The three-day TECH-2017, international education conference organised by the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, being held in Visakhapatnam, saw a lot of deliberations on education, especially on the innovative methods of teaching.
Experts in education, psychology and artificial intelligence and free thinkers from across the globe deliberated on different issues and have come up with contrasting opinions.
While one favoured the use of technology the other suggested that technology overdose can hamper a child’s growth. Speaking to The Hindu , Dr Heather Knight, assistant professor of Robotics at Oregon State University, said robots can be used and the use of social robots can work as an entertainment tool in education.
“It is fun learning with robots. And my focus area is on how robots can learn from students rather than how students can learn from the robots,” said Dr. Heather.
On the other hand Jordan Shapiro, professor at Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage Department, says “introducing technology in education is good but, it should be remembered that we should dominate technology and technology should not be allowed to dominate over us. But he favoured the use of games in teaching.”
Prof. Shapiro went ahead to say “in today’s education values is missing and we should think of redemption rather than innovation”.
On the contrary DR. Heather said “it will not take much time when social robots will have more significance and will also have emotional intelligence.”
“Robots will be part of task making and story telling and students will learn better interacting with robots. I personally like systems in which people and robots work together because still humans are very creative and very good at understanding what matters to other people,” she said.
According to her social robots are currently playing a great role in helping the autistic kids learn social skills.
On the other hand Prof. Jordan said education should be made more value-based. “Through education we can make students to become more compassionate,” he said.
