Sunday, March 20, 2011

Android, is it robotic pedagogy or is the pedagogy robotic?

Is this the future face of teaching?

           « The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. »
            Nietzsche


Perhaps this is a fully physical realization of Drill and Practice. No matter how good the simulation is teaching remains a human practice. Education is for humans by humans as it is at its core a human and social practice. The idea of robotic teachers is the ultimate end game of what is increasingly an irrelevant modernist view of education. Robotics is a tool. Learning how to build, interface and engage with these tools are important but this is a large step away from cybernetic anthropomorphism



 It seems to be a rather consistent obsession of Korean and Japanese robotic engineers that a teacher can be simulated by a robot. Recently I heard professor Hiroshi Ishiguro on the ABC program Night Air, 13 March discuss these ideas and use the term post-human. I'm not a protein based chauvinist anti silicon and hater of robots but... To envision a world that is post human is to have a vision where our 'being' is no longer present. It is all to easy to forget the beauty that humans can create and experience, a beauty that is human not post-human. The rare thing that is birth, life and death and the fact that we are conscious of these processes is part of 'being-in-the-world'

“Dasein exists. Furthermore, Dasein is an entity which in each case I myself am. Mineness belongs to any existent Dasein, and belongs to it as the condition which makes authenticity and inauthenticity possible.” Heidegger

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