智能教室：人工智能和未来教育

Artificial intelligence is changing the 人工智能正在改变世界。

The world’s attention is now fixed on the unfolding impact of Generative AI tools on knowledge and creator economies. Schools, serving as the very epicenters of knowledge and creative work, may well be the first place the broader public sees tangible change take shape.

全世界现在都在关注生成式人工智能工具对知识和创意经济的影响。学校是知识和创意工作的中心，因此很可能是普罗大众首先看到切实变化的地方。

Leaders and visionaries the world over are actively advancing the applications of this rapidly developing technology. The pace of progress is measured in days and weeks, rather than months and years, and it’s only getting faster. The quickening of AI’s capabilities and applications mean that its potential impact, both good and bad, is growing rapidly.

世界各地的领导人和有识之士都在积极推动快速发展的人工智能技术的应用。人工智能技术发展的速度则是以天和周为衡量单位，而不是以月和年为衡量单位，而且发展速度只会越来越快。人工智能的能力和应用的加速发展意味着其潜在影响也在迅速增加，无论是积极的影响还是消极的影响。

Already, we can see around the corner that generative AI systems will have expansive implications for how schools function, teachers work, and how students develop personally and professionally for tomorrow’s world of work.

生成性人工智能系统在不断发展，也必将对教育系统产生广泛的影响。学校将改变运作方式，教师将改变工作方式，学生也将改变个人和职业发展方式。

As is so often the case, our young people are leading the adoption and advancement of these new technologies. The term “digital native” already seems outdated as Gen Z and those that follow them will invariably be expert in these new technologies faster than many adults. Seeing youth as experts with real understanding and knowledge can open new and exciting use cases and applications for new technologies like generative AI.

我们的年轻一代一如既往地成为这些新技术应用和发展的领军人物。“数字原生”这个词似乎已经过时了，Z世代以及后来人比许多成年人更快地成了这些新技术的专家，这是不可避免的。我们要将年轻人视为真正懂行的知识专家，这样做就可以为生成性人工智能等新技术开辟新的及令人兴奋的用例和应用。

Applying the power of AI to some of our greatest challenges in school and system design offers similarly incredible opportunities. It’s already helping teachers design courses and analyze data of student performance to engineer learning interventions and new lesson plans. But its potential to do more is clear. It could help us better know how the school day and all the learning experiences contained therein should look given the rapid evolution of the global economy. It could aid states and districts in developing new career pathways and structures for lifelong learning that keeps people connected to gainful employment across decades.

将人工智能的威力用于解决我们的学校和系统设计的挑战提供了同样令人难以置信的机会。人工智能现在可以帮助教师设计课程、分析学生成绩数据以设计学习干预措施和新的课程计划。但人工智能可以完成其他工作的潜力是显而易见的。全球经济在迅速发展，人工智能可以帮助我们更好地了解学校日常的一天以及一天里包含的所有学习体验。人工智能可以帮助各州和各地区开发新的职业道路和终身学习结构，助力学习者在几十年内接轨有报酬的就业。

There is a sense, among many, that these technologies are pushing toward new horizons and opening us to futures both new and powerful. That group includes those pushing the leading edge forward, like Sal Kahn, CEO and Founder of Khan Academy.

许多人都觉得这些技术正在向着新的地平线推进并正为我们开辟新天地。其中包括那些推动前沿发展的人，例如Khan学院首席执行官和创始人Sal Kahn。

“We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he said during a recent TED Talk. “And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor. And we're going to give every teacher on the planet an amazing, artificially intelligent teaching assistant.”

Khan在最近一次TED演讲中表示，“我们正处于人工智能教育应用的拐点，这可能是教育领域有史以来重大转型。而我们要做的就是给地球上的每个学生提供一个绝妙的人工智能个人导师。同时我们将为地球上的每一位教师提供一个绝妙的人工智能教学助理。”

That would be a seachange in education if only because such personal learning and teaching supports are now profoundly expensive. To address pandemic learning loss, the federal government spent some 0 billion itself, with many state and local jurisdictions adding to that total. But, if we see the future as the Sal Kahns of the world do, massive funding infusions may not be necessary to provide customized and personalized learning experiences for every learner. Intelligent agents can already play the role of tutor and are likely to be more and more effective as the technology advances.

