John Caranci, CTL Lecturer Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
john.caranci@utoronto.ca

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan, a University of Toronto English professor and media theorist, wrote a book titled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, where he predicted the internet and social media. Paraphrasing: the instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. It is a brand-new world, … the global village is as wide as the planet, yet as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in everybody else's business, and in which you have extreme concern with everybody else's business (McLuhan, 1964). This was thirty years before the smart phone and the internet became commonplace, even longer for social media and Artificial Intelligence; all predicted by McLuhan.

Over the last few years there has been a change in electronic information media, the new medium of Artificial Intelligence. McLuhan defined a “medium” as an extension of us through technology where it shapes perception and understanding. So, Artificial Intelligence fits the definition. Other examples are language, novels, newspapers, television, the light bulb, cars and movies. His idea is that a medium, not the content, shapes society and human consciousness. The medium of artificial intelligence, it is said, will shape and reshape us in the classroom.

Throughout history, media turning points are recognised due to their power to influence human thought, consciousness, and everyday life. The Roman Appian Way (a paved road) sustained an empire by speedy communication. The Norse long ship made oceans no longer an impenetrable barrier. The library of Alexandria and its dissemination of information through Moorish Spain brought the wisdom of the ancients into the hands of a dark ages Europe. While the library was long destroyed by then, some of the texts were rediscovered and studied during the renaissance. Later, the invention of a movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg would force literacy on the public. No longer did the clergy have sole proprietary interpretation of the Bible. Every literate person could read the then-readily available Bible. Wireless communication (radio), although invented through the stresses of conflict, became the medium of choice in every living room for news and entertainment; where news of the world was heard as it happened.

What is Artificial Intelligence?
Is Artificial Intelligence a thinking machine? No. There is no indication of anyone working in the field that they can create Artificial General Intelligence. This is the term used for a “human equivalent thinking machine”. Consider these two options. A machine that becomes sentient would learn more than us, faster, where we could be subservient or we would have to put chains on their thinking. Artificial General Intelligence is just “reinventing slavery”.

Communication with an Artificial Intelligence system needs an interface where the system can read and understand a user input inquiry prompt, this is a chatbot. It is designed to imitate human conversation through text or voice commands. The system then delves into its resources. Many Artificial Intelligence systems use a large language model (LLM) as their resources. These systems use large amounts of text that is in files. It uses algorithms to search then respond using human-like natural language text or voice.

The Artificial Intelligence systems are not just retrieval systems like Google. Some are Generative Pre-Trained (GPT) systems. These are trained to use natural language processing to interact with users with a broad understanding of language, context, patterns, and aspects of world knowledge. The output of the Generative AIs can be very creative, especially in the hands of artists. These systems create content, text, video, code, images and other creative output. Generative Artificial Intelligence has built-in algorithms that perform automated tasks. These bots (robots) perform automated tasks that develop the output. There are many repetitive tasks, where some involve decision making and interactions with users.

When an Artificial Intelligence system uses an agent (which is a program that perceives the environment to make decisions and take actions), this happens autonomously, which may lead the Artificial Intelligence system to hallucinate (formulate dissemination of misinformation or flawed analyses) because the agent anthropomorphizes the response. (Hallucinate was The Cambridge Word of the Year for 2023).

This new vocabulary is a further example of Artificial Intelligence being a medium.

Just like the smart phone and the internet now, in the 17th century novels were thought to promote immoral behavior, encourage idleness, and depict unrealistic versions of life. Sound familiar?

Artificial Intelligence’s Effects on the Brain
There are very few neuroscientists studying the effect of Artificial Intelligence on the brain, but they assume effects are to be expected. The population and its interest in any new medium is like looking into a rear-view mirror; we are oblivious to what is coming. Marshall McLuhan predicted the coming of all these electronic media. “The medium is the message” later to be described as “The medium is the massage” since the medium massages the brain. It happened before when bad science was set up, in the 1950s, to describe how television had deleterious effects on children's brains (especially cartoons). These studies were repeated for social media in the 2000s. Each study that comes out shows poorly constructed research. That is not to say that there are no deleterious effects, but you can't start research by starting out looking for the “bad effects” of media. Research needs to have an open mind.

Concerns with Artificial Intelligence
John Holt in his book “How Children Fail” described how we destroy the love of learning in children (which is very strong when they are young) by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards; many times, their curiosity is killed. By the age of ten, many stop asking questions. At that time, they also have decided “I can't do math”; which if you read John Mighton's book “The Myth of Ability”, he describes how that comes about and how to overcome it.

Alyssa, a young woman graduating from psychology at York University, said that the learning comes from going down the rabbit hole to finding your own road to understanding. This idea that Artificial Intelligence could be that rabbit hole, presents an ability for a young person to find their route to their own learning, taking charge of their own learning using Artificial Intelligence as a part of their daily life.

