This column’s weeks 7, 11,17, 33, and 62 (last week) confronted artificial intelligence (AI) issues and in 14 weeks, much has been changed technologically, philosophically, and communicatively. Should we have cultivated optimism in the era of AI? Now we should.
“If we remain paralyzed by our fears, we will miss many hopes and opportunities that AI brings: personalized learning and teacher support, early intervention and resource allocation, professional development and parent engagement, disaster response and preparedness, etc.,” Daniel Franklin E. Pilario of the Congregation of the Mission (CM) tells his academic and broader extensions community.
A top contextual theologian, researcher, and writer in the Philippines, Pilario barefacedly mentions to the faithful flock that he abhorred technologies at the outset, especially because “I was a small boy in a small rural town called Oslob when I heard my parish priest preach against the coming of electricity.” It was the same cynical time, he says, when people started using calculators and online social networking sites. “Sayang ang oras sa Facebook.” “Puro bisyo sa gabing may kuryente.” “Pupurol ang utak sa kaka-calcu.”
Pilario was wrong. So were we and many communities in the countryside.
Life as it turns out in the contemporary world is “unthinkable” without FB, calculator, and electricity, Pilario later concedes.
“We should also look beyond and conquer our fears,” notes the educator-priest, who was once outsmarted by his students when he threw up classroom interrogations, the responses of which were done ingeniously thanks to the knowledge they acquired from their social media accounts.
Pilario notes: “It is the same with AI. For all you know, our students are already there. We are already late.”
For decades and centuries, the guiding principles of founders of schools, colleges, and universities in the Philippines continue to characterize our longing for social transformation, hard-earned-and-dissipated-and-sometimes-gone-again-and-back-again freedoms, love of country and its people, technological advances, and improved living conditions of rural people, especially the poor.
What a providential time for Pilario to prove doubters wrong in terms of rallying the students, academic personnel, government officials from DepEd and CHED, and all other stakeholders of the education sector and prod all, himself included, to stay on target of meeting all sorts of challenges, even the systemic ones. He has just been installed as president of a university which means that its being ranked in the Top 5 best universities in the Philippines by the international higher education analysis firm Quacquarelli Symonds must be maintained or at least be within a certain high-ranking range.
Like all other heads of higher education institutions, Pilario, the new head of Adamson University, needs to answer the tests of time as fast as he can, as razor-sharp as he can, as kind and caring as he and other CMs can.
The 92-year-old Vincentian institution of learning and its dynamic leadership – and add counterparts in the perennial leaders UP, Ateneo, La Salle, and UST – must maintain their high rankings not because the world standards want it that way, but because the young and tech-savvy generation needs it that way, while the other leading colleges and universities need to improve constantly and enormously, too.
Father Danny continues: “Many people are afraid of (AI), and they have good reasons to do so. Teachers have always felt threatened by AI. Questions like these are heard from all sectors: How do we detect plagiarism or train students to think for themselves? What about data privacy when all your digital footprints are under surveillance? How do we think of transparency and accountability in these new contexts? How do we form our students in morality or spirituality when all they have are technologies? For sure, these are questions that all educational institutions need to address.”
“All” is the operative word. We all need to conquer our fears in the academe. We all need to add ourselves to instituting reforms in the education sector which is in deep crisis and with young learners facing miseducation (EDCOM II, 2024). We all need to help once and for all.
The university president gives a reminder to not lose hope which he considers as the spirit of the gospel and relives some rewards of biblical hope: “Jonah had to go through darkness, and after three days, he was alive to preach the good news to Nineveh. Jesus went through crucifixion, and after three days, he was resurrected… (W)e should be signs of hope to our struggling people, our students who are suffering from whatever pains, and our colleagues who are going through difficult times.”
Change technologically (AI-inspired), philosophically (God-inspired), and communicatively (with proper message applying natural intelligence) we must.
DC Alviar
Professor DC Alviar serves as a member of the steering committee of the Philippine International Studies Organization (PHISO). He was part of National University’s community extension project that imparted the five disciplines of a learning organization (Senge, 1990) to communities in a local government unit. He writes and edits local reports for Mega Scene. He graduated with a master’s degree in development communication from the University of the Philippines Open University in Los Baños. He recently defended a dissertation proposal for his doctorate degree in communication at the same graduate school under a Philippine government scholarship grant. He was editor-in-chief of his high school paper Ang Ugat and the Adamson News.
