The Learning Success Blog

Speaking almost sixty six years ago Professor John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI said at the Dartmouth University conference 1956 , “Every aspect of learning... can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” 

Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, said “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed by AI” and it could be “the biggest event in the history of our civilisation”.

Artificial intelligence and other machine learning principles may be taking over a plethora of industries, but there will always be room for design. Within this industry, there are a few future creative roles, including those of augmented reality designer, fusionist, and intelligent system designer. 

Creativity, originality, and vision are three elements that are usually present in youngsters with a flair for arts-related topics but when it comes to design, there are key principles children can learn so they can aim to create quality work with a real value from the time they are very young.

After all, ‘design for life’ - lasting design that has value in the real world - is considered a universal aim for designers from a wide array of industries.

As the brain acquires new knowledge, the connections between the neurons become stronger, creating a more robust network and allowing the neurons to communicate more quickly. This is learning, and the more we rehearse a skill or piece of information, the quicker we are able to retrieve it and the easier it becomes.

What's artificial intelligence got to do with learning and education? Actually, as it turns out quite a lot and in the future it may have an even bigger impact on how teachers teach and how students learn.

I was fortunate to attend the Australian Tutoring Association 2019 annual conference in Melbourne, where I heard educator Moya Gibb Smith give a presentation about the role of artificial intelligence (or AI as its generally known) in education and learning and how it's going to affect students, teachers, and tutors.

Today, Moya joins me on the podcast to explain her first experience of AI when she worked as Learning Support Teacher in a New South Wales country school, and how she sees it developing in the future.

Listen to the interview

Maybe not soon.

But it’s highly likely robots will be used to assist human teachers in the not too distant future.

That’s according to a research study by scientists from universities in USA, Japan and Europe.

The study involved a review of more than 100 published articles, which have shown robots to be effective at increasing learning outcomes.

My granddaughter has just done her first school assignment.

Like all the other children in her kindergarten class in her local state primary school she had to make a video about her family and upload it to a password protected website for all to share.

She is not quite five years old. And she’s using technology to communicate with others and express herself. It’s a 21^st century show & tell.

I expect this little girl and her classmates probably didn’t think there was anything remarkable about that project. But it’s a significant example of how technology is becoming such an integral part of our lives.

“Only by changing education can our children compete with machines.”  That’s what Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba believes.  Alibaba is China’s largest e-commerce company. On some measures it is bigger than Amazon.com.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Ma said, “We cannot teach our kids to compete with machines.  Teachers must stop teaching knowledge. We have to teach something unique, so a machine can never catch up with us.”

Don’t teach knowledge based things from the past 200 years

It seems that technology companies are increasingly interested in the way our brains work and the way we learn. In this recent article, we are told that Apple is currently hiring speech recognition specialists and is in the process of constructing artificial neural networks to process information in ways similar to the way our brains do. Other companies operating in this field include Google (no surprises there), IBM, Facebook and Microsoft. This new field of artificial intelligence development is called ‘deep learning’. What is interesting is that we don’t often hear about the concept of deep learning in schools. We hear about curriculum and standards, and to a lesser degree, personal development and the education of the whole person. But what if educators took notice of the concept of deep learning.