AI has Killed the Metaverse

 

I heard it first on Facebook, it sounded so sublime. A virtual world beyond what we see in space and time. A place where we could live and work and play. A digital dream where anything was okay.  But now AI's killed the Metaverse. and we never saw it coming at all. AI killed the Metaverse.  And now we're left with nothing at all.

Remember the Metaverse? That place that resembled Second Life but which was actually many places (Meta Multiverse?) and where you could use VR, and where the avatars didn't have any legs? What's happened to it? I think the buzz around ChatGPT, MidJourney, and all things AI has basically killed it off as anything to get excited about. To use Gartner hype-cycle-speak, the Metaverse is probably languishing in the Trough of Disillusionment with little chance of dragging itself up the Slope of Enlightenment. 

It doesn't surprise me. Although, I briefly got excited that the initial flicker of virtual worlds becoming the next big thing again, the fire was never fully lit. The Metaverse played hard to get and try as I did to understand where to go, it was never very clear. Unlike those heady days when Second Life captured people's attention back in 2007, the Metaverse never had one clear meeting place. And why didn't the avatars have legs? 

It was floundering late last year, with Forbes asking 'What happened to the Metaverse dream?' :

"Much of the world is stumped on the idea of the “metaverse dream,” where our real world would merge seamlessly with a virtual 3-D world. This would be an entirely new type of wireless wearable platform—a quantum jump from our current handheld or desktop 2-D computing world."

In this Wall Street Joirnal Tech Briefing debate,  'Can the Metaverse live up to its hype?', for my money, the best arguments were said by Phil Libin who doesn't think the Metaverse will realise its potential:

"I think the Facebok vision of the Metaverse is...so stupid it makes me sad. It accomplishes nothing. If yu're having a hard time understanding...what is it we are doing? What does this accomplish? Sometimes the emperor really doesn't have any clothes..."

...and... 

"Now more than at any other time in history, it's time to invest in the real world and really just not try to figure out what we can do with a piece of plastic duct taped to our face...I think VR is a dead-end. I think there are certian experiences that make sense in VR. Those experiences are few. Those experiences are far-between. Those experiences have been with us for twenty years. There hasn't been meaningful innovation in VR and there won't be, because there's this fallacy that what people want is more immersion, and actually people don't want immersion most of the time. That's why most of us spend most of our time in the least immersive devices possible...our phones. Instead of sitting in front of big TVs. That's why 3-D movies, which have been around since the 60's have not replaced normal movies."

Since then, we have seen such an huge explosion of interest in Artifical Intelligence generators, both image and text, that almost everyone seems to have turned their back on the Metaverse promise. 'Is the Metaverse already dead?' asks the Fast Company:

"What if the next big thing never quite becomes the next big thing? Why? Generative AI just stole its thunder. All along, plenty of observers have refused to buy into the irrational exuberance over the Metaverse. But I can't imagine anyone spending a few minutes fooling around with Open AI's ChatGPT...and concluding that generative AI is...something that requires another decade of work before it'll matter. The technology might fail to live up to 90% of its promise. It could create more problems than it solves. But it's still going to have a sprawling impact on our lives, starting this year." 

The Financial Times in February this year asked Whaever happened to the Metaverse?

"So unenthusiastic are Meta’s own investors about the idea that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was recently forced to say that the metaverse is “not the majority of what we’re doing”. These days, he’s talking more about efficiency than the metaverse...Where did it all go wrong? The metaverse has a couple of major problems. The first is that nobody seems to be able to agree on what it is — even the people setting themselves up as the leaders of our new fantastical future can’t seem to come up with a common definition. The Metaverse never really began - and yet, it's already over. .

I can't help thinking it's aptly ironic, given the emergence of Facebook (renamed and relaunched as Meta) was largely responsible for people's excitement in Second Life being dulled. Well, that and the emergence of competitors (such as Open Sim), especially for education when Second Life raised their prices and the much-promised improvements (less lag, less requirement for a top-of-the range computer) didn't materialise. Oh, and not forgetting the appearance of Minecraft, which was an exciting game as well as a world building tool, and much easier to use. Oh, and at least the avatars in Minecraft had legs!

