Tag Archives: generative AI

Grappling with AI

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Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2024. May be reused under CC BY 4.0 licence.

2024 Q2 Update
Singapore & Hong Kong, SAR China
April-May, 2024

In April this year, I co-presented a workshop on AI literacy for schools: Principles, practices and problems for the Academy of Principals, Singapore (9 April; with Grace Oakley) and presented a seminar on Generative AI and the evolution of education for Hong Kong Baptist University (30 April). In addressing, firstly, an audience of schoolteachers and Ministry of Education staff in Singapore and, secondly, tertiary educators from across Hong Kong, it became clear that everyone, across countries and education levels, is grappling with similar challenges as we seek to balance the opportunities and risks for teaching and learning presented by generative AI.

In my own presentations, I began by zooming out to look at the big picture of the technology itself and how it has developed and is developing; continued by zooming in to look at the implications for education and assessment; zoomed out again to look at challenges from the pedagogical to the societal; and concluded by emphasising the need for both educators and students to acquire AI literacy.

Discussions during and after these sessions revealed that many educators are keen to explore how gen AI can support their students’ learning and help them develop skills they will need in future workplaces, but that there are pedgogical concerns over how to teach and assess in this era, and ethical concerns over issues ranging from privacy and surveillance through to the environmental impact.

And rightly so. As I argued in a podcast on Digital ethics for Hong Kong Baptist University (3 May), gen AI is a new, more powerful stage of technology development and therefore potentially more valuable and potentially more risky at the same time. The task before us is balancing out the value and the risks. This will keep educators very busy in years to come as we seek to develop our own AI literacy and that of our students, and, I hope, offer some public leadership in this area.

At the interface of AI and language learning

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Melbourne Skyline from Southbank, Australia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2023. May be reused under CC BY 4.0 licence.

VicTESOL Symposium
Melbourne, Australia
13 October, 2023

I was invited to be a member of a panel on Generative AI in EAL learning: Promises and challenges at the VicTESOL Symposium held at the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership in North Melbourne. Hosted by Melissa Barnes (La Trobe University) and Katrina Tour (Monash University), the other members of this 3-person panel were Shem Macdonald and Alexia Maddox (both from La Trobe University). Perhaps reflecting the degree of interest in this area, the panel ran twice, with different audiences.

We started off each time by considering the opportunities presented by generative AI in terms of language learning inside classrooms (explaining vocabulary or grammar points; acting as a concordancer to provide examples of language-in-use; improving language, register and style; creating self-study revision questions; collaborative story-writing; and engaging in immersive conversation, with AI acting as a Socratic tutor – an approach currently being explored by the likes of the Khan Academy and Duolingo in its Max premium subscription version) as well as in terms of preparation for present and future life needs outside classrooms (including the need to use AI in professional workplaces, as well as when interacting with chatbots and automated services provided by government organisations and corporations).

We then quickly moved on to discussing the challenges raised by generative AI, and the need for teachers and students to take a critical stance towards this rapidly evolving technology. In particular, this entails the development of AI literacy, which intersects with a number of other key digital literacies: prompt literacy, search literacy, attentional literacy and, perhaps above all, information literacy and critical literacy. We should also remember that not all students are ready or able to use this technology: accessibility is a major issue for many, especially in communities of recent migrants and refugees. Neither are all teachers ready: in some cases, some of our students may have more awareness of and facility with the technology that we do, but it’s crucial that we upskill ourselves and help students develop the aforementioned critical perspective that may sometimes be missing.

Questions and comments from the audiences at both panels were revealing: it’s clear that for many educators, the initial wave of consternation that accompanied the release of ChatGPT and the following wave of genAI has subsided, and teachers are finding productive ways to build such technologies into their teaching, their students’ learning activities, and even their assessments. Our reflective conversations and exchanges of ideas about how to best incorporate these technologies into education augur well for the future.

In coming years, we’ll no doubt be hearing a lot more presentations and panels about generative AI and its place in language learning and education more broadly. Meanwhile, photos from the panel are available on Twitter/X.

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