Virtual professors won't ask for tenure!

Projects like Typealyzer, that I blogged about, are all heading towards that grander idea of Artificial Intelligence. Soon, we will be able to train computers to think like humans, and do a better job at that than we humans can do. (Will computers then also make movies like The Matrix? Hmmm....!)

Today, I headed to one of my regular sites--The Chronicle of Higher Education, and there is a piece on scientists and business leaders getting together to "plan a new university devoted to the idea that computers will soon become smarter than people."

When I read that, my thought was perhaps you folks would want to know about this. Hence, this post. The piece adds:

The idea that gave the new university its name is championed by Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the "singularity" — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains. His argument is that several technologies that now seem grossly undeveloped —including nanotechnology and artificial-intelligence software — are growing at an exponential rate and thus will mature much faster than most linear-minded people realize. Once they do, computers will take leaps forward that most people can hardly imagine today.

Finally,

Computers will become better at teaching than most human professors are once artificial intelligence exceeds the abilities of people, argues Ben Goertzel, director of research at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, Cal., a private organization promoting Mr. Kurzweil's ideas.

These new computer teachers will have more patience than any human lecturer, and they will be able to offer every student individual attention — which sure beats a 500-person lecture course.

Sure, one-on-one human teaching will always exceed a computer-student experience, Mr. Goertzel acknowledges, but what college undergraduate gets a personal tutor these days?

Virtual professors probably won't ask for tenure. And Mr. Goertzel sees them as key to expanding educational opportunities, by greatly reducing the price of a high-quality education.

Read the entire piece here.

The personality of this blog

The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

That was the result from Typealyzer. I will leave it up to the readers and participants of this blog to determine how much this analysis is correct.

If you are interested in how Typealyzer evaluated my personality in my regular blog, you will be impressed at how quite different the two personalities are :-)

From the mouths of babies ....

So, here is something interesting. And, unlike the previous one, this actually relates to online teaching and learning :-)

Students in my intro class have to blog about something from the class discussions that made them think about for a little more. Well, the topic that we covered in class this week was globalization, and outsourcing. The following is what one student has posted: (Yes, students can address me by my first name if they choose to.) Note her remarks on online classes.

Perhaps the worry that eventually their jobs might be on the line is also an unstated reason for faculty to oppose expansion of online teaching and learning? But, if that is even remotely a point, then all we have to do is look across the industry and see what is happening with the automakers, right? Not being flexible enough to adapt to changes is now threatening the very existence of General Motors, whose CEO once reportedly uttered, "what is good for GM is good for America" ....

outsourcing: when will it stop?
I am not sure how Sriram says that teaching a a job that will not be outsourced, it already has been. I, myself have taken classes online with teachers across the country. I didn't like it very much, so I will not do again, but I know many of people who do like it and have taken alot. It is not like nobody has heard of it either, because universities are constantly advertising online. If something like teaching can be outsourced, where will outsourcing stop? I can just imagine our world turning into something like what was portrayed in the movie Wall-E, where humans don't have to physically do anything anymore. We will eventually advance technology enough that we can do everything from a computer and it won't matter where we actually are at all.

Divorce in "Second Life"

Ok, I agree this is not about online teaching and learning. But, at the same time, it is yet another marker on how much online activities and cyberlife have become complex.
Against such a background, it becomes obvious how much we could come across as the metaphorical dinosaur if we keep resisting online teaching and learning. It is there; deal with it, is the message, I suppose :-)

CNN:

A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

"I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as "avatars" and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars.

Taylor said she had caught Pollard's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: "I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."

The couple's real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities: "He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life."

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

It felt so strange reading this at the CNN website, and not at the Onion's :-) Truth can be stranger than fiction, indeed.

e-Learning: any different from "regular" learning?

Penn State has gone one huge step with online learning: now online classes are increasingly offered as regular alternatives to tradition resident instruction. I.e., as more and more faculty offer courses online, Penn State students will be able to take online classes even though they are right there on campus. Cool, eh!

