AI + MEDIA ARTS = HOLISTIC EDUCATION

By Dain Olsen 

Media arts is the perfect complement to AI because it is holistic, embodied, social and project-based. It is becoming clear that AI can support basic academic instruction and personalized learning. AI can function as a tutor to scaffold the student’s understanding, and correct any misunderstandings through friendly and nonjudgmental responses and exercises. It could eventually supplement that with a range of interactive multimedia, such as graphics, animations and videos.

This ultimately means that classroom instruction can move to higher orders, beyond basic skills, where students are more active in actually applying their learning in real world contexts. As per cognitive and learning science, these are enriched contexts that can deepen the learning so it is more resilient and transferrable.

Media arts provides these types of active learning situations, where students themselves produce multimedia illustrations, stories and models of the content. Essentially, media arts communications, design, interactivity and virtuality are at the center of our society because they serve this function. Schools and teachers are in the business of explaining content to students so that they understand it. In media arts, students take on this role of explaining or demonstrating the content.

Media arts puts students in the position of teaching a topic to the student audience. They go through a series of multimodal processes in order to do this, which deepens their own understanding. They research the topic and begin to understand it in their own terms. They brainstorm what ways to explain and illustrate that topic. They organize it by writing scripts and developing storyboards. They act it out or represent it in their narrations, dialogues, stories, scenes and soundtracks. They produce it in their animations, 3D models or video games. They analyze their production and evaluate its effectiveness. Such project management requires a wide range of abilities and competencies, such as communication, coordination, management, logistics, negotiation, scheduling, etc.

This is an aesthetically and multimodally holistic process, which develops students' rounded skills, competencies and cognitive development. Media arts versatile and adaptable studios and laboratories can support these sorts of collaborative, active, community connected processes, where the standard classroom cannot.  AI needs media arts in order to advance education to a new, student-centered and 21st C. model. 

Unfortunately, the emphases in AI is on its narrow support for traditional approaches to instruction. This often leads to the use of AI to bypass difficult academic tasks and critical thinking. In the case of media arts productions, some edtech companies are even suggesting that students use AI tools to produce any multimedia. They would not have to go through the rigorous, holistic processes described above to do this. They can just state a prompt and AI produces the multimedia. Consider what students are missing when they overuse AI.

This is the ultimate dilemma for AI in education. What cognitive processes should it replace in instruction? Media arts production presents a comprehensive multimodal and holistic range of cognitive processes. In this regard, Einstein said,  “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”