AI & LLMs Teaching & Education

Because as well as a whole new level of intensive overwork, the real change that we’re on the precipice of is that evidence gathering, synthesis and summarising in a particular style are becoming things that we can get a machine to do instead.

It’s that if the process of synthesising, processing and summarising existing information is now so easy to automate, it rips the heart out of almost every undergraduate degree – because it will develop skills that society no longer needs.

Another option that I’ve heard follows from (generatively) is the idea that all that generative AI does is summarise and synthesize <strong><em>current</em></strong> knowledge. It might do it in a higher order way, but we’ll need new stuff for it to do it with. On that basis the argument goes that given creativity and new knowledge are what matters, all degrees therefore need to become research degrees.

But fundamental I think is that the individual student writing the individual essay marked by the individual academic is game over if generative AI can play both roles.

European Network for Academic Integrity

While AI can threaten academic integrity, it also presents opportunities. AI multiplies users’ abilities - in both good and bad ways. Therefore, students and educators should be guided on the benefits and limitations of AI tools in order to learn and use AI ethically and uphold academic integrity. Moreover, with the increasing automatisation of modern societies, they will likely use AI tools in their professional life. Therefore, they should be given opportunities to learn these skills during their education.

But schooling is no more the sum of small learning units than the human body is the sum of its bones. Nor is it any easier to unbundle relationships, context, time, or other humans from schooling than it is to unbundle someone’s heart from their body.

My hypothesis for the enduring popularity of this model of schooling among technologists is that a huge majority of the people who work in technology (and those whose philanthropy derives from their work in technology) had little use for many of the extremely large units of learning in their own schooling

While these people may be overrepresented in the technology sector, they represent a minuscule fraction of the people who send their children to be educated in public schools every day.

AI chatbots are most effective as the unit size of learning asymptotically approaches nothing. They will help students learn nothing faster than ever. Anyone in the extremely small units of learning business is in a lot of trouble.

I really love how this statement shares its reasoning and approaches it with a positive tone and care for the student.&nbsp;

THERE IS NO WAY TO DETECT THE OUTPUT OF GPT-4.

Unless you are doing in-class assignments, there is no accurate way of detecting whether work is human-created.

Every school or instructor will need to think hard about what AI use is acceptable: Does asking AI to provide a draft of an outline cheating? Requesting help with a sentence that someone is stuck on? Is asking for a list of references or an explainer about a topic cheating?

There is light at the end of the AI tunnel for educators, but it will require experiments and adjustment. In the meantime, we need to be realistic about how many things are about to change in the near future, and start to plan now for what we will do in response to the Homework Apocalypse. Fall is coming.

n every case, students give their ideas and perspectives a sense of permanence and importance as they commit words to paper or screens.&nbsp;

To do this, students need opportunities to interrogate what it means to be a historian and a writer.

They need opportunities to break free from the 5-paragraph essay to uncover the purpose and intellectual benefits of writing. And, they need open-ended learning experiences that allow them to construct their own thinking and learning.&nbsp;

It is important to note that AI writing tools should not be seen as a replacement for human interaction and critical thinking. While these tools can certainly be useful in certain contexts, they cannot replace the value of human analysis and interpretation.

Students must learn how to become HISTORIANS and WRITERS, not simply how to research information and summarize it in writing.

They need opportunities to break free from the 5-paragraph essay to uncover the purpose and intellectual benefits of writing. And, they need open-ended learning experiences that allow them to construct their own thinking and learning.

The AI writing tool can free students from spending time trying to find basic, textbook-style information online (and potentially getting lost in the process) so they can spend more time thinking like historians and acting like writers.

Before starting the exercise, (human) English teacher Erica Reyes Rodriguez took them through the lesson objectives and asked: “Why do we ask ChatGPT to give us feedback through questions instead of asking it to edit our work for us?”&nbsp;

You are a master teacher teaching English in Singapore for Secondary 2 Express students. I will provide you with details about my task, and it will be your job to respond with feedback to my answer,”

Thirteen-year-old Roxette Tan first came across ChatGPT on TikTok, watching videos of kids using it to complete their math homework.&nbsp;

“It might be because of my own personal bias but I still really like asking a teacher because I think the teacher still has better opinions than the AI,” Roxette said, adding that she found some of the questions too vague to be helpful.&nbsp;

<p>They thought it was important to teach the students AI literacy. Teachers come up with the exact prompts used in class according to a “prompt recipe” created by Ms Ong and her team, which took months of thinking and experimentation.&nbsp;</p> <p>“In allowing them to use ChatGPT in a classroom setting, we are able to create that learning environment for them to use it in a legitimate way, in an ethical way, and yet to be able to use it to strengthen their disposition to think and learn,” said Ms Ong, the lead teacher for English at Manjusri Secondary.&nbsp;</p>

We recommend that schools pursue considered, limited experimentation without making undue pedagogical or financial commitments, that schools facilitate access to AI with thoughtful guardrails, that educators consider what productive thought students should engage in, and that industry, researchers, and policymakers work together to support educators and students as they adapt to this disruptive technology.

