Keynote Speakers

Sarah Newman. Harvard University (USA)

Keynote: Facing this Moment Critically & Creatively: AI Pitfalls & Opportunities for Educators

Many educators are intimidated and overwhelmed by the rapid availability and uptake of AI tools like ChatGPT. How do these tools change the value of skills we've held dear to learning — and expression — such as writing? How do they exacerbate inequities between learners? What do they mean for the role of educators? And what can, and should, we do right now?
New technologies have always changed how we learn, and how we teach. As an educator and AI researcher who leads the AI Pedagogy Project, I will offer recommendations (and some warnings) about how to best face this moment. We need to be both critical and creative. We need to separate AI hype from reality. As overwhelming as it feels, the introduction of these AI technologies offer a chance to revisit and revise what hasn't been working in education, while protecting what is most important. Centered on the value of interdisciplinarity, informed by technology ethics, and leveraging the opportunity that this indeed is, this talk will offer pitfalls to avoid, and concrete recommendations that educators can apply immediately.

Newman

About Sarah Newman

Sarah Newman is Director of Art & Education at metaLAB at Harvard University, a project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Her work explores the social, ethical, and pedagogical dimensions of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies through research, art, and teaching. Newman leads the AI Pedagogy Project, a resource to provide educators materials for responsible engagement with AI technologies. Newman’s research focuses on data transparency. She co-founded and serves as Research Lead of the Data Nutrition Project, which aims to mitigate bias in data-driven systems through tools and educational practices. Newman holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is also an installation artist who has exhibited work in New York, Miami, Berlin, London, and Rome, and has attended artist residencies in Germany, Italy, and Sweden. Previous honors include: AI Grant, Harvard Assembly Fellow, Harvard Berkman Klein Fellow, a Rockefeller AI Resident, Artist-in-Residence at Northeastern School of Law, and a grantee of the Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab, a grantee of the National Endowment of the Arts, and winner of the 2022 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity.



Mike Sharples. The Open University (UK)

Sharples

Keynote: Social Generative AI: A Future for International Education

Development of Generative Artificial Intelligence is following the same path as the World Wide Web: research, breakthrough, integration into workplace tools, development of apps. For the Web, the next major development was social media and services. I suggest we will soon see the emergence of “Social Generative AI” – AI systems interacting with humans and with other AI tools in complex social networks. Social Generative AI will have profound implications. In education it will offer new roles for AI as a conversational partner and collaborator; it will break down language barriers and connect people across cultures. However, Social Generative AI may also erode trust in information and create networks of interacting machines beyond human control. In my talk, I will propose we develop social AI for education that is not only effective and ethical but also caring and founded on good pedagogy. The result could be a future for international education that merges human empathy and experience with social artificial intelligence.

About Mike Sharples

Mike Sharples is Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK. He gained a PhD from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh on Cognition, Computers and Creative Writing. His expertise involves human-centred design and evaluation of new technologies and environments for learning. He provides consultancy for institutions worldwide including UNESCO, UNICEF, universities and companies. As Academic Lead for FutureLearn.com he led pedagogy-informed design of the open learning platform. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. He is author of over 300 published papers in the areas of educational technology, learning sciences, science education, human-centred design of personal technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. His recent books are Practical Pedagogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn and Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, both published by Routledge, and An Introduction to Narrative Generators, published by Oxford University Press.