ChatGPT is one of the world’s 10 most-visited websites and people are increasingly turning to AI to think, write, summarise, plan, counsel and even connect in a social sense. This month the OECD released its Introducing the OECD AI Capability Indicators Report, mapping current AI capabilities against the human capabilities of: language; social interaction; problem solving; creativity; metacognition and critical thinking; robotic intelligence; knowledge, learning and memory; vision; manipulation; and robotic intelligence. The report notes that AI currently lacks advanced reasoning and ethical reasoning capabilities. It adds that AI has weak social perception and struggles to infer social interactions, adjust for the emotional weight of a situation, or wrestle with ambiguity.
Reflecting on the professional moments I experienced this week, those in which I felt most fulfilled were human moments of connection, often filled with emotion and ambiguity. Sitting with parents in conversation about what it means to support young people to flourish in adolescence, at our ‘Thriving in the Middle School’ parent event. Touring an old scholar through the school and hearing her stories of her 1970s education and what continues to resonate for her 50 years later. Announcing the school’s new student leaders and feeling the palpable nervousness and excitement in the auditorium, and the subsequent pride and joy of those elected to leadership positions. Collaboratively solving the newspaper crossword in the staff room with colleagues. Watching students shine in the drama production. These are human experiences that technology cannot replicate.
The increasing use of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) is influencing our capacity for lateral thought, problem solving, creativity and human connection.
During my PhD research I could access publications online, but I needed to read them, synthesise them and analyse them myself. I could get help transcribing interviews, but I needed to sit with my participants, immerse myself in the data, draw out themes over time, and write my way into knowledge and understanding.
As I write this blog post, I am integrating knowledge and exploring ideas. I am thinking and writing my perspective into being in an organic way that engages me in cognition, reflection and construction of argument. I am utilising and connecting my cognitive architecture. If I had produced this post using AI to write it, I would benefit from the outcome, but not the process. There may be less friction between reader and written piece, as LLMs apply consistency of tone, genre and word choice based on programmed patterns. The piece may well have been more logically structured, with sub-headings, bullet points and a predictable cadence of language. It may use a number of em dashes, a favourite punctuation mark of ChatGPT writing. (On a side note, I am disappointed that the em dash has become a ‘tell’ of AI writing as it is one of my favourite punctuation marks after the interrobang, and ChatGPT’s use of it emerges from the credible human authorship, including academic sources, on which the LLM is trained). My piece may have been affected by AI’s cultural and linguistic biases (largely US-centric and masculine), and ‘hallucinations’, in which it makes up information and references.
How does our relationship with reading, writing and thinking change when we can paste swathes of content into a LLM and ask it to provide a neat summary? Or to ‘write a X in the style of Y person’ or to ‘generate an academic report on X topic using Y resources’?
If we get someone else, or AI, to do our reading or writing, we do less thinking. This recent research by a team at MIT explores the ‘cognitive cost’ or ‘cognitive debt’ of using AI to outsource our thinking. While ChatGPT outperforms students on many writing tasks including essay writing, this study found that students who used ChatGPT produced essays similar to one another. Human assessors described the AI-assisted essays as lengthy, academic-sounding and accurate, but “soulless”. The standard ideas, formulaic approaches and reoccurring statements reflected an AI homogeneity of argument and ‘echo chamber’ of ideas that lacked individuality and uniqueness. The research found that AI assistance reduced cognitive load and reduced cognitive friction. This made the task easier, potentially freeing up cognitive resources to allow the brain to reallocate effort toward executive functions. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost as users defaulted to the easy option of the task being finished with minimal effort, rather than critically evaluating the AI-generated output or value-adding their own content. Those who engaged the most brain connectivity and activation, around memory and creative thinking, were in the group who used their ‘brain only’ to write the essay .
We need to consider what we are willing to outsource to technology, and for what purpose. Is our desired result an outcome or a process? Producing or thinking? Output or connection? ‘Done’ or continuously improving? How might AI free us to do more that is human without narrowing our capacity for thought and connection?
As we continue to explore how AI and technologies might replicate human capabilities, we need to lean in to our humanity and into what relational human connection and critical thought can continue to offer us. Our shared humanity and our capacity for cognition, emotion, connection, and ethical engagement remains paramount.
