The Science-Fictional in China’s Online Learning Initiatives
Fisher, Margaret A. "The Science-Fictional in China’s Online Learning Initiatives." SFRA Review 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2020).[1][2]
Commenting on her own experience with Chinese online teaching/learning (DaDaABC) with both assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), Fisher speculates and later notes:
Possibly because China has had to delve into the realm of the pedagogically science-fictional to arrive at the mundane of it. China’s online learning startups, DaDaABC, VIPKid, and others have been around since as early as 2010 and are part of a larger trend of AI-assisted learning that is currently ongoing within China’s schools ([Yifan] Wang et al.[WSJ article]). Such a widespread turn to AI will find no academic comparative in the United States [...]. The US, for all its innovative research, struggles to put much of it into social practice — and the American public is prone to resist AI like it resists surveillance in a post-Snowden world.[3] But China succeeds in the pedagogical science-fictional not only because it is able, with significantly less political resistance, to implement this innovation, but because culturally the innovation is successful.
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The expectation imposed upon all teachers [...] is that they exist as narrowly as possible within the company’s rules, do the job exactly as it is prescribed, with little room for the laxity or apathy that might otherwise develop over time in similarly predictable jobs. Behavior is regularly “monitored” by AI that records punctuality and student/parent feedback per lesson and in the case of a complaint or performance review, a teacher might find their class being supervised by an invisible administrator. This sounds possibly sinister — there is much in science fiction to make us fear the robotic monitoring and study of conduct to achieve improved results. But as a business model, it is an incredibly efficient and even [...] motivating system. It is an impersonal way to assure a standard of employee behavior, and any error is managed and corrected with the same lack of ill-will with which one would adjust an out-of-place part in a well-oiled machine [our emphasis — RDE]
Such reliance on AI technology can cause a DaDa teacher to feel that their work is simply to “plug-in” to an indifferent system. It is odd to have no social expectations beyond showing up and doing the work — acting a part and then logging out — with little to no managerial interaction to speak of. It is a curiously transactional experience, and the teachers who struggle most seem to be those who either cannot relinquish control, who feel the need to innovate or deviate from the content (which is often allowed so long as the lesson material remains the focus), or who otherwise cannot sustain the performative consistency demanded. Still, if the members of our “DaDa Teaching Fun” Facebook group are to be believed, the experience is positive for many. There is something apparently clarifying about having one’s emotional output valued, even commodified,[...]. This clarifying organization is partly what I find so unprecedented in DaDa’s online format, the “futuristic” something in its accomplishments so far. Because the work is uniform in many ways, because all material is pre-selected, the teacher-student relationship is mediated by the format in a way that demands emotional investment. There is little for the teacher to do beyond investing their full emotional energy into connecting with the student through the material, and the isolation of this task facilitates and fosters the formation of a strong emotional bond [...].
Cf. and definitely contrast (and perhaps then compare again) motifs of control, surveillance, communication, efficiency, and "Taylorization" in works from E. M. Foster's downright ovular "The Machine Stops" through Y. Zamiatin's We to Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS to the education theme in A. Huxley's Brave New World and on to the relatively recent The Circle as novel and film. For the correction of an error as like adjusting "an out-of-place part in a well-oiled machine" note a highly similar line in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948).
RDE, finishing, 24Oct21