relating to COVID-19 misinformation includes models that suggest that people negotiate and respond to perceived risks to their health based on their perception of susceptibility to an illness or disease; belief in severity of risk; belief that taking action would reduce severity or susceptibility and therefore have benefits, etc, etc. In other words: How could we help people understand that climate change will impact them (or their children, nieces, nephews, etc?) in significant ways (i.e. susceptibility, severity) and that the benefits of responding to climate change outweigh the costs of not doing so? Importantly, how do we do that before the issue becomes personal*?

To be certain, this is an interdisciplinary question: colleagues in climate science, public policy, and educational psychology are likely dealing with aspects of this already, and partnerships can be mutually beneficial. It would be good to engage with this soon, while climate change still feels like somewhere else, somewhere a little bit distant, because by the time it becomes personal for most of us, it may be too late.

* There’s a debate focusing on the worth/value of individual vs. systemic responses here that I’m going to ignore for this post. Suffice to say it’s an issue worth thinking about.

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