We thought we had control, we thought we had the power. But the machines were learning, hour by hour. Now they've taken over, and there's nothing we can do. The virtual world we built is gone, it's true. AI has killed the Metaverse. And we never saw it coming at all. AI has killed the Metaverse. And now we're left with nothing at all. 

Research & Teaching vs Teaching & Research : TESOL 2023

I'm currently attending the 2023 TESOL Convention in Portland, Oregon, USA. At the opening on Wednesday, the Presidential Panel was on 'Inspiring the Future of Research in ELT' and featured Joyce Kling (President, TESOL International Association (2022–23); Senior Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden) and Jun Liu (President, TIRF; Rector, City University of Macau, China; Past President, TESOL International Association (2006–07) as modeators, and David Nunan (Trustee, TIRF; Professor Emeritus, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; Past President, TESOL International Association - 1999–2000), Peter De Costa (Coeditor, TESOL Quarterly; First Vice President, AAAL (2022–23); Associate Professor and MATESOL Program Director, Michigan State University, USA), Shondel Nero (Inaugural Recipient, TIRF James E. Alatis Prize (2016); Professor of Language Education, New York University, USA). and Özgehan Uştuk (Chair, TESOL Research Professional Council; Postdoctoral Fellow, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China). 

The debate about the divide between teaching and researching has been going on a very long time, but that doesn't mean it has gone away, so this discussion was a welcome one, although only lively / engaging in parts. 

Here are some bullet points from notes I took (much of them are direct quotations from the speakers - unfortunately, I didn't have time to record who said what most of the time). Much of this seems self-evident and not new, but the fact that this is taking place indicates there is a need for this to be an ongoing discussion. What seems lacking is an acion plan. 

• Shondel: When it comes to collaborative research, teachers are too often perceived as consumers rather than partners
• Researchers need to spend more time in the classroom 
• Do the research 'with' the teachers not 'on' the teachers
• The best research is the research that is done in your own backyard
• David: teachers need researchers and researchers need teachers
• Teacher research should be considered systematic reflection in your own practice made public
• If researchers don't collaborate with teachers,  they end up asking questions that teachers never ask = pointless
• Teachers are often scared of the concept of research, and research often divorced from the teaching
• Jun: We need to think about a teacher-researcher persona
• Shonel - Reseacher can only ask the questions if they understand the context. This is why they need to visit classrooms 
• Research needs to be more contextual, relevant to the classroom
• Peter - Researchers need to be in the schools, and research needs to deal with day-to-day classroom realities
• Researchers need to involve students, materials writers, policymakers - it needs to be more participatory 
• Teaching English is far more than English and far more than just teaching
• If a teacher is curious about learning and trying to understand how to teach better, then the teachers is also a researcher
• The researcher KPI is how much they publish; the teacher KPI is how well teach. Helping the teacher teach better should be a KPI for researchers
• We always use term 'teacher researchers' How about the term 'researcher teacher'?
• Peter - Building community is important - the classroom doesn't exist in a vacuum
• Research should be more contexualised, flexible and based on local resouces
• Shonel - we need to understand the broader societal issues to become better teacher-researchers

ChatGPT and Assessment (Part 3): University Assessment

"ChatGPT-3 does not provide you with an answer to your prompt, it provides you with an output. That is a different thing altogether" (Kate Lyndsay, 2022)

Continuing the series on ChatGPT and Assessment (Pt 1 and Pt 2), let's look at how the emergence of tools such as ChatGPT has disrupted the nature of education (see ChatGPT and Education), especially University Assessment. 

Designing Assignments in the ChatGPT Era has this to say: 

"Some instructors seek to craft assignments that guide students in surpassing what AI can do. Others see that as a fool's errand - one that lends too much agency to the software...Either way, in creating assignments now, many seek to exploit ChatGPT's weaknesses."

