Carmel Kent had a dream. A dream about the future of education. She then encountered Dall-e, an AI tool that generates digital images from natural language descriptions. This is the result of Carmel’s ‘conversation’ with Dall-e. We would welcome any further contributions to the blog on this theme, long or short, illustrated or not – what do you think our educational future could look like? 

Like any one of us, I dream a lot (on all levels of consciousness) about how learning would or could look in my community, country, university or globally. I am often very anxious about it. However, I sometimes get so hopeful that I can barely keep myself from jumping excitedly or just mumbling all over the place. I guess as long as I keep on imagining – I keep on learning and vice versa.

For this exercise, I needed a partner to bounce some balls with; it would be even better if this partner could do something I am not very able at – such as create some visuals. So, I found Dall-e. As it turns out, she was even available exactly when I wanted to chat. She was quite patient with my indecisive thoughts and my constant and iterative search for appropriate words. So, we had this back-and-forth: me telling her what I see, she responding with how she sees what I just shared with her, me thinking of new themes coming from her responses, and so it went.

Here is a synopsis of our dialogue:

At first, I was consumed with worry about the climate crisis. I kept imagining us, humans trying to figure us what went wrong at the very last minute:

Even when I took us humans inside, trying to learn about our world from an imaginative, safe technology-oriented shelter, it still looked quite depressing:

I then turned to more optimistic scenarios:

What if we do become kinder to our surroundings?

What if we also become kinder to children and young people?

What if we stop imposing certain types of knowledge and ways of knowing on them, and let them explore their own ways of learning while experimenting with what works for them and keeping them curious about themselves?

Nice, don’t you think?

I then asked Dall-e what if it’s not just children? How would it look if people, no matter how old, could get out of schools and institutions and get together in learning communities, bringing their life, families and experiences into whatever new paths they want to explore? Yes, at this point, I became a bit ‘light-headed’, I guess. But she was still there with me:

I was in the flow … maybe … just maybe … ‘learning’ or ‘education’ will not be associated necessarily with fixed qualifications, with marginalising people who cannot follow those fixed paths, or with following the artificial processes that give us the illusion of progress (e.g., you’re graduate year 2, you will now start year 3)?

Could learning become an activity associated with sensory life around the clock? with different people, different cultures and geographies? As Papert said when asked what he would change about education now that we have technology available to us:

“Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn”.

I must say, Dall-e and I started connecting at this point. I felt we are getting somewhere. I loved how she kept the characters in her drawing a bit blurry, leaving me some space to guess what they were up to… were they building something? Growing new vegetables? Immersed in a discussion? Taking an online course? Reading a book? Daydreaming like she and I were?

I loved how the objects in her drawings didn’t always look like something I could quickly identify from my life. Perhaps those people are innovating? Maybe they are creating a world so different from what I imagined when Dall-e and I started chatting.

I guess that’s the beauty of collaborative learning: you can only know how it starts…