Media educators from a range of institutions presented their approaches to modern media education at this week’s MetExpo.
Jessica Micallef, Head Teacher of the audio and journalism subjects explained the TAFE NSW training offered in radio, podcasting, screen, social media and journalism at a range of certificate levels.
Bradfield College is a specialist TAFE creative industries school, located at St Leonards in Sydney. Teachers Michael and Chloe (main pic above) explained that the students from their courses were filming and recording the conference for a live broadcast feed, in conjunction with students from AUT (Auckland University of Technology).
AUT was represented at the conference by Dafydd Sills-Jones, who described the hands on production approach for career development that is taken by Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.
Steve Murphy, the Director of Teaching and Learning at AFTRS talked about the innovations available at AFTRS, including the latest screen and audio production technology. He also explained that the school regularly works with industry to expand its own curriculum and build industry connections for students.
On the agenda for all the educators was the use of Ai and its inclusion in the syllabus. They agreed that it is important to include Ai and that young people are already experimenting with it, but that the big picture of Ai is also important to teach, as well as just the hands on daily use of it. A range of pros and cons about teaching Ai were discussed:
“Ai is a tool that is aleready in use on the workplace… it will have impacts that we don’t even understand yet… what matters is that students can use it when the enter the workplace.
“Our students are digital natives, they don’t always see the implications of using Ai, but they are using it, so teachers need to be up to date with it, so they can engage with students. We also need to make them aware of what is happening behind thne basic open Ai interfaces…
“Ai takes a lot of the critical thinking away the teaching and learning process. The danger is that they often don’t know or ask where is the ChatGPT data coming from. Criticial cognitive engagement has dropped off…
“Ai is food for stimulating debates, helping them to get enough information to be involved then to listen and think about the issue…
“Maybe calling it all Ai is a mistake, lets identify the bits of Ai that can work and the other bits that may not be useful or may be dangerous due to misinformation or bad data.”
The educators are also pondering the question, “what will entry level jobs look like in the future when Ai replaces some or all of them, what will be the new entry level jobs?”
The panel consisted of Lutfi Hady, Jessica Micallef, Craig Daalmeijer-Power, Dafydd Sills-Jones, Stephen Murphy, Chloe Angel, Michael McLennan with input from current students. It was moderated by SMPTE Oceania Chair Paul Whybrow.
Photo (c) S Ahern radioinfo