Bill MacKenty

AI Is a Language Microwave

An article in The Atlantic adds to our important conversation about chatGPT and education. My (non-chatGPT generated) reaction below...

The article, written by Stephen Marche, addresses a few points about chatGPT in contemporary education. A quote in the article underlined some ideas I appreciated

The existence of AI will change what the world values in language. “The education system’s emphasis on [cumulative grade point average] over actual knowledge and understanding, combined with the lack of live monitoring, increases the likelihood of using ChatGPT,” the study on student use says. Rote linguistic tasks, even at the highest skill level, just won’t be as impressive as they once were. Once upon a time, it might have seemed notable if a student spelled onomatopoeia correctly in a paper; by the 2000s, it just meant they had access to spell-check.

Herein, I think, lay the thing; that we [professional educators] should return to a more basic, foundational practice; that our adaptation to chatGPT, especially as it applies to assessment of student work, must be more basic. How do we know our students know? How do we know our students understand is within the context of varying levels of knowing, so it's not just just drill-and-kill, but rather a more nuanced approach to assessment, Bloom's taxonomy is always a helpful framework to understand how we think about learning. . That chatGPT (and its ilk) requires giving students assignments which tease out what they really think and know.

The article is well put-together and I'd say an important part of the road to our understanding of LLM's and learning.