Empowering Education: The integration of Digital world
In today’s world, we are all connected to the digital realm so much that picturing life without it is just overwhelming. One of the most important sectors is education. Digitising many aspects of education has facilitated the teaching, learning, and communication between the staff and the students with their parents.
Searching for Information.
For kids who grew up with technology, searching for an information from a book in a library seems like an impossible job. But using a searching engine to look for a document, then using the command ctrl+F inside that document is what pops up in their minds when thinking about searching for information.
There are many differences between using a searching engine like google and searching in a library. First is the accessibility of the internet compared with libraries, you can access the internet almost any where at anytime while you can only use the library at its opening hours. Some library has solved this problem by providing a website containing every document they have like the University of Manchester library. However, searching in these libraries is sometimes limited to the members of that organisation which gives google and the other searching engines an advantage.
Although searching engines can give thousands of results in seconds, people tend to only open the first few links which mostly sponsored and are not reliable source of information. As stated in the MacOdrum library “keep in mind that most of the information retrieved from the open web hasn’t been evaluated. It could be inaccurate, biased, or it might not be current. Also, the authors of web sites might not have the same credentials as the authors of articles found in the library databases”. MacOdrum library proceeds with providing a method to verify anything out of a library database, this method is called CRAAP test. Therefor, not using libraries is possible but time consuming, which doesn’t match the speed of which our digital world is running.
Artificial inelegance (AI) in education.
Students and teachers are finding new ways to facilitate education, the employment of AI in education is the standout tool in today’s world. Oxford dictionary defines AI as follows:
The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour; the field of study concerned with this. In later use also: software used to perform tasks or produce output previously thought to require human intelligence, esp. by using machine learning to extrapolate from large collections of data.
If you talk to students about their ways of studying, you will certainly hear them mentioning ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) multiple times. The tool’s popularity among students is due to its remarkable user-friendliness. It takes the form of a chat between the students and the machine, and can understand the natural language. An important feature is its ability to answer almost everything in not only education but every aspect of life, figure 3 shows how ChatGPT is helping choose a vacation destination. You can ask it to summarise a text, solve a question with the steps, translate, and generate text for you.
Despite that, AI has its downside. AI tools has a very large amount of data that sometimes it gives different answers to the same question. This makes it difficult on students to verify which answer is the correct one, and can deviate the students focus from the curriculum to different topics. Additionally, excessive dependence on AI can degrade students thinking skills, making the education system fail. Therefore, educating the students about how to effectively use AI without losing their intellectual abilities is an important topic that should now be discussed in schools.
ChatGPT abilities make us question if using AI is considered plagiarism or not? While the author of the AI generated material is considered unknown, many educational institutions are considering AI generated text as plagiarism. Therefore, educational institutions are using other AI tools such as Turnitin to detect whether the text is artificially generated by AI or not, to ensure students are actually learning. To reference everything correctly you can ask ChatGPT to tell you where did it get the answer it gave you.
Virtual reality (VR) in education.
Another important way of introducing technology in the education sector is using the virtual reality, where students are able to interact with a real-world environment by wearing specific devices that leads their minds into believing what they see. Normally what the students see by using VR technologies are environments that are difficult to apply or repeat in the real world, whither the difficulty lies in the costs, dangers, or even wanting to be in a different place or time.
The book titled “Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education, Art, and Museums“ outlines the benefits of integrating virtual reality (VR) into education. First advantage is that VR improves the students problem solving skills. VR can Also encourage the student’s motivation into learning new concepts by offering an amusement interaction with what they are learning which also enhances their imagination. These leads to effortless teaching for the teachers and facilitates the students understanding of the taught material.
Example applications of VR in education include: the engineering experiments where it difficult for universities or industries to keep upgrade their equipment, therefore VR offers a cheaper and easier replacement. Another very useful VR application is in the health care training. This can increase the learners experience and allow them to learn from their mistakes without risking other people’s lives by using realistic simulation of surgical operations. Additionally, VR can be used to explore other places without being physically there, like exploring a different country’s landmarks, culture or even exploring the outer space. VR allows you to transport yourself to different time periods, whether it’s roaming among dinosaurs or imagine what the world is going to like a century from now. These are not only educational experiences but entertain as well, ensuring that the information remains ingrained in learners’ minds for longer.
Self-reflection
Living in a digital society makes a person forget how much our lives has improved compared with the past. However, technology brought significant dangers such as invading the privacy of others, stealing their information, and reduction in our intellectual abilities. Regardless of my previous knowledge of the digital world, this course has enlightened me on several points, and improved some of my skills.
This course made me realise how privileged we are compared with the previous generations. my interaction in the internet is not only between me and another person, it is between me and a big network of data about me and everything connected to me. This network can facilitate my life by tracking my activity and present me with what I wanted, whither it is a service, product, or even information. However, entering this network requires me to understand the risks of sharing information that could be used against me such as home address, or even my favourite restaurant. Governments, schools, hospitals, and banks are also starting their own networks to track our lives and improve their services for the citizens by creating smart cities. Yet, we still must be able to determine what is authentic and what is not, what information can be shared and what should be hidden. Otherwise, all the effort taken to build this digital intelligent world would lose its purpose and be just a source of danger to its users as it has very precise data about every individual life and health.
Moreover, the fast growth of AI with all its advantages makes us overlook its disadvantages. This course made me understand the ethical side of AI which I never even consider as a thing. The information given to me by AI tools made me forget that the AI is getting this information from another place which we need to site instead of the AI.
Additionally, I first started practicing English in university as a second language, but my degree only requires reporting experiment results and linking them with equations ‘’in the most formal and boring way’’ as my professors describe it. Therefore, I did not have critical writing skills in topics outside engineering, but this course helped me explore reading and analysing fun topics, then write a critical article about them. Besides that, writing a blog post was a new experiment for me, it improved my writing skills by allowing me to try an informal tone, a tone that I never used in writing before in a topic of my choice. Exploring the features that can be used in a blog post is an addition to the skills I gained from this unit.
In addition, coursework feedback introduced me to the idea of only using the pictures with licence as I thought using any picture then providing the link to its source would be sufficient. Likewise, using a large number of references in one short article was new to me as my degree requires me to analyse and link things using only lecture notes.