With over 5 billion people using social media worldwide, it is embedded in our everyday lives, bringing us connection, collaboration and opportunities for sharing our voice. Being connected online can have benefits such as facilitating social connections with others, reducing loneliness and providing easy access to helpful resources. Social media can help us to connect and to cope. As someone who has lived across different states of Australia and overseas, social media has been a way to remain connected to friends and family who live elsewhere. I have also enjoyed productive professional collaborations that have been borne of social media connections such as the early days of Twitter (now X) and LinkedIn. I have written academic articles about the ways in which digital and social media can offer collaborative platforms, identity testbeds, productive spheres and empowering spaces.
As a teenager in the early 1990s, I bought a corded push-button phone for my bedroom, so I could connect with my friends (spending hours talking on the landline, thereby preventing anyone else in the family from making or receiving phone calls). Now, however, phone calls are out, and social media and messaging apps are in. A recent Uswitch survey revealed that a quarter of people aged 18-34 never answer the phone and that young people are increasingly choosing to communicate via social media (48%) and voice messages (37%). 98% of Year 10 and 11 students in Australia reported regularly using at least one social media platform, with 18% actively posting or sharing on social media at least once a day.
For teenagers, who have grown up in a digitally connected world, social media is a seemingly non-negotiable and inescapable part of life. It is often through devices, including messaging and social media platforms, that young people connect and communicate. For marginalised young people, the digital world can be a place in which they feel in control of their identity, expand their social and cultural circles, and engage with others. Young people also use social media for creating and innovating. My teenage son, for instance, manages social media accounts for his local businesses.
Social media as a source of stress
The ‘always on’ world of social media and messaging means that there is no escape from social connection, comparison and communication, including that which can be negative in nature. There are growing concerns about the impacts of engaging with social media, especially for prolonged periods, on mental health and self-esteem.
Use of social media, especially high daily use, has been associated with negative mental health, including anxiety, depression and social media addiction. Social media induced stresses include approval anxiety, fear of missing out, availability stress (the demand to be permanently available), connection overload (the perception of not being able to process all information) and online vigilance (constant awareness of the online environment). Visiting social media sites has been found to create psychological stress from information overload, and to activate a physiological stress response that contributes to elevated anxiety symptoms and related impairment, especially in emerging adults.
Young people are worried about their online safety, including catfishing, fake accounts, contact from unknown people, the privacy of their personal information, cyberbullying, deepfakes, being exposed to inappropriate content, misinformation, fake news, receiving judgement from peers about their opinions online, and vulnerability of particular groups.
The highlight reel and social comparison
Through social media, we often present a highlight reel of our experience that leaves out more reality than it includes. Through their engagement with social media, teens are constantly bombarded with content that shows apparently aspirational ways of looking, being and living. This includes unrealistic, highly edited, retouched and AI-generated social media content from friends and influencers.
UNESCO’s Technology on Her Terms report warns that algorithm-driven, image-based content, especially on social media, exposes girls in particular to material that glorifies unhealthy behaviours and perpetuates unrealistic body standards, thereby having a detrimental impact on girls’ self-esteem, body image and mental health. The report points out that the TikTok algorithm targets teenagers with body image and mental health content every 39 seconds, and with content related to eating disorders every eight minutes.
Social media has been found to expediate social comparisons and negatively impact young people’s self-image when they compare themselves to what they see online. Recently-released data from Australian National University show that the use of social media platforms is associated with poorer life satisfaction for Australian young people, especially the use of TikTok use for girls and Discord for boys.
How can we support young people to manage social media?
So, if social media can lead to heightened body image concerns, materialism, addictive use, and mental health issues, how can we support young people to be responsible, safe and kind navigators of the online and digital world? Healthy boundaries, targeted education and open communication are key to supporting young people in this age of relentless connectivity, firehoses of carefully curated communication, and privacy concerns.
Healthy boundaries
The South Australian government recently released a proposed bill which sets out a legislative framework to ban social media for children under 14 and require social media companies to establish parental consent before allowing children aged 14 and 15 to use their platforms. Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has outlined plans to introduce legislation to impose a minimum age for teenagers accessing social media and gaming platforms. Last Thursday, at the Social Media Summit in Sydney, Australia’s eSafety Commisssioner, Julie Inman Grant, indicated that for many parents and children “that horse has already bolted”. She revealed that approximately 1.34 million Australian children (out of roughly 1.6 million 8-12-year-old Australians) have used an app such as Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp since the beginning of 2024, noting that recent research has shown that 82% of Australian 10-year olds and 93% of Australian 12-year-olds are using apps before reaching the current official age of social media entry at 13. This indicates that bans and age limits may not have the desired impact of keeping young people from social media.
