In her article ‘Teacherbot inerventions in automatedteaching’ Sian Bayne describes the trap in which many educators find themselves today: The manufacturers of educational technologies, however, always speak only of the learners, never of the teachers, so that the latter feel excluded from the dialogue. Transhumanism also proposes to improve education through technology and to compensate for human fallibility, so to speak. In the scientific and educational discourse the ‘language of learning’ (459) excludes the teacher, their activity (teaching) is eliminated. ‘Here’, so Bayne, the ‘teacher is reduced to the status of a resource. (p. 459)

Through this insult, many teachers are techno-critical and refuse to accept technology in the classroom because they are not perceived as experts in their own art. Others try to adopt technology and introduce it into their teaching. From a humanistic and anthropocentric attitude they try to use technology for their own purposes, but often design processes by just extending their toolbox and not really altering the way they teach. (p. 458) Materials are digitalised, but even in their digitality they remain mere materials. But the true potential of technology is dynamic: interactivity and dialogue have made it possible to go much further and to use technology as a separate actor. Bayne and her colleagues have tried to do this with the Teacherbot.

Posthumanism in a sense says goodbye to anthropocentrism and puts man on the same level as other phenomena in nature. What about technology? Is technology as well a phenomena besides humans? Bayne suggests designing a ‘posthumanist ‘gathering” (457) where humans and technology will build together a new and different educational environment, where technology will not replace the teacher nor indoctrinate knowledge to the students.

Thus, Sian Bayne proposes an

‘assemblage of the human and non-human, an ‘entanglement’ in which the purpose of education becomes not one of ‘learning’ but one of a creative ‘gathering’, in which the human subject ‘ cannot be seen as separate from the objects of knowledge with which it is concerned.’ (p. 456)

She suggests to explore how human and non-human teachers might work together in a teaching ‘assemblage’ which refuses ontological hierarchy in the interest of productive ‘play’ (p. 460)

In this sense technology would not ‘enhance’ ‘learning’ but in assemblage of human and non-human actors something ‘other’ emerges, a playful environment perhaps. I understand that in this concept of the assemblage teachers take advantage of the potential of technology and perceive it as an actor of its own in the educational space. In this respect, the teacher must be able to bear the fact that he or she cannot completely control all processes, but must allow the result to be unpredictable.

With the example of teacherbot there is some kind of unpredictable acting on two sides: On the one hand the teacher who assembles students and teacherbot (and him/herself) cannot predict the students’ reactions to ‘botty’ and she cannot know what botty will reply exactly. But the teacher controls botty’s brain, namely the content botty will use to output her responses. From this point of view the teacher ‘knows’ that botty will utter English phrases fed with the scientific articles they put into the database. In this sense the teacher controls some experimental aspects of the ‘assemblage of code, algorithm and teacher-student agency’ (p. 461).
Perhaps this is the creative play she mentioned above. Maybe this is one new cultural potential of computation and digital data in education? Maybe we do have to be ready to experiment with the human, or question the human more? Maybe the ‘sociomaterial enactment’ would be to control the machine and feed it our knowledge in order to experience surprising and inspiring outputs, a reasonable human would not be able to do? With a deep learning approach the algorithm should be able to refine the outputs over time.