Penmanship

A traditional ideation tool is the pen or the pencil - as in the proverbial sketch on paper. In the digital age, however, the sketch can be hand-drawn either on paper or a digital tablet. Still the underlying art, technique, or style of drawing, or writing by hand using a writing instrument reveal traditions and school curricula, also known as penmanship. For example, the traditional brush calligraphy, which is a fine visual art form is commonly prescribed in Asian schools although the curricula separate everyday handwriting from artistic brushwork. Yet to integrate calligraphy into their mandatory national curricula, Asian schools are said to preserve cultural heritage, build patience, and teach proper character structure. Interestingly, in UK design education, which attracts many international students, Asian students often stand out in their artful penmanship, and certainly compared to their British-schooled peers who often lack the skills of using pen and paper artistically, from junior school to high school. But the use of digital tools is growing in Asia too, a trend which favours keyboard proficiency. And so, in China, for example, regular calligraphy education is being reduced in the age of screen-based teaching and learning, and social media.  

GenAI storming

GenAI models, such as ChatGPT and  Midjourney, have become ubiquitous in design education, across disciplines and year-levels. But whereas the Polyannas may hail GenAI as a modern deus ex machina, and "AI Doomsters" warn of a sci-fi style global takeover, a more sensible and pragmatic approach is that GenAI can be a tool for broad ideation expanding conceptual horizons while reducing time spent on routine or repetitive tasks like drafting, organising or summarising research data. Yet while GenAI models, which uses a top-down predictive approach with no true domain understanding, can offer students lots of creative ideas, GenAI also leads to concerns over plagiarism, that is, output without critical verification as copyrighted material is being used to train AI models without permission. Moreover, from a learning perspective, as tutors are increasingly using GenAI for teaching and assessment purposes, GenAI raises ethical issues that impact the tutor-student relationship. How, then, and to use academic jargon, to assess accurately the learner's procedural knowledge ("knowing how"), conditional knowledge ("knowing when, where and why") rather than just declarative knowledge ("knowing that"). That is, what proof that the student not only have "tool competency" (knowing that) but also "comprehensive competency" (knowing how and why)? This dilemma suggests assessment in the age of AI has become a wicked problem, that is, a problem that resists clear definition, is on-going and involves ethical trade-offs. Although individual's practice and experience of GenAI differ, in an increasingly corporate-driven educational environment influenced by high stakes social media, GenAI reveals new relationships between students as service recipients, tutors as delivery partners, and faculty as delivery organisation. And so, in this brave new AI world, where do knowledge and authenticity reside, and what is being evaluated or valued?