How do emerging technologies influence society and what will organisations need to consider when utilizing them?
Technology has a huge impact on our day to day lives. Our society, has very well entered what many theorists determine as the ‘information’ age. Our world is driven by information, as is evident by the Digital 2021 Global Overview Report (We Are Social, 2021). Our online behaviours are evolving, and according to the report, the primary reason anyone uses the internet is to seek out information (We Are Social, 2021). This is highly relevant for education, and the GLAM sector, which is essentially based around the seeking and providing of information for users. It is also important that organisations will have to consider that the users active on their social media may not be the users they expect. Assumptions could lead to thinking only younger users will participate on an organisation’s social media, but Facebook found users over the age of 65 increase by 25 percent in the last year. Organisations will need to consider who exactly they’re trying to reach and which social media is best suited to that as opposed to just becoming the most popular page they can.
Further considerations will be required for uprising technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Open Education Resources (Pelletier et al., 2021). How will an organisation police these technologies? More importantly, can they even police them? OR will they be a gargantuan unstoppable force like social media that we will simply have to adapt to? If AI is used as predictive analytics as the studies suggest, will it impact the direction Higher Education puts its funding and resources into? Will that effect who is rehired the next year and who is not? And how do we remove bias from these AI systems, which are already evident in AI’s available on the internet (racial, gender, sex biases). Most importantly, how do organisations ethically use AI so that their current workforce does not join the unemployment line?
In terms of Open Education Resources, the developments in that field will have a significant impact on the education sector (Pelletier et al., 2021). As it is strongly addressing equity and inclusion, bridging the gap for minorities and lower income households. Will higher education be more accessible for more people, and will we see different types of online-hybrid learning styles outside of universities cropping up? Universities may need to consider how to stay relevant as methods of education move beyond the traditional modes of learning.
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Reference List
Pelletier, K., Brown, M., Brooks, D.C., McCormack, M., Reeves, J., & Arbino, N. (2021). 2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report 2021: Teaching and Learning Edition. EDUCAUSE. https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2021/4/2021hrteachinglearning.pdf
We Are Social. (2021). Digital 2021: Global Overview Report. https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2021/01/digital-2021-uk/?mc_cid=ed509b472e&mc_eid=632bbf90f7
Hi Tyrone, thanks for this great summary! I, too, am really interested in the way AI may infiltrate organisational decisions. There’s still so much we don’t know about the way it works, and yet organisations are happily giving AI tools more and more responsibility and authority over different tasks and decisions. For example, I found out recently that ChatGPT gives the user longer, more detailed answers if you offer it a tip. It also gives significantly shorter and lazier answers over holiday periods like Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s so important for organisations to properly understand the new technologies that they’re using, and yet it seems like so many don’t. But at the same time, ignoring these new technologies is taking a head-in-the-sand approach that leads nowhere good. I’m not entirely sure what the solution is, but it’s definitely food for thought.