From the Head of School

 Disruptive Technologies

In 1971, Busicom sold the world’s first handheld calculator.  It added, subtracted, divided and multiplied, and cost US$395 (about £2270 in today’s prices and UK currency).

It was doubtless the cause of some excitement for techies that year, but I can’t imagine that it had much impact otherwise.  Not at that price.  But by the early 1980s, calculators were widespread in schools.

There was, of course, a debate about whether to ban them from classrooms - what would they mean for mental arithmetic skills?  Fortunately, maths teachers focused on how this new tool could be used effectively and changed learning activities and homework to meet this new reality.

The first web search engines were developed in 1993 (before Google existed).  A few scientists at CERN were quite excited, but it went largely unnoticed in the wider world. 

Yahoo and Google started making their presence felt in schools before the end of that decade.  I remember the considerable concern that they would make acquiring knowledge an obsolete skill and that students would simply copy and paste answers.

But schools couldn’t have banned them, even if they had wanted to - search engines were everywhere else and banging on our doors.  Again, we had to adapt, turning a potential threat into an opportunity to improve.  We realised that search engines allowed students to spend less time acquiring soon to be forgotten content and more time thinking critically about the quality of information and how it could be used.

New digital technologies disrupt the ways schools do things.  Our only choice is in how long we hold out and how well we engage.  Even the most ancient of institutions now teaches its students how to use calculators and search engines. How could they not, when the rest of the world uses these technologies routinely?

At the end of last November, ChatGPT launched an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine.  If a student uses google, they can search for model answers to copy and paste as their own.  It is not original content (someone else needs to have posted it) and is easily detected using tools such as Turnitin.  

An AI search engine produces original content - you can ask it to write a detective story involving batman and wonderwoman and it won’t merely look for someone else's creation; it will make something up itself.  

This has a massive implication for schools.  ChatGPT is in its early stages and still makes mistakes.  An early user asked it what the world’s fastest mammal was and was told ‘peregrine falcon’.  But it responds and learns quickly, evolving and improving significantly in the six weeks it has been available to the general public.  Who knows what it will be able to do this time next year?

ISA is already engaged in a discussion with the wider education community and among ourselves about how we can best use this new tool to ensure that students are prepared for the world they will graduate into. 

The calculator took 10 years to end up in classrooms, search engines five:  AI Chatbots will be an everyday reality way more quickly than that.

PS: Read Morio Kajiwara's article and try to guess which paragraph has been written by AI