It's time to make friends with AI

Key points:

My first-year college students have a very narrow perspective on ai. “In high school,” one student wrote in an anonymous survey he took at the beginning of the semester, “I stayed away from the tool because it was emphasized to me as a way to cheat rather than a study tool.” This seems to be the norm: ai as the mortal enemy of all classroom teachers.

I, on the other hand, want my students to use ai every day in class and for every assignment. It is, I explain, the perfect study tool if used correctly. It can help with everything from brainstorming to description and feedback. In fact, it is the ideal scaffolding for all those students who are stuck, unable to clearly articulate their thoughts, begin their work or strengthen their arguments.

During the last two years I have guided my college students on how to use ai. Yo <a target="_blank" href="https://er.educause.edu/articles/2024/7/at-the-crossroads-of-innovation-embracing-ai-to-foster-deep-learning-in-the-college-classroom” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>emphasize which is a 24/7 personalized tutor and mentor who can help them think better about the complex topics we are studying.

Of course, I recognize that students are overwhelmingly using ai to cheatand trying to catch them, let alone teach them how to use it properly, is incredibly <a target="_blank" href="https://www.edweek.org/technology/forget-cheating-heres-the-real-question-about-ai-in-schools/2024/06″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>difficult. But he <a target="_blank" href="https://www.edweek.org/technology/were-at-a-disadvantage-and-other-teacher-sentiments-on-ai/2024/10″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>reality It's that we're far beyond pretending this problem doesn't exist or that we can keep it at arm's length.

So to all teachers: resistance is futile. Or as Julius Caesar supposedly said, if you cannot defeat your enemy, have him as a friend.

Therefore, I want to present a typology that has helped me think of ai as exactly that friend.

A typology for the use of ai

It is essential to realize that there is a whole spectrum of possibilities for how to use ai, or what philosophers call the limits of our intellectual autonomy. At one extreme is its total rejection; I think of this as absolute “cognitive autonomy.” At the other extreme is your total acceptance; Basically, you enter the essay prompt into ChatGPT and ask it to write the article for you. I think of this as absolute “cognitive externalization.”

While these polar opposites are easy to understand, the most important thing is to discover everything in between. Therefore, I suggest that we think of this as different levels of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.educationnext.org/there-are-no-shortcuts-to-thinking-teacher-sees-promise-students-using-ai-learning-tool-artificial-intelligence/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>cognitive download. Minor ai-assisted support can be seen as simply scaffolding for student learning; ai-assisted major support is yet another aspiration cognitive learninghelping students see how an “expert” might do it. Both are key to supporting students' academic success.

ai-assisted support as scaffolding

Students are novice learners and, as such, need guidance. This means extensive scaffoldwhich could be “chunking, sequencing, detailing, reviewing, or any other means of structuring the task and its components so that they fit into the student's zone of proximal development.”

I can't tell you how often students came to my office not knowing how to start their work. Before ChatGPT, I would spend 15-20 minutes thinking about topics, harping, and pushing until we narrowed them down.

Today I teach my students a set of ai prompts in class, based on a standard model to support writing, on how to generate ideas, concentrate and develop your ideas. “I didn't really know where to start,” one student wrote at the end of last semester, “and ChatGPT helped me think about the questions and I was able to start planning what I wanted to do based on the different options.” Another student wrote, “I started with virtually no idea and was able to use ChatGPT to find a topic I'm interested in and I'm working with it to narrow it down.” Now when I meet with students, our conversations are much more productive since we now have a focus.

ai-assisted support as learning

As students delve deeper into the topics we study (poverty, race, gender, and ethics), they realize how complex they really are. These are “wicked problems,” I explain, because there are so many variables, so much ambiguity, and so many ways to define problems. No wonder they're hard to think about, let alone write about.

So, I teach my students another set of ai prompts to help them see what it's like to think well about these topics. This is formally known as cognitive learning: “one needs to deliberately bring thought to the surface, make it visible, whether in reading, writing or problem solving.” ai is very good at doing this by guiding students step by step through their result.

This is essential for students who do not yet know how to fully think, contextualize, or organize their thoughts. Watching the ai ​​offer suggestions for a thesis statement or article summary in real time, with explanations, is incredibly helpful. “The outlines,” said one student, “helped me not get stuck in the small details and reminded me to think about the big picture.” “He asked me questions,” another student said, “that made me think a lot about my topic and consider different things that I wouldn't have thought about on my own.”

Looking forward

Much is unknown about the future of ai in education. But what I do know for sure is that we must all learn to accept our enemies. As one of my students said: “I didn't realize ChatGPT was there to use as a teaching assistant. I am confident that the work I complete with ChatGPT will not cause me problems, because I know how to use it as an assistant rather than a replacement.” Julius Caesar would be proud.