2022年2月16日に教員学術研究発表会が実施されました。この発表会は英語コミュニケーション学科に所属する先生方の研究を発表するものです。教育とテクノロジーの関係について研究をしているライアン・ケビン先生に発表について書いていただきました！
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We only had 40 minutes, so I decided to give a choice to all the teachers who were attending. I gave a short introduction about Metaphors for Teaching. I talked about my early days of teaching when I thought teaching was like attacking the problem of learning. I had to improve my weapons, and get new weapons, to defeat the problem. Another professor, Kozawa-sensei, taught about literature in the 19th century, authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He was also a Buddhist. He thought teaching was like tending a garden. You have to prepare the soil, plant the seeds, take care of it, all before you can harvest. It is a long process you have to do each year. I liked his idea much better than mine.
Most of my research is in technology and teaching, or Educational Technology (EdTech). I had seven presentations ready, and asked them which ones they were most interested in. Teachers chose one presentation on The Role of the Teacher. I explained about 23 different skills or roles that a teacher had to do to be successful. They included things like being a Coordinator and a Coach, a Moderator and a Designer, a Salesperson, and a Critic. But the most important one is being a Learner. A teacher should show students how they learn, to demonstrate how learning means making mistakes, trying new things, failing, and trying again.
The second part of the presentation was about the future. We talked about Artificial Intelligence and how it will change teaching by making it easier for teachers and students (it will do more of the uninteresting work) and how it will make teaching harder because we need to learn how to use these new tools. Another technology called Blockchain is famous for a new kind of money, Bitcoin. But in the future, it will help teachers and students keep track of teaching and learning and share that with other people. A teacher, for example, could teach a course and charge money for both the course and the textbook. They could keep grades, but the students could keep their own work from many teachers in a portfolio to share when looking for a job. The final technology is Translation. It is becoming so good that it is very easy to cheat on writing assignments. But it is also a great way to learn quickly if you use it right.
