Provocations of Technology and Pedagogical Imagination:

Automation, Chatbots, and the Philosophy of Education

Martin Laba

Simon Fraser University, Canada

Abstract

The advance of technology has always been a provocation for profound social transformation. The history
of the digital turn in media and communication for example, ushered in an epoch of radical social change,
and especially so in education. Indeed, technological elaborations have challenged and continue to test
the foundations of educational philosophies and practices. The digital turn in culture and communication
introduced and has sustained debates around the affordances of technology and the urgencies and
directions of educational futures. As technological advance continually disrupts and contests established
norms and practices of education, how do we reinvent our pedagogies? When such advance introduces
new and expansive technical capacities in educational contexts and offers greater levels of autonomy and
agency for students, how do educators respond with creativity and imagination to adapt to and revise the
very concepts of teaching and learning? In more specific terms, with OpenAI’s introduction and
development of ChatGPT, do educators focus on how to “neutralize” the technology to mitigate a
postulated unrestrained increase in academic dishonesty; or rather do educators focus on and reimagine
pedagogical design and practice, philosophy and strategy, to reconceptualize course design, assessment
measures and methods, elaborate experiential learning, understand learning spaces well beyond the
classroom and the institution, and more. Pronouncements on the impacts of open access AI in education
extend the range from declarations that the college essay is “dead”, to invocations of long-established
critical analyses and artistic representations of technology’s displacement of humans by machines as the
distinctions between carbon and silicon intelligences become increasingly ambiguous, to rather more
hopeful perspectives on the enabling possibilities of AI to expand, elaborate, and enrich teaching and
learning. This paper offers a critical encounter with the ongoing provocations of automation in education
and with the need for pedagogical imagination and practices that anticipate the substance, scope, and
velocity of technological change in education.

Keywords: technology, pedagogical creativity, ChatGPT, automation

Disruption
Technological advance has always been a critical disruptor in education and educational technologies
have been contested for centuries. Critics have argued divergent perspectives on the determining nature
and power of technology versus the social construction of technology, or technological determinism
versus technological impact determined in the use of technology. One perspective proceeds from a view
of technology as a dominant power of social, economic and political determination, and the other
understands technology as rather open and malleable, and ultimately as an enabling tool or affordance of
use. Technological determinism suggests that technological development and design not only drive but
also fix the avenues of individual and societal application and accommodation. Arguments to the contrary
deny such rigidly determined outcomes, a “single destiny” in Andrew Feenberg’s terms, (Feenberg,
2001)[1] and instead find agency in choice, deep engagement, interpretation, and use in our relationship
with technology, especially in the educational realm.

Plato’s oft cited denunciation of the technology of writing as pre-empting the dialogic nature of teaching
and learning began a centuries old preoccupation with the technologizing or mechanizing of education.
Plato posited through Socrates in Phaedrus (Plato, 2005)[2] that the written word was static, immutable,
silent, incapable of autonomous intelligence and a hindrance to the dialogic foundations of teaching and
learning. (Feenberg, 2001) Plato’s vigorous condemnation of educational technology is as Feenberg
argued, “deeply flawed”, blind to the possibilities that writing can instigate and sustain dialogue between
teacher and student. Of course, and in real world contemporary terms, technologies of automation that
obstruct or shut down open dialogue, foreclose intellectual exchange, or privilege one dominant point of
view in the interests of a political ideology or neoliberal projects of educational cost-cutting efficiencies,
are thoroughly undemocratic.

Plato’s recognition of the dialogic imperative of education and concerns with the integrity of education
under the influence of technology, specifically writing, are resonant in contemporary anxieties and critical
concerns around comprehensive automation in education, and AI especially. Technology remains a
provocation for social change in the broadest view, and it resides in the centre of educational
transformations including how we understand and assert our pedagogical values and practices.