Teachers who might otherwise energetically experiment with generative AI technology are holding on by their fingernails, with little energy for experimentation. For many, generative AI affords another unwelcome chore next to too many parents’ emails to answer, too many papers to grade, and too many memos to read.

“We’ve done a superficial effort at professional development, because we just haven’t had a lot of time.”

Many of these examples highlight one of the most important reasons to play with AI: it is fun! These tools sometimes generate content that is funny, weird, and surprising. They bring a spark of the unknown into the routines of school, and that playful spirit has a place alongside the search for efficiency and critical perspectives.

Students using generative AI for academic support may also face the challenge of filtering information produced by the models. Although the outputs from the models may look believable, they are not always accurate. The inner workings of the models are complex and opaque. Students will need to learn tools for verifying accuracy and recognizing bad outputs.

I think our purpose is to help them become the best human beings and contribute to a better world. And so if we’re just talking about things like academic integrity, then we’re not doing our job to prepare them for a future where the pace of change is just getting faster.—Colleen Worrell, Director of the Center for Innovation, Teaching, and Learning, Massachusetts.

History tells us our teachers are dedicated and flexible professionals who will adapt effectively to evolving conditions when they have what they need.

Some teachers and schools in less-resourced districts will do brilliant work, but on the whole, wealthier schools in wealthier communities will have the greater advantage when it comes to realizing the benefits of generative AI. Without additional support and investment, less-resourced schools in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to encounter the detrimental aspects of AI without the same benefits realized by wealthier schools, thus widening the disparity in educational experiences.

One fun part of new technologies is being able to share the experience of being a novice with our students. They are as likely to invent and discover useful and creative approaches as adults.

For social studies, history, and English language arts, AI cannot yet produce high-quality work. It might be able to overcome “initiation fatigue” or “writer’s block” to help provide inspiration, but in these fields, the purpose of student writing is to refine reasoning, evidence, and argumentation. When used creatively, AI can play a role in supporting or inspiring student thought and writing, without doing the writing for them.

suspect GPT-4o will struggle to engage a student in a conversation about those big ideas also because those ideas are hard to evaluate as either true or false. They are almost always both—true and false simultaneously.

First, students are much more interested in talking to people in their class, or texting people in other classes, than they are in talking to their computer about math.

But this characteristic of students is why we have teachers. To encourage, cajole, and compel. To make new learning seem appealing and accessible. To convince students that math is for you and you are for math.

Many people describe generative AI as an infinitely patient tutor. They don’t understand that this makes generative AI an ineffective tutor.

But serious education is provocative. The effective teacher pits the radically curious side of a student’s mind against the indolent and complacent side. The goal of excellent teaching, as Jacques Barzun put it in Teacher in America, is to turn a student, “by nature a little copycat, into an independent, self-propelling creature, who cannot merely learn but study—that is, work as his own boss to the limit of his powers.” An AI “co-creator” designed to make writing delightful by tailoring homework to fit a preferred style and mood prevents the sort of independence that serious education cultivates.

By contrast, Bjork found that the time-honored ways of testing frequently, penalizing cramming, and assessing comprehensively (all practices that students tend to loathe) are precisely what make lessons stick. A bit of friction—what educational technology attempts to overcome—is exactly what the mind needs.

psychologist Robert Bjork

“desirable difficulties” in education. Bjork found that “conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer.”

Aristotle and Cicero define rhetoric as the art of discovering (or inventing) the means to persuade

. Thus, writing is closer to carpentry than to computer programming. It requires a capacity for judgment—for what the ancients called “practical wisdom”—that AI language models lack

There is no substitute for responsibility. One either undergoes the discipline necessary for reaching a serious standard or one outsources one’s mind (and soul) to an enticing “assistant” that satisfies the visceral desire for comfort.

Many students may not appreciate the importance of applying themselves rather than using AI, but we must encourage those who do. We should fortify promising students with the assurance that excellence in education is worth pursuing but requires taking a hard road.

Teachers must convey the hard reality that using a chatbot to skip the stages of an assignment that require organizing one’s own thoughts and research is not just dishonest, it is stultifying. It precludes excellence, and it encourages mediocrity.

Are the purported obstacles that chatbots help us circumvent just bumps in the road, or might the difficulties we encounter be a vital part of what is required for us to learn in a serious, lasting way?

Firstly, students who are more digitally literate – or more fluent in general – may be able to use the technology in more sophisticated ways to generate undetectable content.

I’ll begin this answer with a straightforward but possibly unpopular statement: for any unsupervised assessment, we have to assume students might use GAI.

Trying to catch students using GAI creates mistrust and opens up potential ethical issues for equitable assessment. It’s also time consuming, frustrating, and antagonistic. Look for opportunities to move beyond the “cheating” narrative.