Dear Commons Community,

Across the United States, universities and school districts are scrambling to figure out how  to use and respond to chatbots like ChatGPT that can generate humanlike texts and images. But while some are rushing to ban ChatGPT to try to prevent its use as a cheating aid, some faculty are looking to leverage it to spur more critical classroom thinking. They are encouraging their students to question the hype around these rapidly evolving artificial intelligence tools and to consider the technologies’ potential side effects.  As reported by The New York Times.

The aim, these educators say, is to train the next generation of technology creators and consumers in “critical computing.” That is an analytical approach in which understanding how to critique computer algorithms is as important as — or more important than — knowing how to program computers.

The New York City Public Schools are  training a cohort of computer science teachers to help their students identify A.I. biases and potential risks. Lessons include discussions on defective facial recognition algorithms that can be much more accurate in identifying white faces than darker-skinned faces.  In Illinois, Florida, New York and Virginia, some middle school science and humanities teachers are using an A.I. literacy curriculum developed by researchers at the Scheller Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One lesson asks students to consider the ethics of powerful A.I. systems, known as “generative adversarial networks,” that can be used to produce fake media content, like realistic videos in which well-known politicians mouth phrases they never actually said.

With generative A.I. technologies proliferating, educators and researchers say understanding such computer algorithms is a crucial skill that students will need to navigate daily life and participate in civics and society.

“It’s important for students to know about how A.I. works because their data is being scraped, their user activity is being used to train these tools,” said Kate Moore, an education researcher at M.I.T. who helped create the A.I. lessons for schools. “Decisions are being made about young people using A.I., whether they know it or not.”

In one of my graduate classes, I have given my students an assignment of writing  a traditional paper or writing a paper that has been informed (maybe started) by ChatGPT.  All of the 25 students in this class are experienced educators, mostly teachers.  About half of the students have opted for the latter. 

The ChatGPT assignment reads in part as follows:

“You can use the essay produced by ChatGPT as the beginning of your paper.  To complete the assignment, you will likely have to write approximately four-five more pages rather than the seven as indicated in the original Assignment No. 1.  You can use your own discretion as to how many additional pages you need to complete the assignment. 

“I would also like you to add one paragraph to this assignment at the end of your paper answering the following as best you can.

How well did you feel ChatGPT assisted you in completing the assignment?

Do you believe that you could have done as good, better, or not as good paper without using ChatGPT?

Would you consider allowing students in your own classes to use ChatGPT for essay assignments?

What recommendation do you have, if any, for other teachers or educators in using ChatGPT?”

These papers are due at the beginning of March.  

Tony

P.S. Here are two websites suggesting how to  use ChatGPT for essay assignments in K-12 and college-level courses.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.