Week 3 – Critique of Educ-ai-tion rebooted? Exploring the future of artificial intelligence in schools and colleges. National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)
The NESTA report sets out to explore the potential of artificial intelligence and education (AIEd) within the UK, addressing pedagogical challenges and considers how the AIEd sector can grow effectively and responsibly ‘enabling schools and colleges to learn and evolve’ (p.5).
A Brave New World?
It is interesting that the foreword is written by Sir Anthony Seldon. Former Master of Wellington College and renowned for pioneering work in holistic education; a champion of digital education and an active campaigner against ‘factory schools’ advocating personalised education. His tone resonates as a determined call to arms, which sets the reader up to expect revolutionary statements in the body of the report. He calls for imagination and optimism, declaring that ‘A glorious new world of deep education awaits’.
An exciting sweeping statement, that unfortunately, the report did not carry through with.
Watch this video from the NESTA website that propounds a constructivist dream à la Bayne (2014) “What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’?”:
How far does the report go to lay the groundwork for this aspiration? Does the report set out the game plan for the sort of ‘glorious new’ educational world that Bayne was hoping for where technology and education would be co-constitutive of each other? Bayne concluded by hoping that our role as educationalists would be as
“critical protagonists in wider debates on the new forms of education, subjectivity, society and culture worked-through by contemporary technological change.”
Rather, the NESTA report becomes bogged down in exactly the instrumentalist and reductive declarations that Bayne, and also Hamilton & Friesen argue are preventing digital education from becoming truly transformative. Rather than exploring the potential of tying in pedagogy with technology at a design level, the report makes declarations of intent that are, at best, instrumentalist. AIEd is continuously described as a ‘potential tool’. It is divided into three possibilities: learner-facing tools, teacher-facing tools and system-facing tools. Newton (2020), in making a case for pragmatism in educational development, argues that “effective use of digital technologies for learning depends on its successful integration with pedagogy and content knowledge”.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2020.583157/full
The NESTA report recognises but does not emphasise future investment in this sort of approach. Disappointingly, it concentrates on teacher and system-facing tools, arguing that these will reduce teacher workloads, by automating tasks, from the menial to more complex, such as essay marking. However, the report does acknowledge that Edtech is frequently not informed by pedagogy and states that the quality and effectiveness of AIEd must also be improved (p.13; p.17). So it goes some way to advocate Bayne’s transformative pedagogical vision, but not nearly far enough.
On their website, NESTA claims to focus on ‘the human, social and public dimensions of AI.’ https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/artificial-intelligence/ This essentialist view, propounded by both Hamilton & Friesen and Bayne in their respective papers is worth bearing in mind. Did the ‘Educ-ai-tion Rebooted’ report fulfil that focus? Yes, it did to an extent, concentrating on how to help the AIEd sector grow, and dedicating a large chapter to governance of data. Whether it fully explored the essentialist pedagogical values of technology, such as collaboration is debatable; I did not feel the report went far enough to consider these as potentially important.
Nevertheless, the report is important and relevant for its time: published by NESTA in 2019 as part of the EDTech Innovation Fund in conjunction with the Department for Education. There is undoubtedly a strong commercial intent behind the report, written as part of a £4.6m partnership to ‘support more effective use of technology in education’. https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/edtech-innovation-fund/ In a paper on ‘The Mobilisation of AI in Education’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038520967888 Davies (2020) comes to the conclusion, through the creation of a knowledge graph, that currently AIEd has a strong commercial influence. Davies argues that AIEd is being mobilised with the wrong intentions and is “promoted as a way to fix education through, for example, making learning more efficient and effective and addressing social inequalities.” This could be a reasonable description of the NESTA report, which makes direct reference to “a lack of social mobility” and declares that AIEd can transcend social inequalities through tech-enabled learning, by personalising education and thereby also fixing the perceived problem of a factory system of education (p.11). This reminds me of Biesta’s ‘learnification’ of education, where “education is constructed as instrumental”(Bayne 2014), and becomes more of an economic transaction.
In conclusion, the NESTA report has much to commend it, but becomes weighed down by socio-economic arguments, as well as a need to justify AIEd in the light of governance and accountability. It recognises the instrumentalist advantages of AIEd, but does not have a transformative vision that I would like to associate with AIEd.
This post has a well-developed critical engagement with the report drawing on various readings from the course so far. You highlight the instrumental and solutionist logics of the report well. You identify the instrumental, solutionist and reductive transactive perspectives on education in the report very well. The paragraph on essentialism is less convincing. Hamilton & Freisen and Bayne warn against the reductive effects of essentialist perspectives on technologies rather than propound (to put forward) – and, judging from your next sentence, I think you meant warned against. I’m not clear what you mean by “Whether it fully explored the essentialist pedagogical values of technology, such as collaboration is debatable; I did not feel the report went far enough to consider these as potentially important” and this is a point where expanding you argument would be helpful.
This is a well structured and engagingly written blog post and makes good use of images and the video embed.