Critical Background to my Bot
Biesta suggests that meaningful education should be considered under three dimensions: content, purpose and relationships. I think this is a useful framework to apply when designing a bot that ultimately should ‘create something pedagogically generative’ (Baynes 2015).
Underlining these three considerations, is the need for the bot to be ‘playful’, as Baynes argued. My professional experience has shown me that some of the most successful teaching and learning takes place when there is humour and provocation. Furthermore, on reading Bayne’s article I was struck by the fact that it was the unexpected responses from ‘botty’ that generated unexpected teaching and learning; one student called it ‘ambush-teaching’. It was this unexpectedness that seemed so successful.
Content
The bot needs to open a window to new knowledge. As part of the algorithm, the bot needs to access its content in a variety of ways: not just through the written word, but also visually and aurally. This brings to mind: “Text has been troubled: many modes matter in representing academic knowledge” (The Manifesto for Teaching Online)
Purpose
“The question of purpose is in my view the most central and most fundamental educational question since it is only when we have a sense of what it is we want to achieve through our educational efforts…that it becomes possible to make meaningful decisions about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of our educational efforts.” (Biesta 2013)
This quote frames my exploration of bots and what a prototype bot might be. What would the purpose be behind my bot? It should provoke thought, as well as present knowledge in surprising ways, which will keep the learner on their toes. The bot would provide the opportunity to “teach through technology, not just with it” (Selwyn)
Relationships
In my previous blog ‘Musings on Mombasa Road’, I mooted that relationships are vital in education. Bayne also picks up on this theme: “Teacherbot needs to engage in both the functionality of e-learning environments and engage with the core relations between teacher and students.” The word relationship is the opening word in Selwyn’s chapter on ‘Technology and the Teacher’. Hopefully, the bot will engage in some sort of interaction with the learner, thus creating a ‘relationship’, which will encourage the student to think and will engender the ‘ambush-teaching’, which I think would be an exciting result.
I wouldn’t want to create an instrumental bot that will remind my of impending deadlines or some such other useful task. Nor will my bot contribute to ‘productivity-orientated solutionism’ (Baynes)
An interesting post on those three criteria. Your framing of content, purpose and relationships does really centre the playfulness of the Bot and the potential for that playfulness to spark new lines of thinking and critique among students – so certainly not productivity-orientated solutionism!
Hi Emma ,
As we’re at about the halfway stage of the course, I’m reviewing everyone’s blogs against the assessment criteria in the course handbook.
Your blog is clearly demonstrating a regular, sustained and thoughtful reflection on the course content and activities and the implications of these for your practice. Your sustained engagement with the concepts and applications of automation and AI on teaching and education going back to 17 January is a particularly strong and coherent example of this.
You are also engaging critically and insightfully with the concepts being considered in the course. The way you have approached and developed your understanding of essentialism and critical posthumanism is really good to see. You are asking good questions and really interrogating these ideas and their application (eg, in the NESTA report). These concepts are not straightforward nor easy. For me, I think it was helpful that my first exposure to posthumanist thought was on Actor-Network Theory and the sociologist speaking prefaced most of his statements with “I *think* what is meant here is XXXXX but I’m not entirely clear that I understand it fully yet…”. In your case, I think continuing to work through the distinctions between posthumanism as a theoretical perspective for analysis vs posthumanism as a theory for practice is valuable (but this is not a straight forward distinction either). Having said that, this may be something to come back to later in the programme or at the end of this course – meantime, you have other concepts to work with and you may find that those resonate more, are more interesting or shed new light on posthumanism, essentialism and instrumentalism.
In terms of communication style, I think you have an engaging blogging ‘voice’. As the course progresses, it would be good to see further use of the multimodal possibilities of the blog form. This might involve greater use of audio and visual components as not just illustrative part also as part of your argumentation (so to replace text) and using hyperlinks and embed functions to draw in wider resources into your ‘web sphere’.
I’m finding a lot of value in your posts and am enjoying reading them and so I’m looking forward to seeing how your blog develops over the remainder of the course. Please just let me know if you have any questions about this review.