17th International Congress 2024 of the German Semiotic Association “Signs.Cultures.Digitality“

Date: 24-Sep-2024 - 28-Sep-2024
Location: RPTU in Landau, Germany
Contact: Daniel Rellstab
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://www.semiotik.eu/zeichen.kulturen.digitalitaet-2024

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Language Acquisition; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics

Meeting Description:

The German Semiotic Association organizes conferences, colloquia, workshops, courses, and lecture series on core areas of its research fields to achieve its goals. Moreover, every three years, the association organizes an international congress.

"AI in Education. Automated generation and mediation of sign processes in education - the end of learning?"

So-called artificial intelligence is increasingly involved in everyday semiotic processes and, thus, also in education. The data on which machine generation processes are based are generated from previous user behavior or their semiotic traces in databases and digital networks. For some time now, these "intelligent" systems have found their way into everyday and professional musical, pictorial, cinematic, and graphic, i.e., multimodal, sign production. They all draw on an immense data pool of pre-existing and algorithmically ordered presets that provide samples, filters, and content. Algorithms perform data generation, collection, analysis, sorting, and communication in an endless cycle. The ostensible goal is to achieve continuous performance optimization for the machines and their users.

AI has long been harnessed in formal and informal teaching-learning contexts and on specific platforms such as Maths-Whizz, Google Classroom, or Duolingo. Teachers use AI to correct assignments and exams or analyze students’ learning behavior. On a macro level, AI is used to coordinate curricula or room allocation or to design lessons according to curricula, class level, and didactic appropriateness. On a micro level, AI can organize individual assignments and learning paths based on personal performance analysis. In this respect, AI seems to increase the efficiency of educational and organizational processes in educational institutions.

Yet the skeptical voices remain. One of the arguments against AI is that education needs interpersonal interaction. Teachers and learners create learning cultures through communicative reciprocity in concrete situations, constituting meaning interactively, intersubjectively, and situationally. Subjectively appropriated bodies of knowledge are produced by teachers and learners through the joint production and interpretation of signs. The potential shift of the output of sign-like knowledge stocks into automated AI processes requires adapting educational tools and practices. It fundamentally challenges the outlined traditional forms of learning cultures.

In our panel, we want to explore from sign-theoretical and applied perspectives the questions of how AI is used in education, how these applications can also be semiotically explicated, and to what extent learning needs to be rethought and conceptualized in the age of AI. Thus, we welcome presentation ideas that address, for example, the following problems:
- Which AI applications are used today in formal and informal teaching-learning contexts, and how can these applications be analyzed from a semiotic perspective?
- How can learning processes in the age of AI be grasped from a semiotic perspective?
- What does digital literacy mean or imply for teachers and learners concerning current AI applications?
- To what extent can culture be implemented as a meaningful reference world for data generation, analysis, and evaluation using AI technology in teaching/learning scenarios?
- Which didactic-methodological procedures are suitable from a semiotic perspective and why?
- How can new AI-specific sign practices, such as prompting, be semiotically classified in the teaching/learning context?