而这种个人学习和教学支持目前仍非常昂贵，因而可以说这将是教育领域的一个重大变革。为了解决大流行期间的学习损失，联邦政府花费了大约1900亿美元，许多州和地方司法机构还额外拨了款。但如果我们像Sal Kahns那样看待未来的世界，要为每个学习者提供定制和个性化的学习体验可能并不需要大规模的资金注入。智能代理现在已经可以扮演家教的角色，而且随着人工智能技术的进步，智能代理可能会越来越有效。

This ambitious and optimistic perspective, Khan says, must be balanced by an all out effort to thwart the negative, even dangerous possibilities with advanced AI, saying that all must “fight like hell for the positive use cases.”

Khan表示，先进的人工智能存在负面甚至危险的可能性，我们必须全力以赴去避免这种可能性的发生，去实现我们的人工智能雄心壮志，以积极乐观的态度取得平衡。他称，所有人都必须“为积极用例而战”。

Fears more broadly about AI include everything from potential job loss to losing control over lethal military capabilities. The national concern has grown to the point that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was recently called to testify before the U.S. Congress and meet with lawmakers about the technology’s rapid growth. Altman himself urged the creation of new legal frameworks to keep pace with the new technology.

坊间对人工智能存在各种各样的恐惧，包括潜在的工作岗位流失、致命军事能力的失控。对人工智能的关注已经发展到了国家层面：OpenAI的首席执行官Sam Altman最近被传召到美国国会作证并就人工智能技术的快速发展与立法者会面。Altman本人敦促建立新的法律框架，跟上人工智能新技术的步伐。

Worry about AI’s deleterious effects on education specifically are also spreading. New York City Public Schools effectively banned the use of the most popular forms of the technology, ChatGPT, out of fears of student cheating. New York isn’t alone. Many K-12 school systems and institutions of higher learning are taking a defensive posture.

关于人工智能对教育的具体有害影响的担忧也在蔓延。纽约市公立学校因担心学生作弊基本禁止使用最流行的人工智能技术ChatGPT。纽约并不是唯一的一家机构。许多K-12学校系统和高等教育机构正在采取防御性姿态。

Experts in the field say the strategy of banning or blocking the technology could have unintended consequences of its own. The vast majority of successful companies and organizations will be using AI in their work, and seeking applicants that know how to leverage its power to increase productivity. Banning AI in schools could therefore reinforce digital inequities, the digital divide, and ultimately opportunity gaps.

该领域的专家表示，禁止或阻碍人工智能技术的策略可能会产生意想不到的后果。绝大多数成功的公司和组织将在日常运作中使用人工智能，因此也就会招募那些知道如何利用人工智能的威力提高生产力的求职者。因此，在学校禁止人工智能可能会导致更多的数字不平等、更大的数字鸿沟以及导致最终机会差距。

“Many school systems decided to ban it,” Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi recently told CNN. “In New York City where the public school system has banned it, private schools are teaching AI prompt engineering. We have to find a middle ground to safely include it in how and what we teach.”

Code.org首席执行官Hadi Partovi最近告诉记者，“许多学校系统决定禁止使用ChatGPT。纽约市公立学校系统禁用ChatGPT，而私立学校却教授人工智能提示工程。我们必须找到一个中间地带，要将其安全地纳入我们的教学方式和内容中。”

That call to a rational middle ground is both reasonable and appropriate given the awesome potential that generative machine learning offers educators, leaders and students. We should not only think about how technology can assist teachers and learners in improving what they’re doing now, but what it means for ensuring that new ways of teaching and learning flourish alongside the applications of AI.

生成性机器学习可以为教育者、领导者和学生提供巨大的潜力，上述的理性中间立场 是合适及合理的。我们不仅应该思考利用技术帮助教师和学习者改进他们现在所做的事情的方法，而且应该思考如何利用技术确保新的教学方式与人工智能的应用一起蓬勃发展以及这样做的意义。

“Technology offers the prospect of universal access to increase fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Graduate School of Education Dean Daniel Schwartz at a recent AI and education conference.

