Opening the Dialogue: How AI is Shaping the Future of Education

Will AI serve as a catalyst for innovation, or will it widen the gap between effective learning and mere efficiency? AI’s impact on education is profound and multifaceted, leaving us to ponder whether it will be our guiding light into the future or a dark tunnel with unforeseen consequences.

Because of this, universities need to respond not only by integrating AI into their policies and curricula, but also by thinking about how knowledge is delivered. This brings us to another question: of whether the way we teach is right for the 21st century. The discussion about teaching methods has been going on for a while, even before AI in the Czech context. One of the arguments related to instruction is that students are not really learning and gaining knowledge, but rather learning to decode or guess the “teacher’s password” and say the right answer to pass an exam and get credit without proper understanding.

Prof. Mazur has said in one of his speeches that lectures are problematic for many reasons, but the main flaw is that the traditional “lecture method is a process whereby the lecturer’s notes are transferred to the students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either.” These shortcomings are exacerbated by the democratization in the use of AI because students might rely on AI-generated summaries rather than engaging with the material directly. However, with proper and sensitive use, AI could bridge these weaknesses and make the learning process more effective and attractive for both students and instructors.

This post seeks not to provide definitive answers, but is intended to spark a conversation about AI’s role in education.

Mastering AI: Literacy and the Art of Prompting

AI literacy refers to a set of skills that allow individuals to effectively and responsibly use artificial intelligence tools (Long & Magerko, 2020). In an era where AI is becoming increasingly embedded in educational processes, understanding these tools goes beyond mere usage. It involves knowing how AI systems make decisions, recognizing their limitations, and being aware of the ethical implications of their use.

The problem we face today is that many people using AI tools are not fully knowledgeable about how to use them effectively and responsibly. In other words, they are not aware of the limitations, capabilities, and processes that go on under the hood of these tools. Inadequate AI literacy among students and instructors can lead to ethical problems related to unintentional plagiarism, low-quality outputs, and even intentional academic misconduct.

One of the most critical aspects of AI literacy is mastering the art of creating prompts. This involves designing inputs or “prompts” that guide AI systems to produce useful and accurate outputs. In an educational setting, creating appropriate prompts can determine whether an AI tool enhances learning or simply generates generic and unhelpful responses. In other words, this is very well captured by the concept garbage in-garbage out. Working properly with AI should not be based on trial and error but rather on thoughtful steps and a clear idea of the desired outcome.

Mastering prompt creation and AI literacy is not without its challenges. It requires a clear understanding of both one’s subject matter and how AI systems process information. This is where universities should take a proactive approach. The trend is to actively promote the use of AI by students and instructors, but few, if any, universities have yet incorporated teaching AI literacy into their curricula.Related to this is the dilemma for universities of who will train the trainers (instructors) and how to deal with the generational skills gap, where students are sometimes several steps ahead of their instructors in terms of using AI tools.

AI in Education: Guiding Light or Dark Tunnel?

AI holds immense potential for enhancing the educational experience, offering personalized learning capabilities and increased efficiency in various tasks. It also promotes greater accessibility through tools that accommodate diverse learning needs, such as language translation, adaptive learning for varied paces, and assistive technologies for students with disabilities. However, this potential comes with risks—AI use could exacerbate inequalities, lead to over-reliance on the tools, and diminish the depth of human learning if not carefully managed.

When leveraged thoughtfully, AI can be a powerful tool for good. It can provide tailored educational experiences, broaden equitable access to knowledge and tools, and potentially help educators focus on more creative and meaningful aspects of teaching. By enhancing personalization and efficiency, AI can support students in reaching their full potential. For instance, integrating AI assistants into research databases like Scopus or Web of Science allows students and educators to navigate complex research landscapes more effectively, identify relevant studies, and streamline literature reviews, making high-quality research more accessible to a broader audience. Additionally, using AI tools has the potential to help reduce the inequality and discrimination faced by non-native English-speaking students and instructors in an English-dominated scholarly publishing environment. Banning the use of AI tools may do more harm than good (in fact, this would likely be futile) and a more realistic course should involve the creation of clear institutional strategies and guidelines for the use of AI, both in and out of academia.

