*Just publishing this quick additional post to keep track of my own thoughts and reflections*
With a few of the additional readings in this block focusing on the Teacherbot, I wracked my brain to remember where I first encountered this work. I eventually remembered that Sîan Bayne delivered the keynote talk on Teacherbot during our department’s annual symposium in June 2015, just days after I started work at the university, and in higher education in general.
While I couldn’t find the recording of that talk, I did go over the readings, and listened back to a similar talk from the same month:
I want to return to this take on automated teaching later in the course, maybe for the assignment. With so much reaction to the current trends in automation, I’d like to take some time to consider the more creative, and even playful aspects of automation, and the “pedagogically generative” benefits they can deliver, even if accidental (Bayne, 2015).
In contrast to the likes of ChatGPT, a teacher-coded automation tool affords quite different possibilities, though they are still susceptible to in-built biases. In the context of the MOOC, the mere presence of the bot probed reflections and considerations clearly linked to the course themes.
In my own context, it might be worth exploring a similar approach in my Learning Technologies course. I found the bot fascinating back in 2015, and especially enjoyed the playful and powerful nature of some of the Twitter bots covered in that talk.
I’ve somehow managed to avoid automation in my own teaching career and in my learning technologist role. I’ve always enjoyed the labour of teaching, even when managing heavy workloads. In higher ed, I have the privilege of teaching very small classes, so it’s worth considering how I might be able to trial or model some automation to create those “pedagogically generative” moments.
References:
Bayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching, Teaching in Higher Education, 20:4, 455-467, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1020783
Bayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: Automated teaching on a MOOC. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naezS2kMTeE (Accessed 19 February 2023).
Molloy, K. (2015) [Twitter] 19 June. Available at: https://twitter.com/hey_km/status/611820524000428032 (Accessed: 19 February 2023).
I think you are really on to something here Kate and look forward to reading your final assignment, if you still end up writing about this. As a sociomaterialist, I find the whole idea of the teaching and learning process being an entanglement of humans, non-humans, technology, objects and environment fascinating. As a researcher I’m coming to terms with research as something not done by me to my research subjects, but as an ongoing assemblage from which interesting things emerge. I’m currently looking at how boredom emerges from formal learning environments compared to digital gaming. Similarly, how will a new role for the teacher emerge from automation and AI? I think it could be a fruitful partnership, rather than a binary!!
I hope I’m on to something. I also find the entanglements of T&L fascinating, so much so that I think I need to designate a few synonyms for it as I find myself repeating it so often in the blogs. I can’t say that I think of myself as a researcher just yet, so I’ve been using this space to attempt to untangle everything – hence the rambling! I would always view technology and the teacher as partners rather than binaries as well. In my own practice, I use ‘leverage’ a lot. How can we leverage technology to aid our teaching needs? In this case, how can we leverage automation to probe interesting discussions/debates in a class about learning technology? Your research sounds really interesting. I’ve started to look into some work around rewilding, and I’m really interested in learning outside of the conventional spaces.
It’s quite a circular relationship isn’t it? Humans design technology which then develops agency of it’s own as unexpected affordances can appear. I always love the anecdote about Twitter which was designed to be a broadcast tool only but people wanted to talk to each other so they appropriated the @ symbol to tag a tweet and direct it to a specific person. That resulted in a whole new way of using the technology!