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But have you heard of cognitive technology? It's another way of saying 'computers that are capable of mimicking human characteristics'.
Cognitive technologies can be defined as artificial intelligence tools that perform tasks that were once the sole preserve of humans. Examples of cognitive technologies include computer vision, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, and humanised robotics. There is no cognitive component however. Rather than 'thinking', the machine follows complex code to artificially replicate some of the traits that humans perform naturally. As Donald Clark says, AI has the all the competence without any comprehension.
Teachers might ask: will we be replaced by artificial intelligence? This question will be addressed at the end of this post.
Teachers might ask: will we be replaced by artificial intelligence? This question will be addressed at the end of this post.
Teachers might also ask: how does all this translate to learning, and what are the benefits to students? This is where cognitive courseware comes in. Based on cognitive technology, it is a way of creating learning environments and support systems that mimic human tutors or teaching assistants. Some might call them chatbots, and this would be a reasonable label to describe their current engagement levels. Chatbots currently exhibit limitations, especially when you ask them something they can't access in their databases.
An example of this is the Hewlett Packard online customer support service. When you connect, you are invited to 'chat' online to a virtual agent. The chatbot is very polite and asks you to state your problem. It then asks you a series of further questions to refine its response, before providing you with what - you hope - is the definitive solution to your problem. If it can't (which is 90 per cent of the time in my experience), it suggests you either a) refine and rephrase your question or b) wait for a human operative to come online to try to solve your problem.
Other companies have similar two-tier systems of customer support. They reckon that filtering out low-level problems through a digital assistant will give real human operatives a chance to interact more meaningfully with their customers. In education, the 'customer' is often an online student. This was indeed the case with Jill Watson, a chatbot teaching assistant introduced into a large MOOC by Professor Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech a few years ago (see the video below).
Watson was deployed to filter out and addressed a large percentage of low-level issues students posted each day, while human teaching assistants were able to address the more complex problems the students reported. At first some students thought Watson was human, but it didn't take long to see through the facade when it failed to respond appropriately or couldn't answer their questions.
We are still a long way from seeing the development of chatbots that can exhibit emotional nuances that are convincing (NB: several research teams have been working on emotional modelling for many years). Even before this happens, we will need to see chatbots/cognitive courseware that can actually respond appropriately to the high-level problems students encounter, in both text and voice mode. The application of deep learning algorithms in the design and execution of digital assistants will improve over time, and when it does, we might see chatbots that can fool students into thinking they are human, or at least sustaining a worthwhile conversation. Chatbots might then be able to specialise in specific forms of support such as personal counselling, advice giving, or motivational coaching. At present this is very limited.
In the meantime, programmers will continue to refine cognitive courseware, and the research into deep learning and emotional modelling will advance. Many of the mundane, routine and low-level tasks of the teacher can, and probably will be replaced by cognitive courseware. But in the foreseeable future, and perhaps for a very long time, teachers won't be replaced by computers. It will simply free them up to perform more constructive, cerebral - and human - activities.
Next time on Our Digital Future - 11: AI enhanced learning
Previous posts in this series:
1: Telecommunications
2: Classrooms
3: Music
4: Enhanced vision
5: Robot teachers?
6: Home learning
7: Work
8: Artificial Intelligence
9: Omni-choice learning
Our digital future 10: Cognitive courseware by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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