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The tourism industry is facing significant challenges in an ever-changing world marked by globalisation, digitalisation and societal shifts. The issues of overtourism and massification exacerbate concerns about sustainability and the industry's impact on the environment and local communities. These concerns arise as profit-driven ideologies overshadow the industry's original vocation to contribute to meaningful encounters, well-being and social justice. This chapter explores the cultivation of humaneness and conscience within tourism through education, knowledge and personal reflection. Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Socrates' philosophy, it highlights the importance of critical thinking and a comprehensive understanding of the industry's role in shaping alternative futures. Tourism higher education plays a pivotal role in empowering students to become catalysts for systemic transformation. Furthermore, this chapter emphasises the value of embracing diverse viewpoints and engaging in meaningful encounters and dialogues with local communities and stakeholders to collaboratively imagine and implement sustainable practices. Only by dismantling entrenched habits through critical thinking and fostering collaboration can the tourism industry envision alternative trajectories towards a more conscientious and humane path forward.

A number of recent artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technologies, including summarisers, paraphrasers and the cutting-edge chatbots not only have outstanding potentials in modern educational systems but also could lead to a dramatic paradigm shift in the whole education process. This study aims to explore the factors that shape the academic community’s desire and intention to use AI conversational chatbot technology, with a particular focus on the leading ChatGPT.

This study uses a mixed method approach to explore the educators’ adoption of chatbots through an empirically validated model. The model, known as the “Educators’ Adoption of ChatGPT”, was developed by integrating the theoretical foundations of both the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and Status Quo Bias (SQB) frameworks, as well as insights gathered from interviews. The relationships within this model were then tested using a quantitative approach. The partial least squares-structural equation modelling method was used to analyse 243 valid survey responses.

The outcomes of the analysis indicated that perceived educators’ effort expectancy, educators’ autonomous motivation, perceived learners’ AI competency, perceived educators’ competency, innovative behaviour towards technological agility and perceived students’ engagement are significant determinants of educators’ intention to use chatbots. In contrast, perceived unfair evaluation of students, perceived students’ overreliance and perceived bias/inaccuracies were shown to have significant impacts on the resistance to use the technology, which typically implies a negatively significant influence on the educators’ use intention. Interestingly, perceived fraudulent use of ChatGPT was proven insignificant on the resistance to use chatbots.

This study makes a significant contribution to the field of educational technology by filling the gap in research on the use and acceptance of AI-enabled assistants in education. It proposes an original, empirically validated model of educator adoption, which identifies the factors that influence educators’ willingness to use chatbots in higher education and offers valuable insights for practical implementation.

Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for teachers seeking to instill in their students habits of critical, creative, and lateral thinking. In Australia as elsewhere, blueprint educational documents embody lofty aspirational statements of inclusion and investment in people and their potential. Yoked to this is a regime routinely imposing high-stakes basic-skills testing on school students, with increasingly constrictive ways of doing, while privileging competition over collaboration. This chapter explores more informal, organic learning. This self-study narrative inquiry explores my career in terms of a struggle to be my most evolved, enlightened self, as opposed to a small-minded, small-hearted mini-me. To balance this, I examine responsible autonomy (including my own), rather than freedom. This chapter also explores investment in humans, with the reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. It draws and reflects upon events in or impacting my hometown, Sydney, Australia, focusing largely on WorldPride, the Women's World Cup, and a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, all of which took place as I compiled this chapter. Accordingly, the narrative focuses primarily on sexuality, gender, and race. I explore the capacity of my surroundings to teach me and my capacity to learn from my surroundings. The findings and discussion comprise diary-type entries of significant events and their implications for (my) excessive entitlement. The final section of this chapter reviews what and how I have learned.