I’ve just finished giving a brief keynote for IFERP’s 3rd EdInnovate conference in Tokyo (sadly, because I love Tokyo in the Spring, I was online). Here are the slides. The conference was great: they put all of the keynotes and invited talks on a single day, with a very international and cross-disciplinary bunch of thought leaders (and me), and many of us were talking about very closely related themes, of rehumanizing and transforming education, from very different perspectives. Though most of it confirmed what I already know, I learned a lot.
The gist of my talk was that generative AI challenges us to transform both how we teach and what we teach. I have spoken quite a bit about the “how” in the past – essentially it is to double down on the tacit, the relational, and the social, to care about and to empower learners, to focus on what it means to be a human in whatever fields we are trying to teach. The stuff we should already have been doing.
The “what” is new. GenAIs are pretty good at creating stuff, and that’s a problem because it is very, very tempting to get them to think for us (hence cognitive Santa Claus machines: we delegate the thinking to them so that we don’t have to). We now have access to most human knowledge, at a (mostly) expert level, with little skill needed to elicit any of it. These things are like search engines that actually give us what we are searching for, in detail, and then do whatever it was that we were planning to do with the search results on our behalf. If our descendants are not to be less than us (and I really want more for my own grandchildren), we now have to figure out what to do with that. If the answer is to turn in an essay or perform an assignment that any AI could do at least as well, then the world will end with a whimper. Our jobs are to take that, problematize it, and use it to create more than any of us (human or machine) could have created alone. Luckily we already have a model for that: bricolage, or tinkering.
Bricolage has got a bad rap in the past, often compared unfavourably with engineering (notably by Levi Strauss, who defined it and saw it as primitive) but, as Papert and Turkle wrote many years ago, it is a very legitimate way of engaging with the concrete, a highly creative activity in its own right, and it can be a very powerful approach to design. The photo at the top of this post shows just a handful of the thousands of stunning artworks created by Nek Chand and his team, all of it built from the waste products of the industrial city of Chandigarh – pieces of wire, chunks of porcelain, sacks of concrete, and other found objects. I have visited twice and cried at the beauty of it both times.
I have written of bricolage before, e.g. here and here (nicely reported on and more clearly expressed by Stefanie Panke), as a means of researching things that don’t (yet) exist, and I intend to write more. It seems to me, though, that this is one of the key skills that we should be developing for ourselves and for our students, not just for research but as a process and product of learning. It is the natural evolution of the steady progress from high-resolution to low-resolution cognition that has driven human progress for millennia. In the past we built on and with what other humans had already done: it is and has always been what makes us smart that we can, through technologies (including language and art), share parts of our cognition: we think with our creations. The more we create, the more we can create. Now we have machines that are themselves bricoleurs par excellence, capable of producing any parts or pieces we can imagine, at vast scale, and quite a few we cannot. This is different. If we take advantage of it, we can continue the technology-fuelled exponential growth that is a hallmark of our species (and, to be perfectly clear, art, writing, poetry, architecture, music, and all the humanities are among the most significant of those technologies). If we don’t, we face not just the model collapse of genAIs but, ultimately, of our own cognition. This is not about replicating what we can already do. It’s about being able to do what we cannot yet imagine. This seems like a good mission for education to me.