Philosophical Dimension of Today’s Educational Technologies: Framing Ethical Landscape of the Smart Education Domain

Abstract

Although smart education is one of the most rapidly expanding technological practices nowadays, we still don’t know much about the consequences that new educational technologies might have on the future generation of learners. While smart education is often used as an ‘umbrella term’ which covers a wide variety of different trends and approaches in today’s education, it seems useful to narrow the definition of this term before going deeper into the ethical analysis of smart education more in general. Considering this fact, the present paper claims that the smart education domain consists of three main components, namely, smart pedagogy, smart learning, and smart educational technologies. Keeping this in mind in what follows I propose a description of the ethical problems from every component. In the case of smart pedagogy, I emphasize the issue of new responsibilities and new competencies that come with novel digital technologies. In the case of smart learning, I am showing how big data and AI solutions might raise significant privacy issues. Finally, in relation to smart educational technologies, I focus on AI adaptive educational systems which might provide highly personalized educational solutions. Although AI adaptive educational systems can strongly improve the efficiency and interactivity of the learning experience this technological system might also lead to unpredicted consequences related to students’ attention and other cognitive and metacognitive abilities. The present paper also stands in a deep relation to current discussion in contemporary philosophy of technology by questioning the ethical nature of the current digital artifacts. According to many contemporary philosophies of technology digital artifacts such as computer, AI systems and smartphones are not morally neutral. On the contrary, these digital technologies are actively changing our moral behavior, transform our responsibilities and ethical navigation more in general. As I am going to show in the present paper, digital technologies from the domain of smart education are not an exclusion.