Han Yifan: Digital-Intelligent Life: A New Orientation for the Life-Oriented Transformation of Ideological and Political Teaching Empowered by Digital Technology
Currently, digital technology is increasingly integrating into all fields of economic and social development. The inflection point of "digitally intelligent life" (shuzhi shenghuo) has arrived and is accelerating, profoundly influencing and changing people's daily lifestyles, including education, consumption, transportation, and entertainment. The report to the 20th CPC National Congress led the trend of the times by explicitly proposing the requirements to "accelerate the construction of a Digital China" and "advance the digitalization of education," providing a major opportunity for digital technology to empower the "living" (shenghuohua) [1] of ideological and political theory course teaching in universities. Ideological and political courses must be integrated with reality; they "should not only be taught in the classroom, but also in social life." Firmly grasping this teaching requirement, leveraging the advantages of digital technology to empower the "living" of university ideological and political teaching, and achieving the deep integration of digital technology with this process is a necessary step to improve the quality and effectiveness of such courses. At present, digital technologies characterized by big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are sketching a scene of "digitally intelligent life" for modern people. It is urgent to explore a path for the "living" of ideological and political teaching for university students in this era of digitally intelligent life.
I. The Primary Connotations of Digital Technology Empowering the "Living" of Ideological and Political Teaching in the Era of Digitally Intelligent Life
1. "Living" (shenghuohua): The necessary path for the high-quality development of ideological and political teaching. The "living" of ideological and political teaching must first transcend the view of daily life as a hollow, boring collection of trivial behaviors including only the fulfillment of basic needs like food, clothing, housing, and transportation; it must affirm those unremarkable, day-to-day occurrences. Those events originating from the ordinary, without obvious markers, are precisely where "the Dao resides in ethical relations and daily use" [2]. In Marx’s works, the category of "life" covers "material life," "the life-process of individuals," and the "real production of life." He repeatedly emphasized that the prerequisite for "individual reproduction" is the satisfaction of basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. The theory of life contained in Marx’s works takes the "human perspective" as its basic interest. It is grounded in the fact that the essence of social life is practice—the fundamental power for the development of the life-world—and aims for the realization of "the free and well-rounded development of individuals" as the ultimate goal of the life-world. From an epistemological perspective, Mao Zedong pointed out: "If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena" [3], clarifying that "living in (practicing in)" the environment of a thing is the prerequisite for our thorough understanding of it. In his famous Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art, he also explicitly proposed the literary and artistic working method of "going deep into life." From Deng Xiaoping's "effectively improving the people's standard of living," to Jiang Zemin's emphasis that publicity and ideological work should reflect the "vibrant practice of social life of the masses," to Hu Jintao's specific requirement that the publicity and education of the socialist core value system should be "integrated into daily work and life," successive generations of Party and state leaders have endowed the life-world with unique value and significance from different perspectives, clarifying the practical meaning of "living" in line with different work directions. Since the New Era, General Secretary Xi Jinping has attached great importance to the construction of ideological and political courses, emphasizing on many occasions the necessity of cultivating socialist core values and the "living" of ideological and political teaching. As early as when presiding over the 13th collective study session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "We must effectively integrate socialist core values into all aspects of social life." During the National Two Sessions in March 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping further explicitly proposed the specific requirement to combine classroom teaching of ideological and political courses with social life, pointing out the "living" method of "it must be combined with reality," fundamentally pointing out the direction and path for the high-quality development of ideological and political theory courses in the New Era.