There is admittedly a dark side to AI. If over-relied upon, it can, among other things, contribute to a lack of critical thinking, foster dependency, and perpetuate biases inherent in the algorithms. Without careful oversight, AI could lead to a future where education becomes more about surface learning than about truly understanding and engaging with educational material. Moreover, AI is entering a battlefield for information, media, and digital literacies for our students that has not yet been won yet.

The future of AI in education depends on the choices we make today. Educators and institutions must take an active role in shaping how AI is integrated into learning environments. This includes developing clear ethical guidelines, promoting AI literacy (and other literacies), and ensuring that AI tools are used to complement, rather than replace, traditional educational methods. Institutions must also determine who is responsible for specific steps in the use of AI tools for use in the academic context.

As we stand at this crossroads, it’s up to us to decide whether AI will be our guiding light or the beginning of a dark tunnel in education. By approaching AI with caution, curiosity, and a commitment to ethical practices, we can ensure that it enhances, rather than diminishes, the educational experience.

Will AI lead us to a brighter educational future, or will it cast shadows that are difficult to escape? The answer lies in our hands.

Resources:

Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2020). What is AI literacy? Competencies and design considerations. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376727

“Open notebook” science is a practice in which research scientists record their work online and make it publicly available while conducting research in near-real time. Such research is thus completely open to the public and includes all its aspects such as raw data and any associated material. The approach was described by Bradley (2007), the first to use the term, as “no insider information”. Open notebook science makes the research process transparent and provides unsuccessful, not very significant, or unpublished outcomes (sometimes called “dark data”) to anyone interested (Goetz 2007).

Let’s take a look at the primary advantages of this practice, according to the literature. According to Schapira, Harding and Consortium (2019, p. 3), open lab notebooks can save time, resources, and knowledge. Making the information accessible quickly means that other researchers will be able to build upon the open results, making it possible for others to avoid spending time and resources on redundant experiments (Powell 2016). Open lab notebooks should include detailed protocols to achieve experimental replicability. The necessity of more transparent, replicable experiments has been discussed recently (for example, by Nature 2016 and Wallach et al. 2018). Negative data from unpublished research might additionally provide important insights (Mlinarić et al. 2017; Nimpf and Keays 2020). Open lab notebooks can also give experts a space for discussion, to (for example) spot discrepancies in an experiment and so on.

Early career researchers can use their notebooks to connect with peers and experts in the field. One can also add a link to one’s research notebook in an academic CV when applying to a position in order to showcase technical skills (Schapira, Harding and Consortium 2019).

Possible drawbacks of open notebooks (Harding and Consortium 2019, Sanderson 2008, Schapira 2018, Zirnask 2014):

• Possible data theft (being “scooped”): Risk can be mitigated by using repositories such as Zenodo, which assign a citable DOI (or other citable record) to a notebook.
• Difficulty publishing open notebook results in traditional peer-reviewed journals.
• Influencing other research projects before the research documented in the open notebook is complete and/or well-analysed (this is why there are experimental collaborations without open notebook use with strict rules to avoid data leakage and issues with influencing results).
• “Data deluge”: flooding the information space with a large amount of non-peer-reviewed material.
• Can be difficult without a smooth process: maintaining an open notebook should be executed effectively to avoid wasting too much time (as with a regular lab notebook).

What are the necessary characteristics of open notebooks? Harding (2019, p. 2) notes she designed her notebook “to be discoverable, accessible, clear, and detailed in its presentation, and to permit dialogue between readers and me, and to pave the way for collaborations.”

Examples of platforms for open notebooks:

Picking the right open notebook platform can be daunting. Every scientific field has a different environment with different data collection requirements and different data types (e.g., code, images, equations, value). Several open notebook options are listed below; you may wish to ask your mentor if they have a preference for a particular tool. One could additionally create a blog for an open notebook.

• https://openlabnotebooks.org/

To create an open notebook, contact the coordinator. Data are uploaded and stored on zenodo.org (maintained by CERN as a part of the OpenAIRE initiative). You can also link zenodo files to your ORCID profile.

• https://github.com/

Used by many open sourced software developers, among others. A code repository that allows parallel code editing.

