A return to Teacherbot: rethinking the development of educational technology at the University of Edinburgh

Ontological Transparency, (In)visibility, and Hidden Curricula: Critical Pedagogy Amidst Contentious Edtech

“…Institutionally and in this project, automation provoked a discussion that surfaced values, made explicit the knowledge mobilities of the university (Gallagher and Breines 2020), articulated possible applications of automation in teaching (Breines and Gallagher 2020), and in this case, suggested a set of pedagogical positions that inform critical praxis. Such an emphasis on critical practice is deliberate as 'change to ... society must also reside in social practices rather than merely in the structures or values of agents' (Heikkurinen 2018(Heikkurinen : 1657).…”

“…To initiate this pedagogical search and to surface these teaching practices, we adopted a community-driven approach where we focused on how new technologies can be introduced to inform teaching practice instead of pursuing an instrumental agenda of using technology to solve the challenges of higher education (Breines and Gallagher 2020). A series of design events (n = 14) ranging from a few up to 20 participants were run from July-December 2019 throughout the university.…”

“…If they can explore and the computing system is there to give them guidance and feedback to some extent, the automated systems could give fairly broad and course feedback at the moment, and as we work on these systems, the feedback will improve over a number of years. [Francis, Teacher] Indeed, many of the specific applications of automation suggested by participants discussed in Breines and Gallagher (2020) are explicitly designed to activate that invisibility. The opportunities for students to explore ideas freely and not be concerned about being seen by other students, teachers, or a pervasive data architecture have a potentially significant pedagogical impact.…”

“…By allowing teachers to build critical thinking into the technological structures of teaching, by building critical practice into the design of automation itself, critical praxis is possible. This suggests the need for teachers and students to be critically 'informing the design and operation of these systems' explicitly, or to have essentially teacher and student-led educational technology research and development (a process discussed in Breines and Gallagher 2020). Creating a multitude of educational sites within the university to deliberate, adapt, and design through participatory models becomes a component of critical praxis, one that potentially begins to interrogate and potentially mitigate the more entrenched aspects of hidden curricula.…”

“…There has been increasing experimentation with automation in the form of chatbots designed to perform some portion of the larger teacher function, generally in the form of asking questions, providing feedback, and performing additional administrative tasks associated with the teacher function (Sandu and Gide 2019). Automation that provides capacity for rapid group formation in courses, for pre-sessional instruction, and for surfacing student voice in curricular creation (Breines and Gallagher 2020) is being explored.…”