As parents and educators, we can help teens by removing mobile technologies from classrooms and bedrooms, and by using apps and programs that help us monitor and control when teenagers can access social media. We can help teens to set boundaries and regulate their technology use and engagement with social media by banning or limiting phone use at certain times (such as in school yards and overnight) and setting screen time limits, app time limits, and downtime schedules. At my school, mobile phones must be kept in lockers during school hours and notifications switched off on all devices (watches, iPads, laptops, phones) to allow the focus in classrooms to be on learning, and the focus at break times to be on in-person relationships.
We can sit alongside our teens, engage in their online worlds with them, and reflect together on their feeds. We can discuss with our children and students how to improve their digital experiences. This might include by muting and blocking accounts or turning off notifications. It might mean supporting them to remove apps for a time or permanently, and to reflect on how their experience, mental health and sense of self change when they take a break from social media.
We can and should additionally monitor our own social media and device use, and role model healthy boundaries and behaviours.
Targeted education
As parents and educators, we need to openly discuss and explicitly teach our children about the benefits, risks and potential consequences of engaging in the digital world, as well as strategies for keeping themselves safe online, and for seeking help.
In Australia, the Keeping Safe: Child Protection Curriculum explicitly teaches children about safety, respectful relationships, recognising and reporting abuse, and protective strategies. Additionally, schools develop and deliver tailored and responsive wellbeing curricula that teach knowledge, awareness and safe practices, and respond to the needs of the students as they arise. Schools partner with parents in focusing on responsible use of technologies, and working together to support teens.
Open communication
Open communication with trusted adults is crucial in protecting and supporting young people navigating the digital world. Teenagers with a clear and stable sense of self, high levels of emotional self-confidence, and open communication channels with their parents, are better able to cope with social media stressors on mental health.
It is in our ‘real lives’, in person, in the non-online world, that parents and educators can explore, build and co-design protective factors for and with young people. Australian research for the eSafety Commissioner indicates that young people prefer to seek help from trusted adults in the first instance, and that positive reinforcement, support and reassurance of confidentiality from family, friends and services are what encourages them to seek support. Young people may be discouraged from seeking help if they fear being punished, are concerned that adults may not have adequate information or experience to assist them, feel their personal boundaries are being invaded, or fear stigmatisation or victim-blaming. These fears indicate that the most essential thing adults can do for the young people in their lives is to create and hold a safe and non-judgemental space for them to raise and explore their concerns.
Building positive relationships with teens, maintaining open communication, discussing their worries and aspirations without fear of judgement, and workshopping potential strategies with them, helps us to help young people become savvy, self-aware users of social media and flourishing, resilient individuals.
References
Auf, A. I. A. A. I., Alblowi, Y. H., Alkhaldi, R. O., Thabet, S. A., Alabdali, A. A. H., Binshalhoub, F. H., … & Alzahrani, R. A. I. (2023). Social comparison and body image in teenage users of the TikTok app. Cureus, 15(11).
Barnes, N., & Netolicky, D. M. (2019). Cutting apart together: A diffracted spatial history of an online scholarly relationship. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(4), 380-393.
Constant, I., Tsibolane, P., Budree, A., & Oosterwyk, G. (2024). Analysing Coping Strategies of Teenage Girls Towards Instagram’s Algorithmic Bias. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 146-160). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Doery, K. (2024, 10 September). Young People’s Social Media use-What impact does it have?
Ozimek, P., Brailovskaia, J., Bierhoff, H. W., & Rohmann, E. (2024). Materialism in social media–More social media addiction and stress symptoms, less satisfaction with life. Telematics and Informatics Reports, 13, 100117.
Maftei, A., & Pătrăușanu, A. M. (2024). Digital reflections: narcissism, stress, social media addiction, and nomophobia. The Journal of Psychology, 158(2), 147-160.
Moody, L., Marsden, L., Nguyen., B. & Third, A. .2021. Consultations with young people to inform the eSafety Commissioner’s Engagement Strategy for Young People, Young and Resilient Research Centre, Western Sydney University: Sydney
Netolicky, D. M., & Barnes, N. (2018). Scholarship of the cyborg: Productivities and undercurrents. In Education Research and the Media (pp. 165-179). Routledge.