A Statement on Educational Philosophy

There is a sidebar commentary necessary here to identify the considerable merits of the approaches of
educational philosophy and the politics of education. It is never adequate to simply investigate how
technology works because how technology works is deeply embedded in broader political dimensions of
education in society. There are two major points of consideration in terms of our approach to and analysis
of emergent educational technologies, and especially AI. First, a philosophy of education is foundational
to all studies in education and the role and politics of education in society constitute the framework within
which studies in education and technology have actual consequence in terms of issues ranging from
pedagogical practice to administrative governance. Second, there is no single methodological authority in
academic inquiry in education, no single method that has an exclusive franchise on education
scholarship, no immutable standard to which all studies in education must comply. We require a wide-
ranging and multidisciplinary discourse to grasp and forge educational futures, and particularly in terms of
the quality, the magnitude and the velocity of technological change. Studies in education overall, should
be expansive, inclusive, and unbiased, and as much about ideas and philosophy as about empirical data
method and analysis. Clearly some of the most significant, prescient, and influential work in the
innovation and advancement of education have been in the areas of philosophy, applied philosophy and
politics of education, and such works have been provocative, epochal, and discipline-transforming. This is
not a critique of empiricism but rather an inoculation against constrained views of education inquiry that
privilege only empirical method and foreclose on some of the most substantive and consequential thought
on education and pedagogy across centuries.

Techno-Anxiety and Techno-Optimism—Experiences from the Digital Turn

It is important to situate the current concerns over AI technologies in the educational context in the
broader and rather recent history of the digital turn in education. I have argued elsewhere that this digital
turn in technology and education disrupted pedagogical norms and practices as well as the assumptions,
substance, and direction of curricular design and administrative policy, to the extent that the very purpose
and future direction of the university became the subject of debate. (Laba, 2015; 2018)[3] There were
major concerns over what educators and educational administrators often regarded as the promiscuous
use of digital devices in the classroom by students, a vision of a technological free-for-all among students
who were far more inclined to attend to their digital device distractions than to the lesson content. These
were students for whom the medieval-based and authoritarian model of unidirectional lecture delivery and
the transactional relationship with assessment became less relevant and certainly less productive in
terms of the quality of and knowledge gained in their educational experiences. Technological advance
outpaced pedagogical change and innovation, as usual. Professors were often inclined to issue
technology prohibitions in classrooms, a deeply out-of-touch response to the comprehensive and forceful
social and cultural transformations instigated and sustained by technological advance.

The introduction and influence of educational technology has also been the subject of techno-utopian
discourses. Educational reform was envisioned in the late 1990s in terms of then new developments in
virtualized education. Indeed, this was an almost evangelical faith in technology and an advocacy for
universities around the globe to capture the entrepreneurial competitive edge in expanding and dynamic
information/knowledge economies. Online education and concepts such as “telelearning” were seen by
proponents as ameliorative, future-facing strategies that embraced the limitless potential of virtual
teaching, learning, curriculum design, and administration—an integration of education and industry that
spared educational institutions from the burdens of budgetary constraint, oversubscribed courses,
crowded classrooms as they met neoliberal managerial demands for accountability and cost-
effectiveness. Opposing perspectives offered compelling critiques of digitization and corporatization of the
university; in particular, how education was becoming both automated and commodified with educational
technology leading the way for strategies of teaching-at-scale and other cost-cutting measures.

The pandemic of course, issued its own technological contestations. Technology wasn’t so much a
solution than a necessity and courses that were designed for conventional face-to-face delivery were
often awkwardly retrofitted for remote delivery under circumstances of pandemic-driven duress and
emergency.

AI and Its Discontents

The accelerated progress of Open AI’s ChatGPT has introduced substantial anxiety among educators,
curriculum developers, academic administrators, and governments setting education policy around AI
advances, applications, and both educational and societal implications. Such anxiety is not new, and
indeed, the ascendancy and imagined supremacy of artificial intelligence has been resonant in the
popular imagination—robots with agency in popular fiction and literature. AI is met with both fear and
excitement, panic and optimism, and new and emerging AI-powered chatbots in educational contexts
demonstrate both responses.

Stephen Marche argues that the transformation of academia and its centuries-old conventions in the
wake of AI is profound and irrefutable. He notes that the undergraduate essay, “the center of humanistic
pedagogy for generations” is fundamentally disrupted with the introduction of ChatGPT. (March, 2022)[4]
If humanities traditions of academic assessment “judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their
essays” and award Ph.D.s on the basis of the dissertation, how do we proceed when both can be
automated?

