Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Video is the medium of the age and AI is the technology of the age. Combine the two and you have a potent mixture. I’ve been involved with both, working in a video production company, using video on all sorts of media, from interactive videotape machines, laserdiscs, compact discs, CDi to streaming, even making a feature film called The Killer Tongue (you really donl;t want to know). 

Personalized learning is learning experience designed with each student’s specific needs in mind. In personalized learning, learning components like pace of learning, content, sequence, technology, content, instructional approach, instructional content and other aspects are adjustable according to the needs and learning purpose of each student.

What if you could have an artificial intelligence assistant to take down your notes for you? You could just sit back and give your full attention to the lecture secure in the knowledge that at the end of the lecture, you will have everything that was said organized in notes.In the business world, there are already a few companies that have developed solutions to automate note-taking at meetings.  As far as we could ascertain, there is room for the development of AI solutions that would automate note-taking for students. Such solutions, especially if they could summarize the important aspects of a lecture, would be invaluable to students who could then focus all their attention on the lecture while knowing that notes are being created for them.

The number of robots around the world is increasing rapidly. And it’s said that automation will threatening more than 800m jobs worldwide by 2030. In the UK, it’s claimed robots will replace 3.6m workers by this date, which means one in five British jobs would be performed by an intelligent machine.

Jobs in higher education are no exception – with recent studies showing a rapid advancement in the use of these technologies in universities. The full potential of these disruptive technologies is yet to be discovered, but their impact on teaching and learning is expected to be huge. This means that higher education might be affected by these technologies earlier than other sectors.

Have you noticed more discussion recently about Artificial Intelligence or AI? When first hearing “Artificial Intelligence” is there an image that pops into your mind? Is it something that you can easily define? Perhaps your understanding/reference point is something you’ve seen in the movies. For myself, being an 80s child, my initial frame of reference is Star Wars, I immediately think of R2D2 or C3PO. My mind then wanders to thoughts of “I, Robot” starring Will Smith, in which the robots developed the capacity to think like humans, to feel and to take action on their own.

There has been plenty of hype over artificial intelligence and the internet of things. We believe it may be time to put aside the cynicism that this kind of hype generates and look seriously at how we can take advantage of these emerging technologies to improve the student experience, research and the management of our campuses.