This is it: AI will change University for Good
Fecha: noviembre 2024
Mariano Fernández Enguita
Higher education, digital transformation, artificial intelligence, educatiojnal innovation, AIEd
Beyond Ivory Tower. Navigating Higher Education in the Future
Higher education has long been living with the promise, or the threat, that (micro)computing, the internet, or now artificial intelligence, will change everything–whether to reinforce it, turn it upside down, or leave it by the wayside. If we are to learn from the past “to avoid repeating it,” the lesson is clear: once again, technology will not deliver what it promises, especially not to this millenium-old institution, which is much older and more stable than the rest of the educational system. But there is something new: each new technological ecosystem that has penetrated education since the advent of writing, including the printing press, has done so by multiplying access to information and the reach of communication, but always at the cost of more uniformity, rigidity, and one-sidedness. The paradigmatic example in this realm is the fiasco of mass media (film, radio, television…), but also, earlier, the enduring textbook and, later, the ephemeral computer-assisted learning. However, the fifth transformation of information and communication, the digital one, in which we are already immersed, brings two more things: the increasingly developed capacity for personalization and the emerging capacity, just beginning with generative AI, for interaction. In an institution that, unlike earlier educational stages, is free from the custodial function, this can and should bring substantial changes in the processes and relationships of learning and teaching, as well as in its organizational and even material architecture.