This week a new collaborative article was published in the Asian Journal of Distance Education  titled "Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape." Our friend and colleague Aras Bozkurt invited us to participate in a piece using speculative methodology, something new to me, to explore positive, and not so positive, narratives around the use of AI in education. I love collaborating on this type of output because I learn so much both from engaging in the experience as well as from other participants (and there were 36 of us in this endeavor).  It was great to be in the same academic and social mindspace with old friends and acquaintances from past collaborations, as well as work with new folks. The published document is 78 pages long, so a short book if we consider page breaks between stories and perhaps some illustrations, which the original article doesn't have, but someone in our collaborative suggested - and which I think is a nifty idea.  The last big collaboration like this (that I remember) was around Emergency Remote Teaching which I missed out on because of the dissertation work I was doing at the time, so this was a great way to get re-started with collaborative work now that school's done.

In writing my positive and negative stories I tried to be a bit gray in both of them.  Depending on your lens and your predispositions you might see either as a positive or a negative. Either way, I hope they make you think 😁

I need to do a deeper dive into speculative methodologies.  For this round, I read enough to be conversant and get my brain going, but a  big part was a kind of moshpit learning. This approach reminds me a bit of another project I wanted to start a few years back, one that also stalled due to dissertation work, the "Modern Day Aesop" (or better name TBD) where modern animal-based fables could be crafted with an eye toward teaching, learning and technology.  Similarly, another friend, Lance Eaton, had proposed a book a few years back called "Bring Me My Chisel:  The Resistance Manifesto to the Cyborg Takeover of Academia" which also seemed to engage in a fictionalized approach to discussing teaching, learning, and technology in academia from a (perhaps) Luddite perspective.

Anyway, here are the deets on the new article :-)

Abstract

While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

Check it out:

Bozkurt, A., Xiao, J., Lambert, S., Pazurek, A., Crompton, H., Koseoglu, S., Farrow, R., Bond, M., Nerantzi, C., Honeychurch, S., Bali, M., Dron, J., Mir, K., Stewart, B., Costello, E., Mason, J., Stracke, C. M., Romero-Hall, E., Koutropoulos, A., Toquero, C. M., Singh, L., Tlili, A., Lee, K., Nichols, M., Ossiannilsson, E., Brown, M., Irvine, V., Raffaghelli, J. E., Santos-Hermosa, G., Farrell, O., Adam, T., Thong, Y. L., Sani-Bozkurt, S., Sharma, R. C., Hrastinski, S., & Jandrić, P. (2023). Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape. Asian Journal of Distance Education. Retrieved from http://www.asianjde.com/ojs/index.php/AsianJDE/article/view/709