研究生院教育院长Daniel Schwartz在最近的一个人工智能和教育会议上表示，“技术提供了普罗大众都可以使用的根本性新教学方式的前景。”

Indeed, teachers are already early adopters of the technology. Some 30 percent of teachers are now using AI to develop lesson plans, according to Hadi Partovi, Code.org. Pandora’s box appears to be open, but that doesn’t mean we lack agency and capacity to shape the effects of that fact. And it doesn’t mean that we’re headed to a future where AI replaces professional _human_ educators. In fact, it could well mean that highly trained and capable teachers are even more important facilitators of learning in an AI-enabled academic environment. But we need to act now.

事实上，教师已经成了人工智能技术的早期采用者。据Code.org的Hadi Partovi说，大约30%的教师现在正在使用人工智能制定教案。潘多拉的盒子似乎已经打开了，但这并不意味着我们缺乏掌控的能力，也并不意味着人工智能在未来将取代专业人类教育工作者。这其实都很可能意味着训练有素的、有能力的教师未来在人工智能学术环境中将是更重要的学习促进者。但我们现在必须采取行动。

Teachers need professional development specifically on AI and its productive applications. Teachers will need “pedagogical content knowledge specific to AI,” Daniela Ganelin, a Stanford researcher and doctoral student, told Education Week. They’ll need to understand the technology to fully grasp its potential and applications in the classroom.

教师需要专门针对人工智能及其生产应用的专业培训。斯坦福大学研究员和博士生Daniela Ganelin告诉《教育周刊》，教师需要更新“针对人工智能的教学内容知识”。他们需要了解人工智能技术，进而充分掌握人工智能在课堂上的潜力和应用。

With appropriate development and support, routine and time-intensive tasks in the classroom can be outsourced to intelligent agents and human teachers can focus on the deeply relational work of higher-level instruction, as UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan recently noted. Formative assessment, an essential evidence-based tool in every effective educator’s toolbox, can be made even more real-time with responsive instruction plans and learning sequences adapting instantly to the specific state of a student's learning journey.

英国教育部长Gillian Keegan最近指出，利用好适当的开发和支持，课堂上的日常工作和时间密集型任务可以外包给智能代理，人类教师可以专注于高层次教学的深层关系工作。形成性评估是每个有效的教育工作者工具箱中必不可少的循证工具，可以通过响应式教学计划以及根据学生学习旅程具体状态的学习顺序即时调节，达到更加实时的效果。

Students too will need to learn and understand the technology. With the assistance of capable and knowledgeable educators, they will likely leverage these tools in ways that we cannot even imagine at present. With the right scaffolding around them as young learners with powerful technology, they can thrive alongside and amidst the rise of intelligent machines. And critically, we will need to provide that opportunity to _all_ learners–failure to do so will only entrench inequities and widen gaps in novel ways.

学生也需要学习和了解人工智能技术。一些有能力和有知识的教育工作者可以提供帮助，学生可能会以我们目前无法想象的方式使用这些工具。年轻的学习者手握强大的技术，配备了正确的脚手架后就可以在智能机器的崛起中茁壮成长。我们需要为所有学习者提供这种机会，这一点非常重要；如果做不到的话就只会以新的方式加大不平等和扩大差距。

Our northstar must always be the democratization of learning opportunities as we bring the fruits of technological innovation to our classrooms and well beyond them. There will be challenges, to be sure, but the power of human ingenuity to mitigate those challenges is just as real and equally powerful.

我们在将技术创新的成果带入教室以及其他领域时，我们的目标必须始终是学习机会的平民化。肯定存在挑战，但人类的聪明才智也是真实而强大的，肯定可以有效地应对这些挑战。

In this new era of learning—and make no mistake about it, that is exactly what we are entering—we will, however, need an approach to the deployment of AI in education that is centered on real human flourishing.

一个新的学习时代正在来临，务必要正确认识这一点。教育的中心是人类繁荣的真谛，我们务必在教育领域部署好人工智能。

Doing so will not only strengthen student learning, but ensure that future generations thrive in ever more human and humane ways. That’s the kind of tomorrow in which all of our children and our planet can thrive.

人工智能技术可以加强学生的学习，确保未来的几代人能以更加人性化和更人道的方式茁壮成长。在美好的明天里，我们所有的孩子和我们的地球必将更加茁壮地成长。