Why do we need frameworks?
This ‘AI in Education’ thing is new, yeah?
None of us know what we are doing. None of us are experts. None of us can truly know the impact it will have on education. All we know is that we reckon it will change it. But we don't know how much, or what yet. I think this is a good thing. There is no way we can predict the changes that something as evolutionary as Generative AI can mean to our craft.
Am I scared? Nope. Am I curious? Yep. Do I want to wrap some structure around it? Yep.
However, I can’t help but feel that before we spend a lifetime of weekends creating frameworks and scaffolds and continuums and acronyms (yes, I am guilty of this too), perhaps we should just let the young people explore AI a little. Perhaps we should just let the young people see if they WANT to use it. See if they NEED to use it.
Let’s cast back to 2009. A wave of new shiny, sparkly Web 2.0 Tools had proliferated our Eduworld. We mapped them to Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, we created SAMR, we explored TIM, and we even dug into TPACK. But did that really make a difference to our learners? Did all the frameworks help our young people to develop skills in digital pedagogy? Nup. It made US feel like we could cope with this change. It made the EDUCATORS in the room drivers of the change that was being forced upon our young people by the world around them.
Did we learn not anything from this experience? Clearly not. If we stop and think about it, in the end, young people chose what THEY wanted to use and WHEN they wanted to use it. They created with the tools that they found useful. They rolled their eyes at the tools WE thought we cool. They ignored the tools we thought we REALLY cool. And they showed us tool we didn’t even know existed.
Where did Animoto go? Where is Edmodo? What about Glogster… remember that? Are our young people actually more creative? Do they have a toolbox of apps they dip into when they need? Do we still use our scaffolds and frameworks in our classrooms? Do our frameworks and scaffolds guide our learning activities? I doubt it. I think we drag them out to support eductors when WE need them. Nothing to do with the young people really.
Let’s fast forward to 2024. We are all grappling with AI and the impact that it is / will have in education. I see so many frameworks, acronyms, and scaffolds for the integration of AI into existing pedagogy. But Why? Why are we doing this again?
If we are really going to integrate AI into our learning experiences, we need to let our young people drive that. We need to think of the world they are stepping into. We need to give up the past. We need to acknowledge that we don’t know what we are doing and where we are going. We need to move forward together.
Maybe, just maybe, we should all just dive in and use AI in our daily lives. In our professional lives. In our classrooms and in our offices. Perhaps we should be encouraging our young people to do the exploring. Perhaps we should be asking them which tools are working for them. And then, as we move forward, we adapt and adjust the learning experiences needed that will best prepare our young people for the world they will step into.
Just perhaps that’s the way this thing called AI in Education should roll out.
