NCTE 2023

“It can hardly be a coincidence that jazz first emerged shortly after the rise of the record business: in a previous era, improvisations could hardly have been preserved...”
–Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

Whatever else can be said about the past few years, they have set the context for an explosion in new uses of technology for learning. The COVID pandemic thrust educators into Emergency Remote Learning, and then further provided a test bed for exploration of innovations in hybrid teaching modalities. Access to broadband and associated cloud technologies has become enshrined as a fundamental human right. And in recent months, generative AI for both image and text has taken the worlds of work and education by storm, overturning established roles for humans and machines in the creative process. With all of this change at hand, it would be tempting to try to freeze things for a while, and to come up with a simple rule book for the new toolsets. However, as we shall see, there is a far better approach available, one that - much like jazz - references improvisational practice, while being grounded in clear objectives and models. Indeed, also like jazz at its birth, this approach only becomes fully feasible in the context of new technologies. And in particular, we shall see that language instruction acquires new dimensions in this environment, both in how it is executed, as well as in its impact on the surrounding world.