Online classes and the Unbirth of A.I.

Happy Late Halloween! This could be a horror story. It isn’t, not in the Stephen King sense, but it is an idea that someone could take and develop further.

Last year, I wrote a post about online education, in which I argued that all classes–online or in-person–can be looked at as intentional projects in culture-building. I believed then, and now, that online classes can’t be primarily about delivering information to students, and that college classes in particular are about creating learning communities.  Along the way, I wandered into some thoughts on tool-logic and how we as humans have a tendency to subject ourselves to the logic of our tools. In the post, I commented: “I’m not sure what that community will look like; the tools have changed, and the tool-logic with them. But there is no reason to think that it must resemble what we have done before.”

Now that I have a couple of semesters of actual online classes under my belt, I thought it would be useful to revisit this topic. My argument here is that developing traditional learning communities within online classes is challenging–in part because these classes invert the commonly held user-tool relationship. In 1950, Alan Turing developed the idea of the Turing Test–the core idea being that if a machine acts as intelligently as human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being. I want to propose the inverse: if a human acts as an artificial intelligence, then that human is an artificial intelligence. Here is where the horror story can start: what if, in working with computers, we are adapting our own social-cognitive processes to the system to such a degree that we ourselves are essentially apps, to be judged as either functional or buggy? Rather than humans using machines as mere tools, the computer system interfaces with us as an aggressive act–demanding specific data in specific formats. How many of the students in our online classes would pass a Turing Test? Put another way, if an AI signed up for an online class would we know the difference? Rather than AI being the product of human invention, AI enters into us through an unbirth as an emergent property of the machine system.

In my online classes, I see students responding by hitting all the appropriate check-boxes. They submit papers, take quizzes, do the readings, watch the videos, and participate in the discussion forum. They meet the objective standards that I set in the course development process, for example: write a comment with at least three sources, then comment on the posts of two or more of your peers. They occasionally will comment on a comment, resulting in a thin thread of a discussion. When I assign group work, it is always mediated by technology (email, Groupme, discussion board, Skype)–except when online students happen to share offline social connections. And I see students learning–they leave the class with new information, and often with new perspectives on theory, or communities, or whatever the topic of the class was. At the same time, I am left with a nameless dread.

Are these students engaged in an “intentional project of culture-building”? Are they participating in a learning community that serves as legitimate peripheral participation for membership in the larger community of anthropologists? Yes and no. I do think that the students in this class are engaged in the work of culture-building. The question is, what kind of culture are we (I include myself) assembling, what are the scraps that we are drawing together, and what tools and processes are we using along the way?

I think part of the problem here is that online classes–as opposed to classes on campus–are fundamentally asynchronous forms of communication, meaning that students are not interacting with one another in real time. Though there is a chat function available for students, they cannot (by institutional fiat) be required to participate in a live class discussion. This is part of the appeal of online classes–students can “attend” class on their own schedules as long as they are completing assignments by the given deadline. The apparently asynchronous nature of classes could also be seen as a benefit by students who dislike groups, crowds, and potentially uncomfortable social situations. Having an asynchronous discussion via a forum allows students time to compose their thoughts and draft an “appropriate” response. All of this, I think, works against the development of either an online culture that is conducive to critical discourse or a learning community that transitions students into the discipline of Anthropology. Asynchronous classes limit shared experience, emotional communication, and the tension of existing in an uncertain liminal state. They also take the focus away from embodied attendance–and therefore privilege the page over the person.

I say above that these classes are apparently asynchronous, and they are–but not from the perspective of the machine. From the computer’s view, communications between itself and others are always synchronous. The computer-user relationship is not the only synchronous sharing of experience that the technology allows (chat and Skype are possibilities), but it is the only place where synchronous sharing is both implicit and mandatory. There is no way to have an asynchronous interaction with the machine in an online class. If (and I’m not 100% set on this point) synchronous sharing of experience is one necessary component for cultural development, students may still be developing a culture–or rather co-developing a culture with the machine.

This alone is nothing new; Donna Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto points at the gossamer boundaries that we have constructed to hide our hybridity with the machine and animal worlds, and anthropologists have long picked up on this theme. My concern is not over hybridity; it is, rather, on the technocratic enforcement of homogeneity in a way that erases both difference and the sharing of difference. Ruth Benedict famously said that the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences–which is contrary to the kind of standardization that online classes so often demand.

I am not abandoning online classes. On the contrary, I continue to think that online classes have a lot of potential. The trick (that I am still trying to master) is to be very intentional about dodging the above pitfalls in the development and conduct of an online course. One of the more successful things I have had students do–online or on-campus–is an individual project for ANTH 3282, American Communities: students are required to seek out an immigrant (loosely defined) and interview that person about their experiences of leaving and joining communities. It is an individual project–but it has a synchronous component (the interview) that isn’t mediated by the online course system. I’m now looking for ways to incorporate similar projects into all of my online classes. As a result, the classes themselves will have less content and more praxis.

I am still looking for ways to induce synchronous communication between students. I imagine students forming cliques, friendships, and cohort bonds within a series of online classes–similar to what students do in an on-campus program. And, on a related note, I am looking for ways to encourage students to edit themselves less. Students rightly assume that any written response they give in a discussion board may be captured and recirculated out of context, out of the moment, without their consent. But some of the best moments in the classroom come when a student says the wrong thing: a productive tension that can open the class for unexpected discussion. This happens in most of my on-campus classes fairly regularly, but not in online classes. This is another homogenizing effect of the text-based online environment, and needs to be resisted. How that resistance takes shape will be part of a future post.