2. From "Living" to "Digitally Intelligent Living": The transmutation of the "living" of ideological and political teaching in the digitally intelligent era. Digitally intelligent life is an important part of the daily life of "digital native" youth. It is a new life form that has emerged with the rise of modern digital technologies characterized by connectivity, data, and intelligence. Its feature is the empowerment of daily life—such as food, clothing, housing, and transportation—through its instrumental value. On one hand, digitally intelligent life is both born from and transcends real life; it is a "new world" where the physical world and the virtual world coexist and merge. Relying on the "intelligent connection of all things" (zhilian wanwu), it empowers specific application scenarios through connectivity, data value extraction, and efficiency applications, constructing an all-encompassing "intelligent living space." In this space, activities including social interaction, consumption, education, and entertainment exhibit unprecedented characteristics of efficiency, virtualization, and intelligence. The digital transformation of daily life and the existence of a "digitally intelligent divide" have caused the life-world in which people live together in space to split increasingly into two living spaces with different audiences and characteristics. People in central areas of digitally intelligent life (referring to regions with developed applications of digital technology) have long been accustomed to a digitally intelligent life composed of online medical consultations, precise entertainment short-video pushes from platforms, consumption via mobile payments in digital currency, digital courses in smart classrooms, digital immersive experiences in exhibition halls, and virtual game experiences created by Metaverse technology. Meanwhile, people in peripheral areas on the other side of the "digital divide" may still be in a traditional living space for education, consisting of traditional lectures by teachers with chalk and blackboards. On the other hand, digitally intelligent life is the spatial and temporal extension of traditional daily life. Digital technology has extended the three traditional life domains of family, school, and society into four domains that include the digitally intelligent life domain. In the digitally intelligent era, almost no one can live without the application of digital technology. Furthermore, with the iterative development of technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the digitally intelligent transformation of daily life will only further strengthen. The weight of digitally intelligent life in daily life will significantly increase in the future, creating a "crowding-out effect" on traditional daily life. Based on this change, ideological and political teaching in the New Era should incorporate the digitally intelligent life domain of students into its own vision of "living" education, extending the original traditional concepts of "living" education. To construct life scenarios conducive to the "living" of ideological and political teaching, we must focus on the construction of digitally intelligent life scenarios and actively use digital technology to empower this process.
II. Basic Principles of Digital Technology Empowering the "Living" of Ideological and Political Teaching in the Era of Digitally Intelligent Life
1. Properly handling the dialectical relationship between the virtual and the real. The so-called "virtual" refers to using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to allow students to gain an immersive sense of life and experience through smart wearable devices in ideological and political teaching, enabling those practical life teachings that were not easily conducted in the classroom to be realized through digital technology. The "real" refers to authentic social life (social practice). Although digital technology can shine brilliantly in scenario construction, immersive experiences, and intelligent simulated auxiliary teaching, "liberation is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the [development] of industry, commerce, agriculture, the [conditions of intercourse]..." [4]. Virtual digitally intelligent life scenarios cannot completely replace real life. It is still necessary to let students walk out of the classroom and toward society, to enlighten their minds and nurture their hearts (qizhi runxin) [5] through personal, hands-on realistic practical activities, thereby making up for the deficiencies of real-life teaching in virtual digitally intelligent scenarios. It must be recognized that what students in school lack most is practical life experience. If they rely blindly on virtual methods used in ideological and political courses to create immersive practical experiences, it will instead lead them further away from real social contexts. In the virtual teaching scenario of "Retracing the Long March," no matter how vivid and lifelike the simulation technology is, it is not as good as actually letting students retrace a portion of the Long March in real practical teaching. In the process of advancing the "living" of ideological and political teaching, we must properly handle the dialectical relationship between the virtual and the real, giving full play to the technical advantages of digital virtual teaching in the era of digitally intelligent life while maintaining a reasonable tension between it and real-life (practical) teaching. Taking non-substitution as the bottom line, we should empower the "living" of ideological and political teaching through a benign and rational interaction between the two.
2. Properly handling the relationship between instrumental value and intrinsic value. Instrumental value is not based on a thing itself, but refers to the role that thing plays in achieving another goal. Intrinsic value refers to the value inherent and innate to the thing itself. In the process of digital technology empowering the "living" of ideological and political teaching, ideological and political teaching is the value, which innately contains the intrinsic value of "casting the soul and nurturing the person" (zhuhun yuren) [6]; digital technology is the tool, providing the value of satisfying the needs of ideological and political teaching to play its role in soul-casting and person-nurturing—that is, utility. Therefore, so-called empowerment is promotion, not replacement; it highlights the instrumental value of serving the improvement of quality and efficiency in ideological and political teaching, rather than the usurpation of the intrinsic value of ideological and political teaching’s value guidance by digital technology. Currently, as digital technology empowers the "living" of ideological and political teaching, technical elements have entered the central area of teaching with their unique instrumental value, but the embedding of life elements and the integration of the two in the soul-casting and person-nurturing of ideological and political courses are relatively lagging. We must prevent the simple stacking and transplantation of technology, profoundly recognize the ideological value attributes of ideological and political courses, adhere to the development logic of the "soul course," and properly handle the relationship between the intrinsic value of nurturing people and the instrumental value of technology. In the era of digitally intelligent life, because digital technology is widely esteemed, there is an inevitable tendency toward generalization in teaching concepts, ideas, and applications, which brings about a mistaken understanding: that the "living" of ideological and political teaching means infinitely magnifying the instrumental value of digital technology, making digital applications an "omnipresent, ever-present, all-encompassing, and omnipotent" "living" process. This understanding reverses the instrumental and intrinsic values of the two. In the actual teaching process, it may lead to problems in ideological and political teaching such as "form over content," "tools usurping value," and "phenomena detaching from essence," which may seem "living" but are actually detached from life.
