If you haven’t checked out ChatGPT yourself, give it a try! I’ve used it for some editing, which has been surprisingly helpful for me. I’ve tried to ask it to do some original writing, and that did not work out really well for my work – but other people have had some different experiences. Try it for yourself!
We all know that trying to just outright censor things is not a great idea – not a workable strategy. (Yep: talking to you, Book-Banning-Twits out there. You aren’t going to win. We all know you are ridiculous.) And that foolishness in banning things extends to AI tools.
Instead, thinking about ways to incorporate it into learning and the classroom will be better for students and for instructors! Check out the ideas in this article excerpt, and read the whole thing here.
“If you’re an educator and you haven’t lived under a blanket for the past couple months, you have likely heard of ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence based jack-of-all-trades. You can ask it a question and it will give you a thoughtful, clear, and impressive answer (better than Google!). You can prompt it to write a poem, research paper, book proposal, script, or short story and it does so with ease. I asked it about the protein that I studied for my doctoral research and ChatGPT taught me two things that I didn’t previously know. I asked it to write a short story about two people who develop a deep friendship over flipped learning and, by halfway through, I was engrossed in the plot — forgetting that it was written by a computer. If you haven’t given ChatGPT a try yet, pause your reading of this article right now and give it a whirl. ChatGPT is amazing, terrifying, awe-inspiring, troubling, and just simply fascinating all in one go.
What did you think? Crazy, isn’t it? ChatGPT is remarkable in the cogent flow of writing that it can produce, the accuracy (mostly) of the information it provides, and the granular stipulation of prompts that it can accommodate. It’s the ideal student, writing well and effortlessly on any topic that we throw at it. After first seeing what ChatGPT could do, my mind began racing for possible applications in the college classroom.
As I began looking online to see what other educators were saying about ChatGPT, I was initially surprised and then reminded of the predominant mindset of education. Despite our preening of the opposite, educators are often anti-tech (when that tech is new and different). At the time of this writing, all schools across the huge system of New York City public education are officially banned from using or having access to ChatGPT; it has been firewalled. Students at Princeton University have already begun petitioning their administration not to ban ChatGPT, and English teachers at my own daughters’ high school have already announced that all essays will now be written in class in real time. Are we serious, fellow educators? Are we really trying to delude ourselves that we’ll be able to keep this technology away from our students? We’ve made these mistakes before.
“So let’s model that, coach it and teach it to our students — the editing and analyzing of AI-generated writing. Instead of banning AI in the college classroom, I’m planning to create assignments where students must prompt ChatGPT to draft a research paper, opinion piece, or reflection, and then the student must source that paper and fact-check it as the human component of the assignment. Another idea that I’m toying with is breaking students into groups and assigning each opposing perspectives of controversial topics. Those groups would then use ChatGPT to draft talking points related to their assigned positions, and use those talking points as starting points for real time, in-class discussions. A third idea: Have students write a short paper on an assigned topic and use ChatGPT to do the same. Students then exchange these paper-pairs (one human-written and the other AI) and do a peer-review of both papers in the pair, trying to identify which is ChatGPT and why they think so. The common theme in all of these assignment ideas is the analysis of the product created by ChatGPT. Thinking critically about the content that AI produces will be essential for the next generation, and we should be teaching it today. Educators avoid this path at the peril of our own obsolescence; something higher education is already at far too much risk of already.”
Read the whole article here!