Robot or teacher?

Can robots teach in classrooms? Will they be considered more expensive than real teachers? Will schools close down? Will this be a sort of back to the past when there weren't schools?

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Comment by John Thompson on March 7, 2009 at 8:55am: Well, that's certainly one reason for teachers to keep current in their subject matter, include technology in their teaching, and continue polishing their teaching skills! :-) Education as an "industry" is changing (witness the growth of charter schools, virtual schools, online learning, technology, U of Phoenix) but many teachers still don't "get it." Remember the David Thornburg quote: "Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be."

Comment by Octávio Lima on March 7, 2009 at 8:59am: Do you mean there'll be fewer teachers because many of them will be replaced by robots or by homeschooling?

Comment by John Thompson on March 7, 2009 at 9:24am: Not sure if there will fewer, but how and where teachers teach is changing. E.g., technology allows me to teach my grad classes from home (or anywhere in the world) using a course management system and the Internet. As technology, including AI, continues to increase in sophistication and application there will be many changes. Just look at the use of robots on the assembly line.

Comment by Octávio Lima on March 7, 2009 at 9:36am: Yeah, less teachers, less schools, more robots, more internet applications.

Comment by Patrick Kutkey on March 7, 2009 at 12:47pm: Asimov broached this subject about 50 years ago with his short (and I mean short) story The Fun They Had. I started a similar discussion here a month or so ago. Anyway, anyone that isn't learning how to teach with these tools is fooling themselves. I don't think it will be robots, but we had better become fluent with the tools the world is using or we will become irrelevant.

Comment by Octávio Lima on March 7, 2009 at 1:12pm: Thanks a lot for your comments.
Patrick, can you suggest more short or very short stories about this subject? As a Portuguese teacher of English as a Second Language, I use short stories to go with the topics set by the national curriculum and Technologies/Innovation is one of the topics.

Comment by Patrick Kutkey on March 8, 2009 at 6:22pm: Here's the best I can do. I don't know of any short stories specifically on this subject besides The Fun They Had, but robots were a pretty common theme for Asimov, and the idea of them taking over a humans job is pretty universal. These links are only Asimov related. I found them by searching Google and I'm sure you could tweak the search and find something more relevant. BTW, if you've never read Asimov's Nightfall (which has nothing to do with robots or teaching), I highly recommend it. It's one of my favorite shorts of his. I think he wrote it when he was only 20 years old. It's on a lot of favorites lists. Asimov was rather vain, and it bugged him that something he wrote when he was so young was one of his most popular.

http://www.librarything.com/series/Asimov%27s%20robot%20short%20stories
http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/short_fiction_guide.html