Overview
Until recently, my research has mostly focused on race in the American education system, propaganda and education, and the effect of technology on the American education system. I currently have one manuscript completed and accepted, pending revisions, the journal Education and Culture. The article, “Selves in need of Advancement”: Dewey, Occupations, and the Lingering Influence of Herbartian Concepts on Dewey’s Philosophy of Education, analyzes how beliefs about the different intellectual capacities of non-Northern European ethnic groups and races affected the progressive philosopher John Dewey’s writing about education in America.
Due to requests for material from colleagues at external institutions, and the explosion in interest generated by ChatGPT, I have recently started to focus on the use of generative AI in education (AIED). I began this line of research around the time of my last review, and so far it has resulted in two forthcoming publications and one article, yet to be published. The latter article, “Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education”, was co-written with colleagues from the Learning Design Lab in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. This article was submitted to Educational Researcher but was not picked up. Currently, it is published on Arxiv. The research group is currently making some alterations to the piece and will resubmit to a different journal. Of the two forthcoming articles, the first, AI in Education: Some Thoughts about Ethics, Equity, and Social Impact, was written for inclusion in an edited volume of essays. In this article I survey the current reception of AI in education, and discuss some ideological, social, and cultural factors which should encourage the use of caution and understanding in the application of AI to the field of education. The second publication, “AI, Language, and Education: Bias and Prejudice in Text and Corpus Analysis“, was written for inclusion in an encyclopedia to be published by Springer and examines the technological foundations of LLM’s and generative AI in linguistic corpora and the field of linguistics. Although AIED has become something of a trend recently, I intend to continue to publish in this area, since it combines my long-standing concern with ideology and culture, with technology and education. Also, I believe that it dovetails nicely with my research project on virtual influencers/avatars, which I began before looking into AI.
The projects mentioned above is a writing partnership I have started with Dr. Xiaoyu Xu, of SUNY Cortland’s Communications Department. Dr. Xu and I plan to produce an article discussing some features of the relatively new phenomenon of virtual influencers on social media. In the Fall of 2023, I visited the Research and Sponsored Programs Office and learned of an NSF Grant for which this project might be a good candidate. I was very ambitious and eager to submit an application by the nearest deadline at the end of this month, but I and my partner realized that the application would need much more work in order to have the greatest chances of success. We now plan to apply for some internal funding first (FRP) so that we can obtain some preliminary results that can be included in our application for the NSF grant later this year.
In addition to these, I am working on an essay to be included as a chapter in an edited volume, “White Hands and Immaterial Labor: The Role of Knowledge Workers in the Political Landscape of Nascent Neo-Feudalism“, which will examine the changing role of intellectuals in the political life of Western democracies at the late stages of neoliberal capitalist evolution. The volume itself will include works that will discuss life and education in our current world by focusing on how the developments of neoliberal Capitalism have upended life and social relations for everyone in society.