In EP 36, John and Jason talk to Miriam Reynoldson of Melbourne, Australia, about the Open Letter From Educators Who Refuse the Call to Adopt Gen AI in Education.

See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Miriam Reynoldson is a learning design specialist, educator, and design facilitator working across higher ed, VET, and professional learning. She is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD exploring the value of learning beyond formal education in postdigital contexts. Miriam researches and writes about education, sociology, and philosophy, and teaches educational design at Monash University.

You can connect with Miriam at https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-reynoldson/ or her blog https://miriamreynoldson.com/

Resources:

The Open Letter: https://openletter.earth/an-open-letter-from-educators-who-refuse-the-call-to-adopt-genai-in-education-cb4aee75
The Library of Babel listserve space: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/assembly
The Design Justice Network: https://designjustice.org/
Michelle Miller’s “Same Side Pedagogy”: https://michellemillerphd.substack.com/p/r3-117-september-15-2023-reflection

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Middle Music: Hello (Chiptune Cover) by RoccoW is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

Miriam Reynoldson EP 36

[00:00:00]

Jason Johnston: Miriam, you are part of an open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt gen AI in education. Would you, for us, summarize what this letter's about before we get into the details?

Miriam: So it's a really short letter. It's a 400-word statement that essentially positions a certain stance for educators, in saying, "I choose not to use GenAI to teach, to assess to build my course materials. And I do not want to sell these products to students to do their work, either.

John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

Jason Johnston: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half the Online Learning Podcast.

John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation that we've been having for the last almost three years now about online education. Look, [00:01:00] online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage?

Jason Johnston: John, that's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

John Nash: I think that's a great idea. What do you want to talk about, today,

Jason Johnston: Today I'm not sure we've covered this at all. How about we talk a little bit about AI for a change, right?

John Nash: Never

Jason Johnston: That's a joke. Never heard of it.

Well, I'm Just very excited today to be talking with Miriam Reynoldson.

We connected on LinkedIn, and she is somebody I just really wanted to have this conversation with around ai. She's an instructor and a student, a learning designer in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome, Miriam. Would you maybe just introduce yourself to our listening audience a little bit?

Miriam: No worries. I am a bit difficult to introduce because I really don't know where I am. I'm kind of juggling multiple identities at the moment and across multiple universities. So, [00:02:00] probably my primary identity in this conversation is mostly my teaching at Monash University. I'm also doing my PhD exploring non-formal learning in digitally mediated spaces at RMIT. I do a little bit of teaching there as well, and I'm also a digital learning design specialist.

Jason Johnston: That's great. Yeah, we on LinkedIn and we'll probably talk a little bit more about how that came about, but a lot of it was around an open letter that you are part of an open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt gen AI in education. And we'll include the link if anybody wants to preview that before we get into the conversation, we'll put the link in our, podcast. But Miriam, can you talk a little bit first about, how this open letter came about, what led you to do that and who you letter? open letter.

Miriam: Yeah. The dirty secret really is that I was having a bit of a chat to a friend [00:03:00] of mine in Ohio, Melanie Dusseau, who as the first signature on the letter. And she had sent me a link to this letter that had been put together by Literary Hub in the us a consortium of publishers.

And it was essentially a position from the public publishing industry. We don't support the use of AI to replace our authors, our editors or any part of the work that we do in furthering human creative expression. And I went to Melanie, "Why don't we have something like this, but for educators?"

And I think she said to me, "Oh yeah, yeah, the Netherlands have just done that." And she sent me another one. And these amazing people, initially out of Radboud University in the Netherlands, had written this incredible really strongly worded letter presenting a position against the uncritical adoption of AI in academia.

And I went, yeah, yeah, like that except not just [00:04:00] universities. So, we literally went, yeah, okay. We'll just we'll just put something together for like-minded educators who have made the personal choice and we're not going to say we're banning it or anything like that, but just essentially trying to create a space for educators like us who don't feel our voices are being heard.

And I was going away for the weekend, so we kind of just whipped it up. Some exchange of messages. Melanie went, "Yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's go up." And it just went up and then kind of blew up. And so, I think we're just butting up against a thousand signatures now. But what's been much more striking to me is the hundreds of messages I've received from educators who are unable to publicly put their names to it but who feel profoundly sympathetic and struggling with the dissonance and challenges of being faced with mandates to adopt [00:05:00] or encourage students to adopt generative AI tools in their education spaces. So, I think that we're really just trying to create a space where It's safe to speak about how we feel. Even if that is not feeling, identical to the sentiment in the letter.

Jason Johnston: Of these hundreds of educators that you've talked to, why do you think they feel like they support it, but they can't publicly support it.

Miriam: It's a profoundly political situation. And we probably don't have enough time for a huge unpacking of global politics. And obviously I'm speaking to people in North America and I'm sitting here comfortably in down under.

Jason Johnston: What's market like down under? Asking for a friend.

Miriam: In university is absolutely shocking. So, I speak as a learning designer. That's been the vast majority of my career. And for learning designers, this is profoundly difficult [00:06:00] because we don't have our own syllabi, we don't have our own courses and our own ability to determine this is what our curriculum is going to be.

We're there as support and we work with academics across universities to guide them, particularly in the technological aspects of the work that they're doing. And so, it generally means being agnostic to a whole range of things. But particularly to the technologies that are being trialed either by the academics or by the universities that have made partnerships with certain technology companies that makes it an incredibly political position to have more so for people in the third space than in academic roles.

But as I'm sure you're both aware, academic freedom is a very fraught concept. And so, we, we do often self-censor because we're very [00:07:00] conscious of how tight the education job market is.

Jason Johnston: it seems, anyways, yeah, that's a whole thing. It seems like we have educational freedom until we don't have it. Would you, for us just summarize what this letter's about before we get into the details?

Miriam: No worries. So, it's a really short letter. We used a platform that doesn't allow hyperlinking. There's no references or anything like that. It's a 400-word statement that essentially positions a certain stance for educators, whether they're in K to 12 early childhood education, university, community education, professional training, any aspect of education.

Walking in saying, "I choose not to use GenAI to teach, to assess to build my course materials. And I do [00:08:00] not w...