It may be too late to ask for some advice on the assignment but I’m going to ask anyway.
I have opted for the The Role of the Teacher in our increasingly Automated Educational Landscape.
The topic is huge and since my blog posts average 600 words, I’m aware that I need to be extremely focussed in my approach. This has raised some questions:
1 My own professional practice: There is scope in my assignment to include my own experience in the South African primary school context. I have really gravitated to the more theoretical aspects of the IDEL course rather than the practical. Applying theory to a practical scenario could be a valuable exercise. – It could also be included as a follow up blog post to my assignment (thus killing two birds). Any comments?
2 I would like to examine the future of the teacher from two different theoretical perspective;
the transhumanist and the critical posthumanist. I may run into word limits taking on both those perspectives.
So the big question is how feasible would it be to explore only a transhumanist future of education?
I’m asking because (in my opinion) Transhumanism is so radical and difficult to digest. I’m not a proponent of it as a movement and because my own resistance to it is instinctive (i.e. I don’t even have to think about it to dislike it) I want to explore it in a measured way and try to discover what would become of the teacher in a transhumanist world.
Also whilst we have touched on transhumanism on the IDEL most of my reading has rhizomatically spread into that topic and I’m concerned that I have crept too far away from the scope of the assignment. Comments?
Hi Ruth
A brief response to your two questions:
1. Yep, tacking a theory-rich approach to the question grounded in your specific professional context can be a very powerful was to address the question. Be careful to not use too many words to describe (rather than analyse) your professional practice – and killing two (metaphoric) birds is always a bonus.
2. Taking a single theoretical perspective should work well here. An alternative may be to take two or three practices open to automation and analyse then using both trans and post humanist perspectives.
More general advice is to use your opening paragraph to state how you’re tackling the assignment question and why you’re selecting your particular areas of focus (and a general hostility to transhumanism is a good enough reason). Also, from previous experience with this assignment, you should avoid conflating automation with artificial intelligence as automation is a much broader term. If you wanted to focus on AI, that would be fine but at the start of the assignment you should acknowledge automation is a broader concept but for this assignment you’re focusing on AI.
I hope that helps and I’ll look forward to reading the assignment.
Hi Pete
Thanks – as always your feedback is extremely helpful. Automation does indeed cover a huge range of technologies, as does AI for that matter. To my mind, any technology that can do work that was previous done by humans would be considered automation. Of course this includes a calculator – I will have to decide on which technology I’m going to look at, and that could include technology that has yet to be realised. I suppose the intention of the technology and it’s un/intended results are what I would like to consider.
School holidays have just begun and we are going camping so I’m aiming to complete my assignment by the 21st to avoid taking my laptop into the Cederberg.
Wish me luck!