• https://openwetware.org/

Join via a web form. Designated for biology and biological engineering.

• https://jupyter.org/

Free software, open standards, and web services for interactive computing across all programming languages.

Various interfaces (lab book, notebook, hub, Voilá) for sharing outputs.

Use https://nbviewer.org/ to make a jupyter notebook publicly shareable.

• https://open-neuroscience.com/

Open database for neuroscience projects.

If your research, for any reason, cannot be made public, another option for organisation and cooperating/sharing with other researchers or within teams, or managing protocols is the use of electronic laboratory notebooks. There are many options to choose from such as: https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/, https://www.labarchives.com/, https://www.benchling.com/, and https://www.elabftw.net/ (among others).

Openly published protocols: If you do not wish to share your process but would like to publish and share a protocol which you have designed, a tool like https://www.protocols.io can be considered. After publishing a protocol on protocols.io you obtain a digital object identifier (DOI). A DOI can be used in a manuscript so that it can, if the article is approved for publication in a scientific journal, be published (automatically, if a DOI is used upon article submission) at a later date.

Resources:

Bradley, Jean-Claude. (2007). Open notebook science using blogs and wikis. Nature Precedings. https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2007.39.1

Goetz, Thomas. (2007). Freeing the dark data of failed scientific experiments. Wired, 15(10). Available from: https://www.wired.com/2007/09/st-essay-3/ 

Harding, Rachel J. (2019) Open notebook science can maximize impact for rare disease projects. PLoS Biol, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000120

Mliarić, Ana, Horvat, Martina. & Šupak Smolčić, Vesna. (2017). Dealing with the positive publication bias: Why you should really publish your negative results. Biochem Med, 27(3). https://doi.org/10.11613/BM.2017.030201

Nature. (2016). Reality check on reproducibility. Nature, 533(7604), 437-437. https://doi.org/10.1038/533437a

Nimpf, Simon & Keays David A. (2020). Why (and how) we should publish negative data. EMBO Rep., 21(1). https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201949775

Powell, Kendall. (2016). Does it take too long to publish research? Nature, 530, 148-151. https://doi.org/10.1038/530148a

Sanderson, Katherine. (2008). Data on display. Nature, 455(18), 273. https://doi.org/10.1038/455273a

Schapira, Matthieu. (2018). Open lab notebooks to increase impact and accelerate discovery . Springer Nature. Available at: https://researchdata.springernature.com/posts/29655-open-lab-notebooks-to-increase-impact-and-accelerate-discovery

Schapira, Matthieu & Rachel J Harding. (2019). Open laboratory notebooks: good for science, good for society, good for scientists. F1000Res, 8(87). https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17710.2

Wallach, Joshua D, Boyack, Kevin W. & John P. A. Ioannidis. (2018) Reproducible research practices, transparency, and open access data in the biomedical literature, 2015-2017. PLoS Biology, 16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2006930

Zirnask, Mart. (2014). Are open notebooks the future of science? UT Blog. Available at: https://blog.ut.ee/are-open-notebooks-the-future-of-science/

For as long as I can remember, I have somehow always known about the opportunity to do a Fulbright Scholarship in the US. Probably, I learned about Fulbright from the promotional materials provided by the University of Hradec Králové (UHK) International Office at the Philosophical Faculty. Going to study or conduct research in the US has always seemed like a big challenge to me, both in terms of my language proficiency and my academic preparedness.

I cannot say, however, that I would apply for a Fulbright under any circumstances, or just to go to the US. Even though this would make sense for me since my research is focused, among other things, on American philosophical movements such as pragmatism and naturalism. Relevant ongoing research projects and various sources for my work are thus naturally there.

I decided to apply for a specifically Czech Fulbright grant, the Masaryk-Fulbright scholarship, to work on my doctoral dissertation (I am now in the fifth year of my doctoral studies), with a topic that revolves around the concept of naturalism and historical/evolutionary explanation. “The time was right in my career” is what I listed in my application as the main reason for my submitting it. In 2017, Professor Paul A. Roth from the University of California-Santa Cruz taught a Philosophy of History course for one term at UHK (during the course, we discussed a manuscript he later published, The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation), and it was a personally and philosophically transformative experience for me.

