I was standing in a crowded bus the other day and realised my abilities to describe an image have withered rapidly with the invention of the smart phone camera and screenshot function! While it’s super-efficient to reach for my smart phone with its photo albums, these technologies have almost completely replaced my now diminished abilities to describe a rental property’s floor plan, a scenic view from a friend’s hobby farm, or explain why I was in fact, not to blame for the erroneous purchase of ill-fitting jeans from a website where the UI was poorly designed thus making the various buttons and drop-downs difficult to distinguish when making said jeans purchase in the back of an Uber on the way home after several glasses of shiraz.
Efficiency, the enemy of learning?
As is my wont, it got me thinking about moments when efficiency is the enemy of learning and professional development; or at least initially. We’ve all seen claims of how many hours GenAI can save us on low, mid or even high cognitive load work, and this will supposedly create time in my life for tasks such as returning the ill-fitting jeans for a pair suitably sized to accommodate a trip to an all you can eat hotpot restaurant in Burwood. But is efficiency always relevant?
There are a great many benefits for learners in completing some tasks and exploring some topics slowly, manually, or dare I say it – mindfully? When I was much younger than I am currently, I recall learning some fundamental mathematical skills such as matrix manipulation (not the movies where #1 was great, #3 was awful, and I haven’t seen #4) where we were told up front that in professional practice, matrix manipulation type tasks would be completed by computers. This was in 2005 when YouTube launched, so a good few decades before GenAI (but only a few years after Y2K)! While I can’t manipulate (how Machiavellian!) a matrix anymore, I am certain that further maths, chemistry, physics and engineering learning and doing was helped by me learning how to work with small matrices by hand – literally, with pencil on paper. I’d even suggest my current skills in organising information are probably somewhat attributable to sitting down and manually learning how to draw up a matrix.
Slowing down with students
For those involved in designing and delivering learning, other than advice already shared in our fantastic Education Express resources, one idea that was cooked up by Copilot that I quite like is having students explain concepts to each other before reaching for GenAI. Like putting away my smartphone, making time to slow down and manually and verbally stepping through concepts with other humans could help students explore the basics. This could even help grow creativity with students having to ideate several approaches without GenAI, or at least initially. From this, the students could list a few questions they have about the concepts and then they can whip out their now folding smartphones (a return to the before times!) and ask GenAI for help in the form of an academic who steps in when the GenAI starts to hallucinate (did anyone else think Neo was hallucinating after he took the red pill?).