3. Properly handling the relationship between the unity of dominance and subjectivity. The unity of the dominance of the teacher and the subjectivity of the student is a clear requirement for adhering to the "Eight Unities" [7] in the construction of ideological and political courses. In these courses, teachers must grasp all stages of teaching as a whole and occupy a central position in the classroom, internalizing values into students' hearts through the use of teaching methods and means. Students are the subjects of course learning, and teaching must be student-centered. In ideological and political courses, students should give full play to their subjective role in learning, actively participating in the course, thinking deeply, communicating, and exercising their subjective initiative. In the era of digitally intelligent life, due to the immersion of digital technology in teaching, intelligent systems possess a certain "species advantage" over natural persons in some sense, relying on their functional advantages in the storage (data), retrieval, transmission, and application of teaching resources. If teachers become increasingly dependent on digitally intelligent life and form a "technological dependency," thereby losing their dominant role in teaching, it may lead to ideological risks. If students become accustomed to the intelligent task partitioning, content pushing, and one-click generation of results in digitally intelligent life, they will become increasingly passive, leading to a gradual blurring of their subjectivity. As a powerful medium serving the teaching of both teachers and students, digital technology should perform the function of serving teachers rather than replacing them. Some teachers and students rely excessively on digital technology, forming an inertia of "virtualized life." It should be noted that AI technology, like other media technology carriers, is not entirely value-neutral. Because it essentially still executes the code instructions of designers under current conditions, AI still harbors potential ideological risks in areas such as teaching content extraction and screening, as well as linguistic and semantic generation, through the manipulation of intelligent algorithms. Only by properly handling the relationship between the unity of dominance and subjectivity can the effectiveness of ideological and political teaching be guaranteed.
III. The Realization Path of Digital Technology Empowering the "Living" of Ideological and Political Teaching in the Era of Digitally Intelligent Life
Employing digital technology to bolster life-oriented teaching methods. In the era of digital-intelligent life, Ideological and Political Theory Teachers (IPT teachers) have greatly enriched the "arsenal" of modern pedagogical methods by continuously strengthening their own digital literacy—truly "advancing with the data." By utilizing digital technology, teachers can transform difficult knowledge, abstract concepts, and monotonous lectures into vivid, interesting, visual, and life-oriented experiences. Many universities have established virtual simulation classrooms, integrating virtual simulation technology with traditional teaching methods. By creating an immersive, life-oriented environment, they facilitate the realization of life-oriented teaching methods and the integrated upgrading of pedagogy. For example, the "Ideological and Moral Character and the Rule of Law" virtual simulation experimental course at Tsinghua University employs a "virtual simulation + small-group seminar" teaching model. It uses virtual simulation technology to provide a more impactful and rich audiovisual feast that mimics real-life experiences, while the teacher-led small-group seminars help avoid excessive "technology dependence," allowing perceptual knowledge to be more effectively sublimated into rational knowledge. To take another example, when explaining the issue of whole-process people’s democracy, teachers can adopt a "multilateral dialogue" teaching method based on collective empathy. By using digital technology to create virtual scenarios that embody whole-process people’s democracy, they can mobilize students' initiative and deepen their understanding of people's livelihoods throughout the entire process. Furthermore, knowledge-graph-based teaching methods supported by Big Data technology are beginning to receive significant attention. Beijing Institute of Technology uses a knowledge graph of the Party's innovative theories to conduct theoretical study, achieving a systematic, logical, structured, and visual presentation of learning content. They have constructed a five-dimensional learning system that provides comprehensive services for the acquisition, internalisation, and application of knowledge. These life-oriented teaching methods, empowered by digital technology, have shifted traditional pedagogy from a singular to a pluralistic approach and from parallel tracks to integration. This allows teaching to break through traditional two-dimensional models, facilitating the path toward the modernization of IPT teaching.
