It’s been a year since ChatGPT was released and educators are still struggling to respond to this new type of ai tool.
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Much of the conversation has revolved around the double-edged nature of ai chatbots for educators. On the one hand, teachers are worried that students will suddenly cheat on their assignments, since chatbots can write essays in ways that are difficult to detect. On the other hand, however, educators see the potential of the tools to save time on administrative tasks how to write lesson plans.
But in a recent work document, a trio of education scholars say these discussions are too “parochial” and shortsighted. They argue that if the technologists building these new ai chatbots are right that the tools will improve rapidly, then the technology will likely lead to massive changes in knowledge work (including academic research and the administrative workforce) and therefore , will raise profound questions about the purpose of education.
“It just raises all these questions about what are schools for?” says one of the paper’s authors, Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the Institute of Education, University College London.
The article imagines four possible scenarios for how generative ai, as the technology behind ChatGPT is called, could change society, and what those changes could mean for schools and universities.
The goal behind the thinking exercise is to get ahead of rapidly changing technology and avoid what academics call the “worst-case scenarios” that could result. With that in mind, they close with a list of recommendations for how education and technology leaders can respond to try to better leverage the benefits of technology.
Sometimes the article is intentionally provocative. For example, imagine a scenario where ai becomes so good at instantly creating learning and entertainment tutorial videos that people stop learning to read.
“Literacy has been a relatively recent thing… and it’s actually very difficult,” says Arran Hamilton, director of the consulting firm Cognition Learning Group. “We have to take ownership of a part of our brain that is actually generally used for facial recognition and we are borrowing it to use for literacy.”
After all, the academics note, some research shows that the recent rise of GPS technology and mapping apps on smartphones has led people to be less able to read maps without the tools. Could it be possible that within a few decades reading could, as the article imagines, “become as quaint as Latin and the classics, things we learn for show off and to confer social status, but which are not in the least essential ( or not)? even useful) for daily life”?
For this week’s EdSurge podcast, we connected with Wiliam and Hamilton to talk about what this ai-infused world would look like and how educators can start preparing. They argue that the recent executive order from the Biden administration on the safe development of ai is a good start, but more large-scale thinking will be needed to respond to this technology.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Seamstress or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.