Naturally, online teaching itself was met with questions and reservations. Here is an excerpt from their report:

Of utmost importance is a concern that the report is framed around a distinction that is increasingly invalid: “e-learning” as distinct from “resident instruction.” Several years ago, e-learning was largely identified with the World Campus, which is directed to offcampus, nontraditional students. However, today, e-learning plays a significant role in teaching traditional students--on campus and inter-campus, as well as at a distance. For every Penn State student, learning is now a blend of curricular and
co-curricular experiences that take place online and face-to-face. The issues need to be framed in this emerging context. The basic questions that we must ask as an institution are: In what ways are the differences between teaching and learning online and in a classroom consequential? How can we ensure that the consequences do not affect quality adversely?

As I noted earlier, online means that the focus will be only on learning, and the course objectives. Now, how about we begin to emphasize that for regular face to face instruction too?

Peer to Peer University

If Second Life and World of Warcraft are the beginnings of a future, where an increasing part of daily lives will be spent in a virtual world, restricting teaching and learning only the real world will become increasingly difficult. Yesterday, in one of my real world classes, one student said during discussions: "let me be honest. I am only here because I know that I will need a four-year degree to move up. I find it frustrating that this [he was referring to university education] is the only business where the consumer has no choice at all."

Of course, learning as a "consumer" behavior, as if it is like buying a soy milk latte, does not appeal to me. But, hey, that is the reality we are dealing with, and in the immortal words of a rather hopeless mortal, we can go to war only with the military we have :-(

So, on top of everything else, we can expect more and more of a demand for online learning. Politicians, who are already sold on the business/consumer model, will prefer this even more because then there will be less pressure for constructing new buildings, ....

Have I set the context up enough? Well, the Chronicle of Hr. Ed. has a report on yet another model for online teaching and learning: the Peer to Peer University. According to the Chronicle:

The organizers call it P2P University (for peer-to-peer), and they hope to fill what they see as a gap in online-education efforts by traditional colleges, which often focus more on delivering full degree programs online than on one-off courses. ....
P2P University's two main audiences will be working professionals who want to brush up on a topic for their jobs but don't have time to take a whole degree program, and recent retirees who have plenty of time on their hands and feel comfortable in cyberspace ....
Although the university will not grant credit or seek accreditation of any kind, it will encourage students to seek college credit elsewhere — either by asking a traditional institution to give independent-study credit or by directing students to Western Governors University or other institutions that grant credit to students who can prove they have learned certain material on their own. P2P University might issue some kind of certificate indicating who taught the course and what was learned, however, and in some cases that alone might be enough for students to show a boss or put on their CV

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

If the university is really interested in revising our LACC, and seriously rethinking and restructuring liberal education, then the AACU annual meeting is the place to send a bunch of committed faculty and administrators. While it is not perfect, the AACU has always been one of the go-to places for me when I want to learn more about higher education, innovative pedagogies, etc.

One of the workshops at the annual meeting has a fantastic title: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, written by Don Finkel (Heinemann, 2000), challenges faculty to think of teaching as a practice of designing intellectual experience for a community of students, rather than one of “telling.” Drawing from the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire, Finkel proposes a variety of teaching practices that put the material at the center of students’ experience in the classroom, such as the Conceptual Workshop – a practice that engages students in community dialogue and inquiry and gives them the opportunity to apply ideas to complex situations.

I am sure you have figured out the rationale for posting this in this blog, as opposed to my other blog: when we teach online, don't we teach with our mouths shut? That in the online mode we put learning in the front and center?

As I noted in a posting in my other blog,
In the Chronicle, [former Harvard president] Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview."
They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

Isn't online teaching and learning a part of the process of experimentation, gathering evidence, and fine-tuning our approaches? Or, have we just stopped doing science altogether? I hope not.

So, ready to head to the AACU meeting? It is right up the road in Seattle, in Jan 2009.