Benjamin Riley is not excited about the announced partnership between ISTE+ACSD and Big Tech.
It is completely unsurprising, though no less infuriating, that ISTE+ACSD continues to double-down on its leading role as shill for Big Tech. I’m sure it’s nice to unlock Google’s funding, but what so profit an allegedly nonprofit education organization if it shall loseth its soul? All the while doing damage to teacher effectiveness and student learning in the process.
But that of course presumes there’s any soul at ISTE that’s left to be lost, which seems unlikely. Richard Culatta, who worked in the Obama Administration and is someone I once respected, seems blissfully unaware that ‘AI literacy’—a stupid and largely incoherent term, but surely one that if it has any meaning suggests a modicum of critical thinking—might result in teachers resisting these tools of cognitive automation. To be sure, ISTE says resistance is futile, because “the future” will demand “AI readiness.” I’d credit their clairvoyance just a tad more if ISTE had not claimed, as recently as just a few years ago, that “the future” would also demand that everyone learn to code.
Oops!
If we can bracket the odiousness of ISTE’s grift, I admit I’m fascinated to see the major Big Tech companies competing so vigorously to control “the education market.” OpenAI is giving away their premium model to teachers (until they won’t), and now Google is doing whatever this is. Of course, Google is also the company that once ran ads suggesting children should use AI to outsource the drafting of their letters to their heroes, so I confess I’m just a tad skeptical of their commitment to “student agency” and “critical thinking” nowadays. As a company, they’ve tried to erode the former, and shown little collective capacity for the latter.
I also must briefly note the contradictory, and fundamentally very stupid, paradox sitting at the center of the AI hype right now. On the one hand, we are told AI models are on the the verge of ravaging the entire global economy and will soon destroy the need for knowledge work of any sort. That’s bullshit of course, but if it were true, then why in the world would teachers need any training to understand how to “use AI responsibly”? For that matter, why would we even need teachers at all, if AI will obviate the need for any human thought expended toward any productive enterprise? The robots will do all our work for us, as we become robots ourselves.