In the “Terminator” films, Skynet was a super-intelligent, networked, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI). When the creators of Skynet (that would be us humans) tried to deactivate it, Skynet went rogue and attempted to exterminate the human race in order to fulfill its mandate to “safeguard the world.” This dystopian view of AI makes for excellent films and great entertainment. “Terminator” wouldn’t be the same if Skynet was just another chatbot taking your Starbucks coffee order or busy booking the cheapest flight for that once-in-a-lifetime “onsen” tour of Japan.
Each and every day brings exciting advances in AI as new, innovative ways to leverage AI are discovered. These advances will fundamentally and permanently change humanity. For those of us in education, AI is nothing short of a positive, disruptive revolution.
Imagine the holy grail of personalized learning, powered by real-time feedback and assessment, where machine learning is leveraged against a student’s body of work as it unfolds. Where sentiment and lexical analysis of student writing leads to instantaneous tailored feedback for the individual student. Not tailored to the class, but tailored for the individual student at that very moment in time and space. I feel that soon, real time will be just a tad bit too slow. We will move from real time to predictive models. From reactive to adaptive.
As someone who enjoys living on the bleeding edge, I fundamentally believe schools need to stop being limited by the lens of education. Students of today need to create the technologies of tomorrow. It is our responsibility to prepare students for a future we cannot predict. We need to equip them with skill sets that are agile, relevant and timeless. As educators, we need to start thinking of 22nd-century skills as the accelerated pace of change will compress the generational changes we’ve grown accustomed to. In other words, if we don’t start today, we’ll be too late. The cadence of old is dated.
Schools like Mid-Pacific are actively working to prepare students to be the wizards of the future — students who will yield technology so advanced and so ubiquitous, it’ll feel like magic. We are on the path to enabling our students to solve problems with technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), low-energy Bluetooth (BLE), autonomous driving vehicles and more. We have created courses that allow students to tell stories with empathy and emotion based on 360-degree video capture, 3-D animation, 3-D game engines and both virtual and augmented reality. Our students are using photogrammetry and laser scanning to capture the world we live in and composite it into a world they can only imagine.
At the same time, we are building tools to enhance the educational experience by leveraging cloud-based AI technologies including IBM’s Watson and Bluemix services. We have built and continue to expand our immersive technology program footprint to excite and engage even more students.
The bleeding edge of technology is like a rainbow. Each step closer moves it one step farther away. This poetic injustice is a beautiful thing. You can never reach the bleeding edge, and we will never stop striving for it.
Do you believe in magic? I do.
Brian Dote is chief innovation officer at Mid-Pacific Institute. Reach him at brian@midpac.edu.
