Abstract

Recent technological innovations, such as emerging technologies and generative AI, are not only changing the landscape of education but also disrupting the way of instruction. These changes and disruptions bring both excitement and concern. They have the potential to foster deeply engaged learning experiences by providing the affordances that were not possible before and provide means for continuously monitoring, assessing, and guiding students in their learning process to ensure they receive tailored support. These same advances can also create biased content, spread false information, share private information by mistake, cause job loss, and raise questions about human dependency and accountability. This keynote speech will provide glimpse of future of education and discuss how to exploit these emerging technologies before they exploit us. We shall collectively create a vision for the future of education where, instead of trying to stop the progress due to the various concerns, effective planning and rules can reduce those risks and take advantage of the opportunities such technologies bring to transform the current education, with constraints and safeguards in place to make learning process safe and reliable.

Brief biography

Dr. Kinshuk is the Dean of the College of Information and Full Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of North Texas. His work has been dedicated to advancing research on innovative paradigms, architectures and implementations of online and distance learning systems for individualized and adaptive learning in increasingly global environments. With more than 610 research publications in refereed journals, international refereed conferences and book chapters, he is frequently invited as keynote or principal speaker in international conferences and as visiting professor around the world. He has a successful record of procuring external funding over 10 million US dollars as principal and co-principal investigator. Dr. Kinshuk is Founding Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technologies, Founding Editor of the Educational Technology & Society Journal (SSCI indexed, within top 10 in Google Scholar metrics ranking for Educational Technology), and Founding Editor of Springer’s Smart Learning Environments journal. He is also Founding Chair of the New Zealand Chapter of ACM SIG on Computer-Human Interaction, and Past President of the Distance Education Association of New Zealand. He has served on the Advisory Board of Dallas AI – nonprofit AI forum in North Texas with over 10,000 members, and on the Board of Directors and as the North America Regional Chair for iSchools – an international organization of around 130 universities worldwide focusing on various aspects of research and teaching about information.

Abstract

Participation is touted as the holy grail of democratic design—a virtuous process ensuring stakeholders have a voice and solutions are fit for purpose. But in practice, is it merely theater? In this talk, we peel back the layers of "participation" in educational technology design and research to reveal an uncomfortable truth: traditionally, it is often misleading, performative, or simply ineffective. We will examine why current methods fail to translate student, teacher, and administrator voices into impact, leaving the promise of participation broken. Finally, we pivot to a counter-intuitive solution. Rather than distancing us, can artificial intelligence be the unexpected catalyst for genuine human connection between learners and educators? We will explore how AI may offer opportunities to move beyond tokenism to enable impactful participation.

Brief biography

Frode Eika Sandnes is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design, Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Reading, UK. His research interests include human-computer interaction generally, and universal design and accessibility specifically. Dr. Sandnes was the primus motor for the establishment of the first master's specialization in accessibility in Norway. He is an editorial board member of Universal Access in the Information Society (Springer) and Interacting with Computers (Oxford University Press). He has hosted several international conferences, including NordiCHI (ACM). Sandnes is the Norwegian representative to the IFIP Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction (TC13) is currently serving a term as vice-chair for awards. He has written several textbooks and was a Ministry of Culture-appointed advisory board member for the Norwegian Library of Braille and Audio Books under the National Library of Norway.