Imagined futures 5: Robot teachers?

Image source: Novak Archive (1965)

In a conversation with Sugata Mitra several years ago, the novelist Arthur C. Clarke stated: 'Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer ... should be.'

Clark was right of course. Teachers cannot be compared to machines, and should certainly never function as such. If they do, then they aren't teaching. Good, effective teachers are intuitive, empathetic and responsive to the needs of their students. They get to know their charges well, finding creative ways to help them to learn optimally, engaging them with methods and activities designed to draw out the best performances. Good teachers are memorable because they go the extra mile, make personal connections that are genuinely human, and yes, occasionally they bend or break the rules. Good teachers continually reflect on their practice, think critically and act creatively. These are just a few of the convincing reasons why teachers could never be replaced by computers ... or robots.

This doesn't mean that robots have no place in the classroom though. Robots (or intelligent systems) can be very useful when they are tasked to complete some of the functions that teachers previously performed. Most of these are mundane, repetitive jobs including much of the administrative duties teacher are expected to perform, and also low level instruction and assessment. The use of artificial intelligence can even mimic some of the communication needed for large groups who are online. The case of 'Jill Watson', a chatbot designed  to act as a teaching assistant on a large MOOC at a US university demonstrated how well they can be designed and deployed. AI has a place in the modern education equation, and has plenty of scope to improve, but when it comes to human empathy and interaction, you can't do better than a human educator.

Image source: Novak Archive (1958)

But that didn't stop retro-futurists back in the 1950s and 60s depicting a 21st Century in which robots performed the role of classroom teachers. These pictures show how artists of that period conceived an education that was technologically dominated. Note the illustration with the large screen TV from 1958. Entitled 'Push button education' image is either a facsimile of a teacher or a live presentation from a real teacher at a distance. If it's the latter, then allowing for the constraints of the technology that mediates the conversation, the teacher can be almost as effective as if she were co-present. If it's a facsimile, then interaction is entirely dependent on the instructions (programming) behind the robot. Responses from the robot teacher might be limited, perfunctory, or even non-existent. In today's classroom, it is more likely that children will be busy programming robots, rather than the other way round.

Note also that each of the students has their own personal screen and console. This represents a form of programmed learning similar to the early days of computer assisted learning, where each student worked through a set menu of learning texts, followed by a multiple choice question and possibly a remedial loop to take them back if they failed the test. This was just as didactic an experience as a lecture and exam, but began to tap into the potential of machines to personalise pace and place of learning.  In future posts, I'll be considering some of the more realistic means of using robots in education.

Enjoy the retro-futuristic images!

Previous posts in this series:
1: Telecommunications
2: Classrooms
3: Music
4: Enhanced vision


Imagined futures 4: Robot teachers by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.