From: Jon Kruithof
(email)
Mohawk College, Hamilton, ON, Canada media education
Date: 12/08/2009 06:22:08
A prevailing undercurrent is that education, like medicine, is a bitter pill to swallow. I agree with Ryan Cameron, and do think that educators have to be media moguls in some sense. It seems to me that e-learning in general will not change, but the educator behind it will have to adapt. The educator will have to be a scriptwriter, web designer, filmaker, image manager and do it well, and for less. With that critical consumption of media and the ability to discern fact from fiction will become more important. As we move further into the future, and into virtual worlds, identity and who one is will become critical to manage and control.
From Downes’ work here: https://www.downes.ca/post/53334
Ryan Cameron might be this particular person, and dang, I got it right in some ways. Look at the successful MOOCs – they all have personality and tell stories while still cramming the learning in. I’m pretty sure this comment pre-dates Khan Academy (actually, no, it started in 2008, but the comment predates it’s ascent into the popular conscience in 2012). And now with the AI apocalpyse (or more likely, the AI hype curve, followed by mainstream acceptance much like Google Search has become the defacto internet search). I don’t know if we’re at the tipping point of every educator needing to be well-versed in media techniques. But consumers and creators of media need to be aware of AI, and everything they do can be taken from them, analyzed, dissected and filed away for acontextual (not a real word) retrieval.
And the one thing computers still don’t have on people is identity – and that’s where we can really retain our humanity. If you’re worried about AI, right now, it’s got a little (prefabricated) personality. Once it starts to develop a cohesive one, one that doesn’t change based on the varied inputs, then you need to worry. In my most nihilistic, I think it’s perfect that this endgame-capitalism that values a race to a zero sum for everything is essentially building an entire replacement for the human that built it. I still have hope that we can cast off this AI-hype like blockchain and VR and treat it like the Google replacement it’s trying to be.