Vannucci, A., Flannery, K. M., & Ohannessian, C. M. (2017). Social media use and anxiety in emerging adults. Journal of affective disorders, 207, 163-166.
Wolfers, L. N., & Utz, S. (2022). Social media use, stress, and coping. Current Opinion in Psychology, 45, 101305.
I’ve always been a bit of a secret techy nerd, thanks, in part, to my dad who was an early adopter of computer technologies. In the 1980s, we had an Amstrad CPC desktop computer, one with a cassette tape deck to play computer programmes. My parents taught me how to write basic computer code using … BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). My mum wrote programmes using BASIC that my brother, sister and I could play. We soon upgraded to an IBM PC and floppy disks. While we also had a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, we were at the bleeding edge of 80s technology! We continued to upgrade computers and have access to games. From the 80s I have fond memories of the arcade-style game Gilligan’s Gold, and in the 90s I loved strategic simulation games like Civilization and Jones in the Fast Lane. The Walkman revolutionised and mobilised music listening, and I spent hours of my high school years in my bedroom making mix tapes on a double audio cassette player; timing was everything.
Now for a statement of the ridiculously obvious: The technological landscape has changed dramatically since I was a child. Its physical, virtual, and ethical parameters are very different. I have been considering what our children and students need now in terms of technologies that can aid or augment learning and living, and what kinds of knowledge and nous they require to be effective and empowered negotiators of their current worlds and the multiple identities they act out on real and virtual platforms.
But why bother with digital technologies? Why not stick to traditional technologies (pen, paper, the overhead projector!)? In part, our local and global context requires it. The world feels a sense of urgency around predicting our students’ future and busily preparing them for it. Being tech savvy has become an economic imperative.
In Australia, technologies and technology education are an ever-increasing focus. The 2008 Melbourne Declaration of Educational Goals for Young Australiansstates that “when students leave school they will be confident, creative, and productive users of technologies” (p.8) and that “practical knowledge and skills development in areas such as ICT and design and technology are central to Australia’s skilled economy and will provide crucial pathways to post-school success” (p.12).
As part of the 21st century skills movement, digital literacy has become a global focus. A Commonwealth of Australia (2009) report highlights digital media literacy as a dynamic concept and a necessary condition for a successful digital economy. It says: “Digital media literacy ensures that all Australians are able to enjoy the benefits of the digital economy: it promotes opportunities for social inclusion, creative expression, innovation, collaboration, and employment. … The focus of digital media literacy policy and programs is on the development of three core skill sets:
the technical ability to engage at a basic level with a computer and the internet, such as to create documents and emails;
the ability to understand and critically evaluate digital media and digital media content; and
the ability to create content and communications.”
In 2013 the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA) published the seven General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum, including the ICT Capability that “involves students learning to make the most of digital technologies available to them, adapting to new ways of doing things as technologies evolve and limiting the risks to themselves and others in a digital environment (p.49).
In 2014, the Australian Government released the Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda that aims to strengthen Australia’s competitiveness. One of the major announcements at this time was the proposal to focus on science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and innovation in schools, and the introduction of the Coding Across the Curriculum Program.
In 2015 ACARA released The Australian Curriculum: Technologies, which aims to develop the knowledge, understanding, and skills to ensure that, individually and collaboratively, students:
investigate, design, plan, manage, create, and evaluate solutions;
are creative, innovative, and enterprising when using traditional, contemporary, and emerging technologies, and understand how technologies have developed over time;
make informed and ethical decisions about the role, impact, and use of technologies in the economy, environment, and society for a sustainable future;
engage confidently with and responsibly select and manipulate appropriate technologies − materials, data, systems, components, tools, and equipment − when designing and creating solutions; and
critique, analyse, and evaluate problems, needs, or opportunities to identify and create solutions.
ACARA (2016) has since declared STEM education a national priority, describing STEM as closely linked to Australia’s productivity and economic wellbeing, central to a well-rounded education, and contributing to a diverse and capable STEM workforce pipeline.
The introduction of OLNA as an online literacy and numeracy assessment, and NAPLAN moving to computer-based assessment from 2018 (on an opt-in basis), means that students from Year 3 need to be able to be proficient keyboard and computer users in order to effectively demonstrate national literacy and numeracy requirements.