So I quickly realized that having the opportunity to meet up regularly with Professor Roth again in person (and, of course, also having the much-needed time for research and writing thanks to the Fulbright scholarship), would be the best possible impulse for finishing my PhD thesis. From this perspective, my case is specific because I knew Professor Roth in advance, and I knew that he would be happy to write the invitation letter for me (this proved to be an advantage because the letter had to be re-written several times, always with a short turnaround time).

I was at a stage in my career when I also knew that starting in January 2023, I would no longer receive a PhD stipend and that I would have to find other resources to finish my studies. For these reasons, I wrote various research proposal sketches and refined my CV throughout 2022. In August 2022, I returned from an Erasmus+ traineeship at the Institute Vienna Circle in Austria, and I slowly started filling out an online application for the Fulbright-Masaryk stipend (deadline: November).

This period of time (three months) was enough for me because I already had a rough-and-ready research proposal which, moreover, substantially mirrored the topic of my PhD thesis. I appreciated that I had complete freedom to apply with a subject in which I was already interested as a PhD student and a pre-doctoral researcher. For the Fulbright-Masaryk scholarship, applicants must also prove that they are “not only outstanding experts in their scientific field but also active in the civic or public life of their institutions or communities, just like Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.” I was pretty confident that I met these criteria, so after contacting the Fulbright Commission to hear their opinion, I simply added a “Public and Community Service Statement” to my CV emphasizing and putting into context my various past and present activities. Beyond writing the research project itself and receiving the invitation letter from the US, the most time-consuming part of preparing the proposal was for me to put together three additional recommendation letters on my behalf from colleagues and/or former instructors.

At the end of January, the Fulbright Commission informed me that I had passed the first two rounds of the selection process (meeting the formal requirements plus an anonymous review of my project by two experts in my field) and that I was invited to an in-person interview in February. The interview was relatively short (about fifteen minutes), and the committee consisted of Fulbright scholars from the US currently staying in the Czech Republic and others.

The interview was not, I felt, primarily concerned with my research proposal or my academic, scientific, or teaching achievements. It was about me as a person, citizen, and cultural ambassador, so the commission was primarily interested in my attitudes, visions, and future professional plans. Moreover, they were very interested in my practical plans related to moving to the US with my whole family and related to my research (e.g., if I had already checked the cost of living at my host institution). I recall four questions that were explicitly posed to me in this regard:

1. Why the US? Why is it necessary to conduct your research in the US?
2. Why did you choose this particular departure date for your research stay?
3. What would you do if your mentor was ill or absent?
4. What difficulties do you think you might experience in the US?

I had to wait until March to learn I had been awarded a Fulbright-Masaryk scholarship. I must say that I am delighted with how the Czech Fulbright Commission handles things and communicate; there are several handbooks and guidelines for us recipients of various Fulbright stipends, and the coordinators are very patient and swift in answering our questions and acknowledging any adjustments (I, for example, had to change my date of departure from October to July after discussions with Professor Roth). In May, all the scholars receiving a Fulbright for the 2023/2024 academic year had an informational meeting with Fulbright Commission coordinators and four former Fulbright scholars. This was a very friendly event (with free pizza!) during which we could ask any kind of question and tackle any kind of worries we had. Thus, I wholeheartedly recommend anyone interested in conducting research or studying in the US to apply for a Fulbright stipend.

As I already indicated, active researchers, scholars, teachers, and publicly-involved people are halfway there since the Fulbright Commission does appreciate this, regardless of one’s discipline or research interests. What is sometimes underestimated, I think, although the Fulbright Commission always mentions that, is that, with the current rental rates in some US states, the monthly Fulbright stipend might not cover all your costs, especially if you want to move overseas with your family. Personal savings are, therefore, really required — at least for some destinations in the US. If you are considering applying for a Fulbright stipend and want some help or just wish to chat about it all, please feel free to contact me at: hubalek.michal.42@gmail.com. Here you can also find a case study for the Fulbright application written by Stephanie Krueger.

Michal
Prague, July 2023