technology – Page 3 – Panta Rhei Enterprise

Hey, Friend,

Thinking about AI. This is something I have been doing a lot. For more than a year now. Alright. Full disclosure first. I like working with computers. Their handwriting is neater than mine. When I use a command line, the graph I “drew” looks so much better. And most importantly, the computer remembers stuff really well. Sometimes too well. My interest in language led me to some branches of artificial intelligence. First, I dabbled in natural language processing (NLP). Then I started learning about it. Writing about it. Not as a computer scientist. As a linguist. As a language teacher. That is why I paid attention when Alan Turing, the father of AI, hypothesized that AI can be useful for language learning. From the late 1990s until the 2010s, I talked about and wrote about AI, as we knew it then, in the context of language education. The computer as a grammar checker, as a writing aid, or as a reading aid. It was challenging. Making the computer analyze language – words and sentences first – was difficult enough. Making the computer analyze a sentence a language learner wrote was even harder. Researchers and graduate students tried different approaches to deal with learner text successfully, or at least a little more successfully. But hardly any of the NLP-based programs for language learning ended up in the classrooms or on the computers of learners. They were too specialized, too unreliable, too expensive to make, and too cumbersome too maintain. We learnt a lot, though, in this work. About computers. And about language learning.

And then in late 2022, Generative AI became a thing. People noticed. Google Translate and DeepL started producing better translations from many languages into many others. ChatGPT spits out texts in more languages than I can read. These tools are faster than proficient writers and certainly faster than even advanced language learners. And. As ChatGPT told me once itself, the tools are mostly more accurate than the majority of language learners in many languages. Not in all of them.

After having left AI alone for some years, I started reading and learning again. I was lucky: I had done it before. Some things in AI looked familiar; others were completely new to me. What had happened? What is happening? Let’s find out together. It takes more than one post to disentangle the many threads … I have been asked to contribute some chapters on AI to books on language learning and technology in the coming months. The invitations to speak about AI before teachers and applied linguists have started coming in. So, I will be sharing some of my notes and my thoughts in this blog.

Why? The topic of generative AI – and AI as a whole – and language and learning a language has a lot to do with complexity and change. It is a topic made for this blog. The growth of AI as we all witnessed it and are witnessing it in the public arena has been exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of some complex processes …

learning a language with the computer — Photo by Peter Olexa on Pexels.com

Hey, Friend,

Many of us have experienced online learning-and-teaching over the last thirteen months, if not before and at least part of that time. Many of us have also experienced root canal surgery. Of course, the latter experience does not make us an expert dentist. And, I would say we don’t need to be as afraid of online learning-and-teaching anymore as some of us are of root canal surgery.

Flat puns aside, let us take a step back, it always gives us a better view of the whole thing. What is online learning-and-teaching? And why do I keep talking about learning-and-teaching, a made-up word with two hyphens? Teaching does not really happen without learning; you can’t say you have taught them, if they did not learn anything. Of course, one can learn without teaching. Why do we teach then, you ask. It’s a matter of time. Literally.

Let’s take an example: It is the middle ages, and you are in German lands. You would like to walk from Finsterwalde to Sonnewalde. As you can make out by the place names (der Wald = forest), you will have to find your path through the woods. Steps to be taken, decisions to be made at each fork, trails to be found and followed. After hours and hours and, sometimes, hours, you arrive in Sonnewalde. Exhausted and … late, maybe too late. If you were mindful, paid attention to the path you took, and reflected on your choices, you will have learned something. But it came at a cost, you arrived late; it took you too much time and effort.

Of course, there are alternatives: You ask for help. You find somebody who goes with you, somebody who knows the way, who can tell you, when you need to know, where to turn and to turn where. You get to Sonnewalde on time and as planned. It was easier than all by yourself, wasn’t it? You have achieved what you wanted; you have learned something, and you were taught, if it was a good teacher, the same something you would have learned alone at least.

Of course, there are alternatives to that: In the middle ages, you could have obtained a map, before walking off. You got directions beforehand. Or you used a compass to navigate through the dense forest. – Europeans got to know compasses in the 12th century. – In other words, you could use technology: a map, written notes, and/or a compass. Today, you would have even more options: a map on your phone or a GPS app talking to you intermittently.

In any case, your teaching-and-learning experience would have been mediated. But before we look at tool mediation, let’s think about something else: time. Wandering through the forest on your own takes more time then receiving the necessary guidance and information in appropriate chunks, when you need them. That’s pretty much what teaching is: you are learning by intentionally addressing a complex problem and your interaction with the problem is mediated by the teacher. The teacher breaks down the process into manageable chunks and – most importantly – presents you with these chunks in the order that is most conducive to learning. What pedagogy – the science of teaching-and-learning – does is help the teacher determine the selection and ordering of the chunks (pieces of information, steps in a complex process, …), which is best for learning for an individual, a particular group, and under specific circumstances. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, we will look at these pedagogic processes one by one in future posts.

Obviously, teachers use tools. They use words. Often words are their most important tool. Sometimes they demonstrate. Or they model. They use blackboards and whiteboards. Over the years, they had slide and overhead projectors, record, cassette, CD, and DVD players. I don’t remember anybody saying that these tools made their teaching virtual. Pupils, parents, and politicians thought of it as the real thing. Virtual? Virtual used to mean having the power of acting without the agency of matter. Now this adjective describes the thing is the thing in effect or essence, but that fact is not recognized formally. Tja!

Virtual learning is learning in essence and effect, but we won’t admit it. Perhaps, we should avoid the word virtual in this context and admit that online learning-and-teaching is real and realistic.

When schools and colleges were closed last year to keep students safe and healthy during a pandemic, as best one could, they were asked to learn online. What changed? The teachers changed their tools: they did not talk to the classroom walls any longer, they began talking to computer screens. The learning-and-teaching was still just that: learning and teaching. It did not suddenly become void of matter. Education remained accessible for kids who could not leave their homes, enter a school building, or congregate in groups. By swapping the whiteboard for a Jamboard or group work for Breakout rooms, how the teaching was mediated changed. Who likes change? It requires learning: teachers and students had to learn about the many new tools, how to use them, and how to use them effectively. They had to adapt to the tools and – more importantly – adapt the tools to them and for them. All of this happened online. With successes and failures. With joy and misery. And it was real. Not virtual.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard when everything is online. All the time. And it’s a challenge to learn new tools and tricks. So, let’s look back on these past months online, our efforts and our learning, and let’s make the learning-and-teaching in this modality more and more real. Real and effective mediation by a teacher. No need then to throw out the online utensils from the tool box in a couple of months. Hopefully.