Actively utilizing digital technology to filter life-oriented teaching resources. High-quality, life-oriented teaching resources are an essential foundation for the construction of IPT courses. The famous educator Tao Xingzhi’s [8] theory of "Life Education"—summarized as "Life is education, society is school, and the unity of teaching, learning, and doing"—emphasizes that life contains infinite teaching resources; education originates from life, draws materials from life, and ultimately serves life. The empowering advantage of digital technology in filtering IPT teaching resources is reflected in three aspects: First, the digitization of life-oriented teaching resources. As teaching resources such as textbooks, case studies, films, images, courseware, and practical scenarios become increasingly digitized, the volume of life-oriented teaching resources expands. Digital technology can transform physical teaching resources that were originally scattered or immovable into digital products that can be easily replicated and disseminated, thus enriching the sources for IPT courses. Second, the aggregation of life-oriented teaching resources. Following digitization, the next challenge is to resolve the "resource island" phenomenon—where resource owners are functionally disconnected, data is not interconnected, and resources are not shared. By ensuring "all possible connections," and through the creation of national or provincial teaching resource platforms or interactive cloud databases, high-quality resources can achieve co-construction, interconnection, and sharing. Third, the precision delivery of life-oriented teaching resources. Digital technology creates "precise portraits," determining supply based on demand. Backed by powerful computing power, the massive life-oriented resources applied through digital technology possess "recognition," "coding," and "positioning" capabilities. This facilitates combining the needs of different teaching scenarios and contexts, using various platforms and databases to create precise portraits of users, and delivering resources accurately according to life-oriented pedagogical needs, providing great convenience for IPT teaching.
Developing the skillful use of digital technology to assist life-oriented teaching language. The essence of IPT courses is "explaining the truth" [9]. Teaching language is the intermediary vehicle for explaining the truth well, deeply, and thoroughly. Whether one can use the life-oriented language that students enjoy and easily understand to transform the profound theories inherent in IPT courses into linguistic symbols that students can comprehend and engage with is the key to achieving the transformation of IPT teaching from a "textbook system" to a "teaching system." The ability to use life-oriented teaching language directly affects pedagogical efficacy. Large Language Models (LLM) based on deep learning and massive data can, through training, simulate natural human communication and generate human language. In the future, human-machine linguistic interaction will be as smooth and natural as chatting with a real friend. From generating creative content to assisting in pedagogical communication, LLMs such as ChatGPT, intelligent voice robots, and virtual teaching assistants are integrating into our daily lives, fundamentally changing the way classroom dialogue and interaction occur. LLMs can convert "document language" or academic language into "down-to-earth" [10] life-oriented language that is easily accepted by students. Driven by data and algorithms, they can create "precise portraits" based on students' age, cognitive level, and professional backgrounds, adopting different linguistic registers to conduct teaching according to students' current linguistic receptivity and leading them into the teaching scenario. Through the "interfacing" of digital technology applications like LLMs, academic and document discourses are transformed into popular and mass-oriented language, making complex matters simple and easy to understand, thereby effectively promoting the application of life-oriented teaching language.
Ingeniously utilizing digital technology to integrate life-oriented teaching practice. Life originates from practice, and life-oriented practical teaching is the core of the "Great Ideological and Political" course construction [11]. By ingeniously using digital technology to empower education—such as building virtual practice platforms and extensively conducting training activities—the small IPT classroom can be fully connected with the "grand classroom" of society and the "cloud classroom" of the internet, ensuring that the curriculum moves in the same direction as, and interfaces with, real life. The comprehensive use of digital means to build diverse virtual practice platforms breaks through the geographical limitations of offline life-practice teaching currently faced by many schools, alleviates student safety concerns, and shapes a new type of digitized life-practice classroom. As digital technology construction advances further, strengthening digital links with resources such as memorial halls, exhibition centers, museums, IPT practical teaching bases, and old revolutionary base areas [12], and making full use of VR/AR technology to reconstruct historical scenes and experience historical events, will make IPT teaching "come alive." This creates a practical teaching experience of "IPT courses on the move" within real life, allowing digital technology to empower new ways of opening up IPT courses.
(About the Author: Han Yifan is an Associate Professor and Master's Supervisor at the School of Marxism, Henan University of Chinese Medicine.) (Funding: This article is a research result of several projects, including the Henan Provincial Soft Science Research Program "Research on Digital Technology Empowering IPT Teaching in Universities" [No. 242400410237], the Henan Provincial Educational Science Planning Project "Research on the Life-orientation of IPT Teaching in the New Era" [No. 2022YB0144], the Henan Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Special Project for IPT Courses "Research on the Integration of Socialist Core Values into the Daily Life of University Students in the New Era" [No. 2022ZSZ063], the Henan Provincial Graduate Education Reform and Quality Improvement Engineering Project [No. YJS2023KC19], and the Henan University of Chinese Medicine Teaching Reform Special Project [2019SZJG04]). Web Editor: Tong Xin Source: School Party Building and Ideological Education (Xuexiao Dangjian yu Sixiang Jiaoyu)