Learning Is Humanness, and AI Can’t Change That

I’ve been thinking about this image lately:

It’s a painting done around 1350 called “Henricus de Alemannia in Front of His Students” by Laurentius de Voltolina, depicting a lecture hall class at the University of Bologna. It’s one of those images that gets referenced once in a while about the ineffectiveness (or effectiveness) of the lecture as a teaching method, but I’m more interested now in thinking about how recognizable this scene still is to humans now.

I wrote about this picture a bit in my book More than a Moment, which is about the rise and fall of MOOCs (remember them? the good old days!) in higher education. The second chapter is called “MOOCs as a Continuation of Distance Education Technologies” and it’s about some key moments/technologies in distance ed: correspondence courses, radio and television courses, and the first wave of “traditional” online courses.

I began the chapter by talking about a couple of MOOC entrepreneur TED talks in the early 2010s, including one by Peter Norvig in 2012 called “The 100,000 Student Classroom.” It’s a talk about a class in Artificial Intelligence Norvig co-taught (along with his then Stanford colleague Sebastian Thrun, who went on to create the MOOC start-up Udacity) with about 200 f2f students where they also allowed anyone to “participate” as “students” “online” in the “course” for “free.”¹ Like most of the early high-profile MOOC prophets/ profiteers, Norvig and Thrun seem to believe that they discovered online teaching, completely unaware that less prestigious universities and community colleges have been offering online classes for decades. But I digress.

Norvig opens his talk by showing this image to suggest that nothing in education has changed in the last 600+ years. There’s still the “sage on the stage” lecturer, there are textbooks, and students sitting in rows as the audience, some paying close attention, some gossiping with each other, some sleeping. That is, nothing has changed— until now! It gets a laugh from the crowd, and it’s typical of the sort of hook that is part of the genre of a successful TED talk.

In my book, I point out that there are a lot of details of the modern classroom that would be unimaginable in the 14th century, things like audio-visual equipment and laptop computers, not to mention things we don’t even think of as technology anymore— electric lighting, synthetic building materials, controlled heating and cooling, whiteboards and chalkboards, and so forth. In fact, as I go on to argue, the conventional f2f classroom of “today” (well, almost 10 years ago, but you get the idea) is so seamlessly connected to digital libraries, social media, and online learning platforms that line between f2f and online learning is fuzzy.

I still think that is mostly true, but the more I read about how AI is going to change education completely, re-seeing an image like this makes me wonder. Maybe the reason why we still recognize what is happening here is because this is what learning still looks like. In other words, what if the real reason why technology has not fundamentally changed learning is because this is just what it is?

Maybe it’s because I’m writing this now while traveling in Europe and I’ve seen a lot of old art depicting other things humans have done forever: worshiping, fighting, having sex, playing games, acting, singing, dancing. The details are different, and maybe it’s hard to recognize the weapon or the instrument or whatever, but we can still tell what’s going on because these are all things that humans have always done. Isn’t learning like this?

Don’t get me wrong— a lot of the details of how learning works have changed with technologies like literacy, correspondence, computer technology, online courses, and so on. But even an asynchronous online course is recognizable as being similar to this 1350 lecture hall course, or like a small group Socratic dialog, just one that takes place with writing down words that are somewhere between snail mail exchanges and synchronous discussions.²

I guess what I’m getting at is maybe images like this one demonstrate that the desire to learn new things is something ingrained in the species. Learning is like all of these other things that human animals just do.

So if we can remember that learning does not mean the same thing as “going to college or whatever to get a credential to get a job” and that we are still a social species of animal that cannot stop trying to learn new things, maybe AI won’t “change everything” in education. And honestly, if the sci-fi scenarios of Artificial General/Super Intelligence come to pass and the machines replace their human creators, we’ve got much bigger problems to worry about.

1. These are all scare quotes because none of these words mean the same thing in MOOCs as they mean in conventional courses. ↩︎
2. In fact, I’d suggest that what happens in online discussion forums and on social media are much more like what Socrates meant by dialogue in Phaederus than what he meant by the more problematic and unresponsive technology of writing. ↩︎