Clearly, academic integrity and rigour have been the most prominent themes in critical analyses of
ChatGPT and other and emerging AI. The detection of AI-generated writing is a fraught endeavour—from
proposed programmed watermarks to approaches to “neutralize” the technology (FCTL, 2023)[5], the
adversarial strategy is “an endless game of whack-a-mole”, as Kevin Roose has termed it. (Roose,
2023)[6] Proposed measures and institutional policies are often blunt instruments applied across the
board to discourage the small minority of students who are inclined to engage in academic dishonesty.
Such adversarial approaches have included the hyper-customization of writing assignments, the
employment of numerous, and smaller assignments and assessments, increasing the frequency of in-
class writing, techniques to become savvy detectors of AI software characteristics and patterns, use the
AI platform to answer an assignment thereby creating a model of for comparison to student submissions,
employ detection software, and the list continues.

Still, amidst the abundance of adversarial strategies, prohibitions and the blocking of ChatGPT with the
rationale of managing concerns on the negative impacts of the technology on standards of academic
honesty and accuracy of content—a “cheating tool” as one U.S. public school administrator referred to
ChatGPT—are numerous and more measured responses. As with each epochal surge of technological
advance in media and communication, imagination, invention, and application are decisive determinants
and definers of technological purpose and direction. Key in all educational endeavours under the
influence of AI is, as always, literacies—media, information/digital and AI. AI literacy is motivated in the
first order, by the broader principles, values, and practices of educating for the sustenance of democracy.
As Wong and Kindarji note, LLMs (Large Language Models) and other AI platforms can clearly disrupt
legitimate and authoritative sources and information as well as facilitate disinformation and reinforce,
even perpetuate spurious sources. (Wong and Kindarji, 2003)[7] In this context, the admonition of Open
AI CEO Sam Altman is instructive: “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to
create a misleading impression of greatness…we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness”.
(Altman, 2022)[8]
Conclusion
ChatGPT’s capacities are enormously promising if applied with pedagogical imagination; that is, when
well defined and strategic educational aspirations and applications are asserted: the teaching of ethics
and research integrity; a revitalization and elaboration of experiential learning; participatory approaches
and the cocreation of knowledge; instruction toward information/digital literacy; the expansion of new and
emerging multi-modal representations of knowledge; the critical engagement and assessment of AI itself;
the crafting of new and expansive learning environments; the reconceptualization of course design and
assessment measures and methods; and more.

The provocations of technology demand not a project in the neutralization of technology, surely a
defensive posture arising from a long established, compelling and very human discomfort with the
ambiguities between carbon and silicon forms of intelligence. (Kingwell, 2023)[9] Instead, educators might
focus on and reimagine pedagogical philosophy, design and practice, understand learning spaces to be
well beyond the classroom, invoke the principles of democratic education to support critical independent
thinking and instigate social change, to enable students to see their own agency as an educational goal
and achievement. AI is not an end, it is a means, and education is a site of constant renewal, particularly
in the velocities and complexities of technological change.

References
[1] Feenberg, Andrew. “Wither Educational Technology,” International Journal of Technology and Design
Education, 11, 93-91, 2001.
[2] Plato. Phaedrus. London: Penguin, 2005.
[3] Laba, Martin. “Digital Disruptions: Media, Communication, and New Learning Environments”, Future of
Education Proceedings (Florence: Libreria Universitaria), 2015; Also “The Eye of the Storm: Educational
Resets for a Jobless Society”, Future of Education Proceedings (Florence: Libreria Universitaria), 2018.
[4] Marche, Stephen. “The College Essay Is Dead”, The Atlantic, April 6, 2022. Accessed on February 10,
2023 at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-
essays/672371/
[5] FCTL. “Artificial Intelligence Writing”, Faculty Center, University of Central Florida, 2023. Accessed on
April 8, 2023 at https://fctl.ucf.edu/teaching-resources/promoting-academic-integrity/artificial-intelligence-
writing/
[6] Roose, Kevin. “Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It”, New York Times. Accessed on April 7,
2023 at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/chatgpt-schools-teachers.html
[7] `Wong, Wendy H. and Valérie Kindarji. “Digital literacy will be key in a world transformed by AI”, The
Globe and Mail, March 11, 2023. Accessed on March 11, 2023 at
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-digital-literacy-will-be-key-in-a-world-transformed-by-ai/
[8] Altman, Sam. Twitter, December 10, 2022. Accessed on April 8, 2023 at
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1601731295792414720?lang=en
[9] Kingwell, Mark. “Why are we so afraid of being displaced by machines? It’s only human nature,” The
Globe and Mail, February 18, 2023. Accessed February 18, 2023 at
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-being-displaced-by-machines-
its-only-human/