A year back, Thomas Corbin and Deakin U colleagues created a stir with a tough-minded argument that AI was a “wicked problem” for university assessment, that there are better or worse ways of dealing with it, but nothing will solve everything. Now Corbin and co-authors are back with a new take as technology picks up the pace.
Anybody can buy smart glasses anywhere and for students they are less a fashion statement than a potential way to sack the last citadel of assessment, invigilated exams and interactive orals. However,as Janine Arantes and colleagues pointed out in Future Campus last week, they could also be a valuable study aid.
Glasses that look like sunnies can serve as screens displaying AI generated text, and use built-in mics to process speech and read exam content. “Wearable AI allows users to, for example, identify what something is just by looking at it, navigate unfamiliar areas, translate conversations as they happen.”
This is life-transformative stuff, that “does not function as a tool the user consults but as a capability the user inhabits. This is not a difference of degree. It is a difference in the kind of relationship a user can have with the technology, and it is not a difference any previous educational technology has had to confront at scale.”
And it will be harder to police as the technology becomes quotidian.
“A student who learns to read through AI-mediated annotation, communicate through incorporated translation, or reason through ambient contextual retrieval may not have merely adopted a shortcut. They may be developing a mode of capability that exists as a hybrid of their own capacities and the affordances of the tool. These are open empirical questions.”
So what is to be done? They identify two likely responses, neither of which will work: prohibition or enforcement-device detection and surrender.
The problem with prohibition is that AI glasses can’t be distinguished from ordinary ones. The problem with confiscation is where does it end? “Once AI technology converges with every day and entirely ordinary eyewear, hearing aids, health-monitoring devices, and other objects worn on the body, surrender no longer means simply removing phones and laptops. It means deciding which bodily attachments may enter the room and – perhaps more importantly – deciding how these can be identified.”
And this will get personal, very personal. “It is no longer the em-dash, the hallucinated citation, or the uncharacteristic fluency that invites scrutiny. It is the hearing aid, the glasses, the medical device, the head covering, the gesture, the pause, the gaze.”
But nor is surrender a solution – “the question of what counts as a meaningful demonstration of capability, of what kinds of judgement students should be expected to exercise and what they should be held responsible for does not disappear.”
It just gets harder and the authors offer no answer. This is clearly an area set for intense discussion in future.