Wednesday, December 6th 2023, the University of Bucharest, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, organized, as part of the fifth edition of the OCDE Global Forum regarding the future of Education and Competencies 2030, an interdisciplinary workshop titled Digital Humanities and Ethics of AI @UniBuc.
The moderators of the event – which was hosted in the Lecture Hall of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest – were Professor Lucian Ciolan, PhD, vice-rector for Development Projects, Lifelong Learning and Educational Infrastructure and coordinator of Hub CIVIS 5 – Technological and Digital Transformation, and professor Romiță Iucu, PhD, president of the Board of Trustees of the University of Bucharest, coordinator of the EduLAB – UNICA Workgroup and of the European Diploma Subgroup of the FOR EU working group within the European Commission.
Several official delegates, dignitaries, board members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), international experts, academic professors, students, mass-media representatives and officials from the Ministry of Education in Romania attended the event, along with teaching staff of the University of Bucharest.
The two-hour long workshop was structured as follows: introduction; four interventions; a Q&A session; conclusions.
In the opening of the session, Professor Lucian Ciolan presented the University of Bucharest to the participants, highlighting the importance of its affiliation to CIVIS – A European Civic University Alliance.
“We are a civic network of universities with well-determined social responsibility. The reason for developing this Alliance is an obvious one: to share resources, to be competitive, to have higher standards and to act as a whole. Also, to bring together 11 universities from different countries, with the goal to create common projects and study programs – it is a complex and difficult process. For me, this has been the biggest challenge in the past years, but we believe, at the same time, that it will lead us to a new educational perspective”, noted professor Lucian Ciolan.
Professor Romiță Iucu emphasized the opportunities the University of Bucharest has as a member of a community space of responsible and innovative education, which is currently – in the digital era – in a continual redefining process. At the same time, he pointed out the role that the University of Bucharest has undertaken in launching the current year’s edition of the OECD international Report – Education a Glance 2023, by engaging a team of educational and public policies experts from the University of Bucharest.
“Two months ago, the University of Bucharest participated in launching the OECD international report Education a Glance 2023, which includes, for the first time, data about Romania. It has been an honor to take part in this project. The PISA test ranking by countries was also published yesterday”, professor Romiță Iucu remarked.
The data regarding Romania, which the report includes as a premiere, also refers to the impact of digitalization on education, theme approached unanimously by each of the four presentations held at the event.
Thus, the series of conferences was inaugurated by lecturer Anca Dinu, PhD, teaching staff at UB’s Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, who held a lecture titled Teaching and learning in humanities embedding digital technologies / AI. Coordinator of the Digital Humanities master, Anca Dinu underlined the fact that UB programmes, among which the above mentioned, were adapted to the tendencies and current curriculum that were brought about by the fulminant rise of AI technologies, such as deep learning and large language models. In this way, graduates are not only proficient in using digital technology, but are also capable of applying it in a solution-oriented manner.
Next, lecturer Mihaela Constantinescu, PhD, teaching staff at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest and executive director of the Center for Research in Applied Ethics (CCEA), proposed a prospective theme that raised ethical problems: GenAI Avatars and the techno-moral future of education.
On the background of an increasingly technologized world, marked by emergent artificial entities such as avatars powered by generative AI, the future of education needs to encompass relevant skills for meaningful human-AI interaction. Integrating techno-moral virtues across educational fields has the potential to empower next generations to manage technological complexity in a responsible manner. In a complex and volatile world, only intertwined responsibility, and the ethics in design for AI can reduce the risks of uncertainty.
Lecturer Sergiu Nisioi, PhD, teaching staff at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in UB, held the lecture A perspective of the Tech experts: AI, Blockchain and Big Data programmes. He accentuated the fact that “in the current AI hype, it is in our duty as teachers for AI and Computer Science not only to provide an understanding of the technical details behind statistical learning methods, but also to encourage a situated, practical, and engaged thinking of the socio-economic impact of these tools. This would not be possible without continuing to develop foundational research in AI, to release reproducible and explainable models, and to foster trans-disciplinary collaboration, particularly with existing partnerships in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.”
The final presentation of the conference was held by associate professor Olimpius Istrate, PhD, teaching staff at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, who presented his paper A discussant integration of perspectives, “wearing” education/pedagogy lenses. The professor highlighted that digital technologies redefine education and bring new possibilities, they transform it, showing plausible directions for “reinvention” on foundations not only technological but (rather) cultural, social, professional, economic, and mostly humanistic. Whilst there is a recognized need to redesign educational situations and learning paths, the ingredients for the new recipes seem unbalanced and the result uncertain.
“Should a new digital pedagogy emerge?”; “Is there a new taxonomy of the educational processes?” are some of the questions he proposed to the participants at the conference.
In the final act of the conference, the lecturers and audience reflected on the future of education and of the necessary competencies of the actors involved in 2030, either students, professors and/or avatars, concluding that AI is a component that needs to be accepted, integrated and valorized in the educational process, not rejected, but used responsibly without disregarding ethics.
OECD held the first editions of the Forum during the pandemic context, in virtual format, in spring and fall 2020. The spring edition in 2021 was organized by Estonia, and in 2022, the fourth edition of the Forum took place between May 31st – 2nd of June, in hybrid format, in Jerusalem, Israel.
You can access more information of the Digital Humanities and Ethics of AI @UniBuc workshop here.