What can we compare to AI in higher education?

The extent of ____ use by faculty to communicate with students for teaching-related activities was estimated. The mean response to this item was 2.0 (SD = 1.2) on a four-point scale where "1" represented no use and "4" represented frequent use, with 56.3% of the faculty respondents indicating that they have never used ____ to communicate with students about teaching-related activities, 9.3% indicating that they use ____ with students infrequently, 15.2% indicating frequent use of ____ with students, and 19.2% indicating that they very frequently use ____ with students.

(Mitra et al., 19__, Results section, para. 1).

Okay, you've probably put it together yourself, that the mad lib style quote is a rhetorical strategy to get you to think about what now-ubiquitous technology you would put in the blank. Maybe you're thinking about Learning Management Systems in their early days, or social media back when some folks were building Twitter spaces for their course discussions. Maybe you're remembering the 2010s and HASTAC's recommendation that we consider digital badges as a modern credentialing mechanism. It is something even more common-place, sometimes frustrating, and that its removal from our digital ecosystems is just not possible: e-mail.

Mitra and colleagues published this quote in 1999 in their article "Faculty use and non-use of electronic mail: attitudes, expectations and profiles" and they weren't alone. "A person characterized by a strong disinclination to change may refuse to adopt e-mail despite demonstrable benefit and social pressure, preferring instead to talk face-to-face even about trivial matters amenable to e-mail" (p. 198) is from Minsky and Marin (1999). As a 90% online teacher, this one hits home, because sometimes I just can't handle another meeting that should have been an email.

AI is here to stay, as the world turns and the token economy shifts. New data centers (terrestrial or the currently-impossible space-based) will be built if the capacity demands, and students will bring it into our learning environments regardless of our opinions or policies. As the models improve, being able to tell what is or isn't AI generated is harder and harder, and if you're still betting on AI detection, well I've got data-center ready property on the moon to sell you. I am not arguing for aggressive expansion and adoption, only the acknowledgement that avoiding the disruption of AI just isn't feasible now. The disconnect, at least to me, is that while many instructors I interact with want to build more AI-resilient or -enhanced learning experiences, they really don't know where to start, but especially they don't know where the margins are. The gap between responsible AI use and institutionally defined responsible AI use feels to me that it is widening, not narrowing, as what AI can do evolves more rapidly than we can write policy (and that's another blog post but hardly a hot take).

And to temper my words, I offer my lamentation through the words of Nguyen (1995) as I also acknowledge that now "gone are the unpolished chiselwork of deliberations, the uncertainties of discourse, and the unrehearsed responses… not even this technology can reproduce all the nuances of personal contact" (para. 13). While that statement is grounded in the disruptive power of e-mail, I see the ramifications now due to AI, and I say this as someone who taught his first college course in Fall 2007. I can only see what has been lost in my time, but I trust my colleagues who faced these issues due to the emergence of rapid electronic communication. However, I've never had an office door with a transom, so maybe some things had to change.

As much as I can romanticize an academic life without e-mail, I know that without such rapid communication, I'll be attending a lot more meetings, with longer agendas, and also we will probably argue more about what was or wasn't said (I was once in a faculty meeting that went off the rails for almost an entire hour debating "ought" vs "should" in a learning objective discussion, rooted in two different emails from academic leaders). As much as I wish for my students to develop domain knowledge and expertise based upon the message and not the medium, the reality is I cannot stop the grad student (who works a full-time job as an academic advisor while trying to raise a family) from looking to AI tools for efficiency.

And let's just get out ahead of at least one common critique (and there are many valid critiques of AI in education worth heeding), with Stoll's piece from Newsweek in 1995 that "no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works" (para. 2). While interpreting Stoll's brief commentary requires some acceptance of what is meant by "competent teacher" and "the way government works," overall I find myself agreeing with his sentiment, and not just because I think that employers will continue to value accredited degrees for most positions over self-taught expertise (this is a whole different debate we should have), but also because teachers have always found a way to be the conduit between content and mastery. What would Alexander's legacy be without Aristotle, and who would Peter Parker be without Uncle Ben? Where would Annalise be without Soraya (shout out Peter Nowalk and Viola Davis for this one)? Will AI ever be able to know the things a mentor knows, and dance between the lines to offer that knowledge to others?

Is e-mail a fair comparison? It isn't. This is a false equivalency, and e-mail as a disruptive communication tool is far more focused than the ways that AI is disrupting education. But, I hear the echoes of this concern as I try to honor this past and on-going discussion about the impact of technological advancement on the arena of teaching and learning. What can we compare AI to? Do we have case studies from which we can derive generalizable principles for navigating turbulent technological waters? I'm not sure, but what I do know is that I have been told time and time again, in what I understand is my brief 20 year career as faculty, that each leap forward with technology costs us things (real like the ability to solve the problem that AI did for us, or artificial like cursive handwriting which was and continues to be an artifact of the "haves" against the "have nots"). Faculty resistance is a predictable, recurring, human, and necessary pattern, not a referendum on whether the technology is "good."

References

Minsky, B. D., & Marin, D. B. (1999). Why faculty members use e-mail: The role of individual differences in channel choice. The Journal of Business Communication, 36(2), 194–217.

Mitra, A., Hazen, M. D., LaFrance, B., & Rogan, R. G. (1999). Faculty use and non-use of electronic mail: Attitudes, expectations and profiles. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1999.tb00097.x

Nguyen, T. (1995, November). The Internet generation. Harvard Magazine. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/1995/11/the-internet-generation

Stoll, C. (1995, February 26). Why the web won't be nirvana. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306

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