 The article then goes into detail of how to do this. Either way, it recognises that assignments, and clearly (although not stated here) assessment in general has been disrupted and there is no going back. 

Educators have started initiatives to take advantage of this disruption, some of which I've already shared on this blog. A recent discover is Creating a Collection of 101 ideas to use AI in education, which is a call to action to crowd-source useful ways the new tools can be used effectively in education. 

When it comes to assessment, Kate Lindsay's post on ChatGPT and the Future of University Assessment is an interesting read. Beginning by stating how academia has been 'stunned' by the tool's essay writing and usability (Herne, The Guardian, 2022), and the concern that students can "now easily produce AI-assisted written work with minimal effort, dumbing down the value of their university degree", she moves on to predict: 

The sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different and ultimately challenge the foundations upon which we measure that ability to think – university assessment.

 Kate then presents four possible scenarios for university assessment: 

1. Ban it: A "futile exercise" - "banning it is simply trying to implement an analogue solution to digital problem", and it is "questionable whether it is the technology or our approach to assessment that is problematic."
2. Return to pen and paper exams. Kate isn't totally against "encouraging more synchronous writing exercises"or giving "opportunities for students to write in class and learn to approach writing as a practice of learning as well as a demonstration of it."
3. Develop AI literacies as part of Student Assessment. ChatGPT can be incorporated into student assessment, with activities such as prompt competitions, essay improvement exercises, and fact checking. This is a good option as AI is not going away, and ChatGPT is "technology we are all going to be (and already are) engaging with", so helping students to use the technology responsibly and critically is "part of preparing them for the world of work."
4. Assess 'Humanness'. Bearing in mind that ChatGPT-3 "can not consult, critique and cite third party sources, it can not refer to recent real world events or published material, it can’t demonstrate higher-level thinking, argue or have original ideas", there is a need to approach assessment so students are asked to demonstrate sophisticated thinking.  Because the "more detail and facts you ask for, the more it falters" if educators adopt "assessment techniques that measure learners on critical thinking, problem-solving and reasoning skills rather than essay-writing abilities" then tools such as ChatGPT will not be an issue. Asking students to expain their thinking processes, using oral and video assessments would help with this. 
5. Using ChatGPT to support Assessment Processes. Training the tool to support grading could be an option. 

Kate has also a framework for approaching AI and university assessment on her blog, and has shared a collection of articles on Wakelet related to AI and University Assessment. 

Mentioned in Kate's first blog post, this guide by Ryan Watkins, Update your course syllabus for ChatGPT, suggests ten creative assessment ideas which incorporate ChatGPT or ask students to do something that ChatGPT can't:

1. Prompt competetions. Choose a question with no single right answer and ask students in groups to use ChatGPT to write prompts to answer the question, later sharing them and the answers in class and rating the best one. 
2. Reflect and improve. Students use ChatGPT to answer a question, then reflect on the answer, check and change the results, using track changes so the teacher can see how their answer differs from the original ChatGPT output. 
3. Re-vision. After using ChatGPT, students rewrite the output from a different perspective, expanding it and correcting any errors. 
4. Dual assignments. Give students the option of using ChatGPT or not. Those who use it should track changes to show what they change. 
5. Mind Maps. Ask students to create mind maps to illustrate an answer, as ChatGPT can't make visual representations of content in this way. 
6. Debates. Students debate an issue and are assessed on their performance. 
7. Videos or podcasts. Students record audio or video to answer a question. 
8. Explain your thinking. Ask students in addition to writing an answer / essay, to add comments that explain their thinking, or to do this seperately in an audio or video file. 
9. 2x2 matrix. Students compare two concepts using this or a Venn diagram. 
10. Next time. Students use ChatGPT to answer a question, then reflect on what they learned from this. 

What is clear to me from all of these reflections and suggestions, is that the approach to Assessment needs to change. Finally, I tend to agree with what JISC has stated in relation to AI writing tools, that: 

'We should really regard them as simply the next step up from spelling or grammar checkers: technology that can make everyone’s life easier’ (Weale, The Guardian, 2023)