#TLTSYM18 - Pumped for the Future! - How Technology will drive Teaching and Teachers (Arghajeet Saha)

Recently, I attended the Teaching and Learning Symposium'18 at the Penn Stater and it proved to an absolutely gratifying experience which will stay with me for a fairly long time.  To be honest, I was in a two-state of mind of how it might pan out, however at the end of it all, I was extremely happy and satisfied.  One of the brightest spots of the day for me was the opening keynote by Dr. Stephen Dubner. I actually couldn't believe when I saw his name on the booklet which detailed the schedule for the day, as Dr. Dubner's 'Freakonomics' is an absolute favorite of mine. It was almost a dream come true to see him in front of my very own eyes and what transpired to be a wonderful address. Dr. Dubner made humorous annotations about how economics often drives the way our society interacts with its various components and how economics will also determine the future of agriculture. His humorous analogies with Dr. Keith Chan's (a Yale economist) work to teach Capuchin monkeys how to use the money, why the average US buyer was drawn towards Turkey meat, how their reproductive cycles have changed as a consequence of hybrid breeding to mitigate consumer demand and how food waste can empower us to self-reflect for those who don't have a regular guarantee of morsel. His talk was laced with anecdotes, satire and made the deep, delving concepts of economics very easy for all of the audience to comprehend like he did with 'Freakonomics'. If the word 'sublime' could be attested to something, it has to be his keynote address. 

After the keynote, I attend two sessions. The first was, 'Active Learning with Simulations', which I found to be innovative - a new way of accessibility or get students interested in classroom teaching.  The concept dealt with using simulations/sites replicating teaching to enable the students to have more understanding of the topic with an example of the Department of Higher Education at Penn State World Campus being one of the first sectors to have started using it.  It also had a very intuitive interface, with respect to providing decision-making tools to the students and following it up with a continuation or end of a decision query. Some interesting modifications included a pathway in which the student/teacher involved can keep a tab on the progress.  

My final session was, 'Using Data Science in Support of Learning'. I was fascinated by this topic and found it deeply relatable. Firstly, because for a fairly long time, I have been hooked on the uses of deep learning, algorithmic structures, and AI in daily life. Also, as someone whose work involved large-scale computation, I couldn't have been more pleased to see this as a subject that people involved in teaching were considering seriously. The panel involved people from Penn State Behrend and University Park campuses and explained how AI has made great strides in areas of semantics, detection of grammatical error and sentence structures. How it is valid to even try and make question papers through deep learning (or AI) and how it reduces the aspect of human error or how it can be used to allow courses based on a student preference. However, they were not hesitant to state that all of these innovations were still in beta-testing stage and more strides were required.  It was an extremely vital session considering how technology would enable teaching, however, I would want to believe that human interaction will still play an important role, irrespective and everything would not be automated. 

The symposium on its totality was joyous, it made me have a glimpse at what the future holds and how the present can learn from the past in retrospect. It made me have a lowdown on how teaching will proceed/has the capacity to engage in the future with the involvement of technology and how we, as teachers can make it more progressive, humane and wondrous.