AERA 2023 Roundup
by Marie K. Heath & Daniel G. Krutka
CoT Announcements
Webinar Tomorrow: Civics of Technology contributor Michelle Ciccione is leading a webinar Monday, April 17 from 12-1 EST for the Media Education Lab titled, “Can Media Literacy Help Us See Through the AI Hype?” Register here.
Next Book Club: We are reading Sasha Costanza-Chock’s 2020 book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. We will meet to discuss the book at 8pm EDT on Thursday, May 18th, 2023. Register on our Events page.
Next “Talking Tech” Monthly Meeting on 05/02: We hold a “Talking Tech” event on the first Tuesday of every month from 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. These Zoom meetings include discussions of current events, new books or articles, and more. Participants can bring topics, articles, or ideas to discuss. Join us this Tuesday on April 4th for our third Talking Tech. Register on our Events page or click here.
We wrapped up our conferencing at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) today, and we’re a mix of tired and invigorated. This morning we facilitated a session asking technoskeptical questions about ChatGPT as the keynote event with the Technology as an Agent of Change (TACTL) SIG. We were invigorated by participants’ creative ideas that helped us think through not only ChatGPT, but our relationships with technologies more broadly. As we discussed in our session, our 5 technoskeptical questions focus primarily on psycho-social issues, but we also are seeing more content that is helping understand technical dimensions of the issue. The Tech Won’t Save Us podcast had a fantastic episode this week titled, “ChatGPT Is Not Intelligent w/ Emily M. Bender,” and then Cal Newport wrote “What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?” for the New Yorker. Both of these sources dispelled a lot of hype around ChatGPT by explaining what it is and isn’t. We are both still learning a lot on the topic, and I think educators need to show students how we can engage in the process. As L.M. Sacasas wrote in his recent Convivial Society blog post:
Thinking cogently and insightfully about AI is a bit of challenge right now. Or maybe I should be more modest in my claim. I am myself finding it challenging to think cogently and insightfully about AI. Part of the problem is that the term is used rather indiscriminately, so it is hard to pin down what exactly one is talking about with the kind of specificity that sound thinking requires.¹ It’s also difficult to fix your thinking on a phenomenon that is rapidly developing.
We hope today’s discussions were a start of technoskeptical inquiries, not an end.
Throughout AERA, we’ve learned from many of our Civics of Tech community including work by Charles Logan, Tiera Tanksley, Aman Yadav, Roxana Marachi, Sarah McGrew, and so many more of you. Our Civics of Technology meet-up on Friday was incredible.
It wasn’t just the sessions that stretched our brains and challenged us to more thoughtful work in technoskepticism. We were overwhelmed with the community turnout at our meetup on Friday, seeing the in person faces of our online friends and making new friends with people whose work we’ve read and learned from for so long. The camaraderie and conviviality (insert your Ivan Illich pun of choice here!) of the gathering invigorated us for next steps for the Civics of Technology community. If you were unable to attend, we still have opportunities for gathering in our monthly Tech Talks and our Summer Book Club. Shortly, we will announce the call for our August conference, which provides another opportunity for us to gather, learn, and collaborate on actions to work toward more just technological futures.
Next week we will share the interrogations of ChatGPT that folks shared at the TACTL talk, but for now, we’re going to take a long restorative nap.