Machine Learning Blues

Imagining Education Futures: Researchers as Fiction Authors

“…In this collection, artificial intelligences have been given the power to choose what modules a student should take (Håkansson Lindqvist 2022 ); grade students (Bozkurt 2022 ); provide student feedback (Scott 2022 ); and befriend students (Vallis 2022 ). Fuentes-Martinez ( 2022 ) offers a history of the future, in which an old teacher remembers her past which is the readers’ future, and Curcher ( 2022 ) pushes the irony to absurd in a story where students use AIs to write assignments, teachers use AIs to provide feedback on these assignments, and then students upload the feedback to their AI so that it can write a better assignment next time: Students could, if they wanted, read the feedback but almost none of them did, even the most conscientious just uploaded the feedback into their own personalized version of the AI, so that next time round their [natural language processing] took the feedback into account, whatever it said.…”