Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.
The Telescope is the fourth and final seminar in Educational Optics:
The Telescope: Teaching in the Age of AI — Seeing What Matters
This time I wanted to return to my own teaching and to some of the experiments with AI that I have been doing over the last few years. After all, I am in a context where people design things with AI, and it was time to talk about what I do with it beyond my reflections… almost all the experiments I talked about have already appeared here as a record of my teaching, and some are now also part of the questions we are working on in AILearn.
While preparing the seminar and putting together things that had emerged at different times and for different reasons, I realised something I had not formulated in this way before. Some of them exploit the same capacity of conversational AI: AI can ask questions, not only answer them.
The AI Helper and the Interviewer are probably the two clearest examples. They are not versions of the same idea and, in fact, they respond to very different pedagogical problems. In one, the questions are intended to support the student in going back over an experience and reflecting on it; in the other, the questions are intended to make other evidence available that I can use for my judgement as a teacher. The technological capacity may be the same, but the pedagogical meaning it acquires depends on where we put it, what for, for whom, and what we do with what emerges from that conversation.
And that is where the telescope, the TELESCOPES, come in. When AI enters the story of the seminar, I switch from images from traditional telescopes to those from the James Webb. Webb observes in infrared: it does not simply magnify what our eyes can already see, but makes other phenomena observable. I was interested in thinking about whether these conversations could do something similar, offering us other traces of learning activity.
Of course, as happened with the prism, the lens and the mirror, in the end I also had to become suspicious of the telescope. Instruments make some things visible and not others and, moreover, they can modify what we are trying to observe. I finished with an image of NGC 1672 constructed by combining observations from Chandra, Hubble and James Webb. An extraordinarily rich image, made possible by different instruments that allow us to see different things.
But the image is not the galaxy.
A conversation is not learning either. It is another trace, another possibility for looking. And perhaps one of the questions this final seminar leaves me with is precisely what we can do pedagogically with these new conversational capacities without confusing what our instruments allow us to see with what we are trying to understand.
And with this, Educational Optics comes to an end. Special thanks to Iain Maclaren for lending me some of his images to tell this story, and to NASA and the James Webb, Hubble and Chandra teams for the others.
Here is the recording, in case you are curious. As you know, comments are very welcome.