AI Educational Technology, Gamification and Values: The Case of Collaborative Annotation Apps

AI-enabled collaboration apps such as Perusall promise to increase student engagement and learning while automating grading. On Perusall, students accumulate points by engaging in activities similar to those used by social media platforms: commenting, upvoting, and responding to users' posts. In this paper, I discuss the risks of these techniques for student learning. I first describe how the Perusall platform works and its benefits before discussing its risks. Then I discuss two potential risks: students could game the system, and the platform could replace the thick value of engagement in higher education with a thin, social media-aligned version of this value. I also discuss the inability of proxies to measure engagement.