Silos and AI
The overwhelming tsunami of information about and enthusiasm over AI and its potentiality for making our work life better, stronger, faster only serves to make me more nervous as the days go by. Don’t misunderstand me – I am curiously poking at the edges and playing with possibilities…but there are some aspects that I struggle to embrace when I think about its use in school contexts. Namely, the implications for cognition, complexity and collaboration.
If you agree that each brain is unique – primarily due to its complex and intricate structure, in combination with the interplay between various factors that contribute to individuality – then you might also consider in what way AI shapes and misshapes our brains. In other words, the brain’s ability to reorganise and adapt its structure and function in response to changes in the environment, learning, and experiences (neuroplasticity) must be influenced in the way AI is used (or not used) in schools. These interactions will inevitably involve the formation and strengthening of neural connections and the pruning of unused connections for individuals.
As an educator this leaves me curious. As a researcher I want to ask questions. And as a practitioner I want to know what this will look like, sound like and feel like for my day-to-day work and the work of my colleagues. I am particularly interested what this will mean for students, teachers and leaders in schools.
Over the past thirty five years I have welcomed and responded (positively and negatively) to various technological innovations that have emerged to shine like bright stars “for the way we will do things around here from now on”. Yet, the complexities that arose as a consequence of these technological advances left me feeling (at times) that “innovation” was another way of saying that my work-life was about to get more difficult and my workload increase but with less time to do it.
This is not to say that these innovations didn’t have advantages – they most certainly did! It was one of the reasons I greeted the LLMs and the rapid advancement and extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) with genuine enthusiasm. From enhancing productivity and efficiency I could see that my work-life and workload could be eased. The mundane could be lessened if not eradicated and I would have more time for conceptualising ideas and putting them into practice.
But as I was playing with various AI tools I began to contemplate some unintentional consequences of employing AI. The mundane sometimes holds important gems that we do not always recognise straight away and important thinking can come as a consequence of these. In equal measures I swing from frustration to elation with predictive text, titles that are suggested for my viewing, pop up advertisements when I am researching new appliances, translation applications, and any other assistive/ant technologies. More recently I have begun to wonder if my choices are really my own or I am being pushed in particular directions that I may or may not have followed if unassisted by AI.
I will foreground that my issues emerge from a fear that the use of algorithms in every aspect of our lives leads us to be like the metaphorical frog in boiling water scenario – are we failing to notice the silos that are building up and surrounding us!
Silos are organisational metaphors used to describe key aspects of a cultural phenomenon, that collectively result in barriers – psychological and physical – based on our human need to classify and organise social and mental models (Tett, 2016). Silos are a construct of function, knowledge and experience. Importantly, silo mentality can be both an organisational strength and problematic if unrecognised or ignored.
In this instance, AI and its uses in education can act in the same way. The allure of efficiency and productivity in a world that has become increasingly obsessed with fast paced deliverable outcomes is underpinned by assumptions that do not always see the light of day. Just like the silo, these assumptions are hidden from view by images and rhetoric that belie what is contained within.
With this in mind, in regards to education and AI, I am contemplating the following questions.
- ·What are the educational questions we should ask when employing AI?
- ·What is becoming of future generations when our AI assistant does the “heavy lifting”?
- ·How do (or will) AI personalised learning experiences and adaptive feedback impact the quality of human interaction and the relational aspects of education?
- Are we encouraging our students to be programmed or coded to forget their own existence?
- Will our (mis) use of AI contribute further to silo mentality?
Do any of these resonate for you or do you have others?
Joanne Casey (PhD) is an education practitioner who works in a range of contexts to support reform agendas that build sustainable practices over time. Her focus remains on improved outcomes for ALL students. She understands schools are complex environments requiring flexible but research-based approaches to achieve improved outcomes for those they serve.