Marshall McLuhan emphasised that the amount of education children are receiving from the electronic media is more important to them than the stratified subjects they receive in the classroom.

Teacher’s Plight
People make predictions of the collapse of the education system. They are protesting educational change. They need to recognize the history of media. Revolution, evolution, or predicting disaster happens when a new media permeates the social consciousness.

Each time a teacher has a new medium to deal with, whether it is social media, smart phones; even television, audio, or film, we have to figure out if there is a way we can integrate these media in a positive way to improve student learning. Teachers never stop learning; unless they get into a focus that the teacher is the centre of that learning. All educators know this is not true. As child psychologists know, children learn more before they are seven years old than they will ever learn in the rest of their life.

McLuhan introduced a tetrad of four questions. What does the medium enhance? What does the medium make obsolete? What does the medium retrieve that had been made obsolescent earlier? What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes? (McLuhan, 1964) These questions should not be taken chronologically, but simultaneously.

Using these questions as a basis for working with Artificial Intelligence in the physics classroom, things are easily noticed.

What does the medium enhance?

• Cognitive dissonance can be overcome with fine tuning of Artificial Intelligence prompts used by students to create visual interpretation of concepts, like when demos are used with teacher’s running comments.
• Reducing cognitive load with multiple and varied explanations that Artificial Intelligence can give the student in a variety of language and vocabulary levels. Teacher training is immersion in a discipline which sometimes limits the explanatory vocabulary teachers use. AI can vary vocabulary, like using dance vocabulary to explain friction.
• Voiced Artificial Intelligence responses can enhance and support text. Audio explanations along with video interpretation of concepts through Generative AI.
• Increases positive attitude of students. With varied content and connections with other disciplines, AI can touch on things the students are interested in within the context of physics concepts.
  

What does the medium make obsolete?

• Teacher-centred pedagogies that emphasise lock-step teaching like Socratic and lecture teaching.
• Cookbook lab activities that have been done repeatedly with the same results.
• Students no longer need to be finished a topic when the teacher is finished teaching that topic, the student can go at their own pace and use AI to help them catch up on older content independently.
• Inadequate lab facilities can be replaced by video and auditory simulation for effective teaching.
• There is less focus on classes being less teacher centred due to the fact that some of the students are otherwise focused on the content.
• Curriculum breadth replaced by depth emphasis and not on completion.
• Rearranging equations by hand and then using a calculator to crunch the numbers.
  

What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

• Storytelling and video storytelling to make a topic dramatic (started in the 1960s and is still done in indigenous communities).
• Artificial Intelligence can produce videos of phenomena accurately, indistinguishable from reality.
• Video and film were used in the 1950s and 1960s to enhance the concepts, like this clip.
• Hands-on activities.
  

What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

• Obviously, the flipped classroom where the student is the centre of learning, this would mean the curriculum would be less restrictive.
• Makes engagement pedagogies a central focus of teaching.
• More emphasis on teacher development.
• More emphasis on parent integration.
• Instead of doing group work in a group, students can do group work independently, partnered with Artificial Intelligence

Think of yourself as a ninety-something-year-old in the future, what would you then think about what is happening now? Thinking ahead might be difficult, so reverse it. What was education in the past?

High schools had classes where you could opt out. Some schools had student smoking rooms. Senior classes were required to have independent study; material not taught in class but still assessed. Some classes had no summative final. There were no computers, no smart phones, calculators were just coming into use. Mathematics classes had symbolic logic, geometric proofs, topology, integral calculus, and dimensional analysis.

Weaving Artificial Intelligence into the physics program, do not outlaw its use because it just makes it something that people want to use more; and nearly every student uses it regularly already. If the physics teacher is a master of Artificial Intelligence, its use becomes obvious. Remember that Artificial Intelligence may be a way of releasing the creativity of students, increasing their learning.

For example, when a physics lab started using data retrieval systems like force probes and motion trackers, the programs and algorithms drew the graphs for the students. Students can analyze the physics in the graphs, not take all their time creating the graphs in the first place. Creating the graphs may be a good skill for them to have and to be able to understand how the graph is created, but the time to create the graph is rarely the physics.

Artificial Intelligence cannot replace a teacher that uses engagement pedagogy. In the sense, using Peer Instruction, Just in Time Teaching, whiteboards, the first steps process, or any of the other engagement pedagogies, you realize that the process of learning is in the hands of the teacher. Metaphorically speaking; a composer creates a piece of music, handing it to a conductor or musician who will apply a certain emotional context. So, the actual algorithm to write the musical code for each instrument is not a necessary condition of understanding how the piece of music is heard. The way the musician plays makes it emotional. The educational context is the content of the physics topic, which is delivered to the student using a specific pedagogy.

The last word from Marshall McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

References

• McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. 1964
• Holt, J. (1964). How Children Fail. Pitman
• Mighton, John. (2003) The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child. Toronto: Anansi Press

Tags: History, Pedagogy, Technology