So how are educators to engage in all of this? Fullan (2013) urges us to move beyond a superficial homage to 21st century learning skills to developing what it means to actually implement them in practice. Higgins (2014) challenges us to ask: “Do we need a curriculum with less specified knowledge, allowing a greater emphasis on skills, based on the argument that information (and therefore knowledge) is more readily accessible? Or do we need more knowledge, as the basis for developing greater expertise and the ability to make informed and complex judgements, based on a deeper understanding of a topic or field?” (p.571).
The launch of a new communication and learning management platform at my school and my involvement in a couple of strategic projects have had me thinking about digital pedagogy and how to choose digital tools for learning. In a sea of fast moving technologies and faster moving policy, perhaps we can anchor ourselves with the building blocks of teaching and learning: good curriculum and assessment design, well-considered pedagogy, and knowledge of our students. Then we can make decisions around technology based on what it is we want them to know and be able to do.
References
Fullan, M. (2013a). Stratosphere: Integrating technology, pedagogy, and change knowledge. Toronto: Pearson.
Higgins, S. (2014). Critical thinking for 21st-century education: A cyber-tooth curriculum? Prospects, 44(4), 559-574.
The past is for learning and letting go. You can’t revisit it. It vanishes. ~ Adele Parks
photo by Steve Wheeler
At first this image, provided by Steve Wheeler, sparked thoughts of learning environments. Here is a graveyard of old wooden desks. Scratched. Graffitied. All bunched together in some kind of storage space. Left. Forgotten. Abandoned. Past their used by date. The sad scrawled face in the bottom right corner, a symbol of the kind of soul-crushing 50s -industrialist schooling that Sir Ken Robinson champions against.
But when I look at this image what I really get is a rocket back to my own schooling. Wooden desks engraved by compasses and ball point pens, with lift-up tops revealing stationary and lunch boxes and gum and whole pieces of fruit.
I’m reminded of how my fellow students and I would sit, listen, mess around, or tackle boredom. There were no smart phones, no apps, no laptops, no Smart screens, no texting. We passed notes on actual paper. We looked out of the window. We scribbled onto or carved into the rough wooden surfaces of our desks which lay in rows, etching them with our individual markings, evidence of our existence.
Recently my husband and I drove more than 800km in one day to this spectacular place, with Mr 3 and Mr then-4 in the car. We could have taken a dvd player. We could have hooked them up to please-keep-quiet digital devices most of the way. But we chose not to. We made a conscious decision that the very very long car trip (about 9 hours) was to be spent mostly old school. We sang songs. Listened to music. Talked. Played ‘eye spy’ (for the 3 year old we mostly played by colour instead of letter). Snacks, notebooks, a couple of monster trucks. C-o-n-v-e-r-s-a-t-i-o-n. It was a retro road trip.
There were 2 occasions in each car trip (we had to do the return 9-hour journey, too!) when we let them have an iPad. For 20 minutes they were able to have 5-minutely turns, so 10 minutes each; 20 minutes each all up per session. Sharing. Waiting. Practicing patience. Being grateful.
Parents might ask: Why would we do this to ourselves? Teachers might ask: Why aren’t we immersing our children in available technologies?
The answer is that we think it is good to be bored. Or rather, to have the self-capacity to figure out what to do with our selves or our brains when we are bored. Without a screen.
While I am a literature nerd who loves to read and smell books, and use old school tactile technologies, I’m also an educator who uses BYOD, the back channel, OneNote, virtual classrooms, discussion forums, Voxer, Twitter, personal and student blogging, podcasts, vodcasts, student created content, online surveys.
So when I look at Steve’s desk-graveyard image with its tactile wooden shapes and the student-made markings, I’m taken back to a classroom where a student’s main technology is their brain. With maybe some paper, ball point pens, and a compass.
It makes me think about letting the learning, not the tech, guide us. And ensuring that our children and our students see their brains as the best tech at their disposal.
Viva la boredom? Or at least viva la ability to use our brains and our character in ways that allow us to be still, be grateful, be learning, be creative. Like a blog post written around an image chosen by someone else, parameters can push us to creativity.
I love the idea of #blimage, so to end this post I’m throwing out another image, to ‘pay forward’ the challenge. So, bloggers, do your worst with this pic (just attribute the image back to me :)):
the édu flâneuse 