Comment by beloch
1 month ago
"Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills."
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Perhaps schools need to adapt to AI use and recenter the goals of education in the minds of students. If AI use impairs your development, you are only being efficient in your evasion of education.
i.e. Students need to be taught that learning to efficiently pump out AI written essays isn't the same thing as learning to reason and express themselves. AI tools will evolve and become easier and easier to pick up and use. Using your own mind is a slower and more difficult skill to develop, but it makes the difference between going through life as a human being or a mere meat-puppet for AI. It will always be far easier for a human to pick up AI tools and learn them from scratch than it will for a meat-puppet to remedy their lack of human development.
Underresouced instructors just need to come up with new pedagogies to handle revolutionary new tools that change extremely rapidly and which also provide an extremely effective way for students to cheat.
They'll get right on it.
Probably but how do you adapt to something that changes faster than semesters. Revising your theory of learning, implementing, evaluating results, etc. takes years, not weeks.
The current situation is that many students don't perceive that using AI to produce, for example, essays is harmful to themselves, and students who do things honestly may feel pressure to use AI in order to stay competitive with students who do.
The answer may be to focus less on output and more on the process. e.g. Instead of sending students off to do essays at home and then merely grading what gets handed in, perhaps teachers should run workshops where students work on their essays while receiving guidance. i.e. Everybody works in the classroom on their essay and talks to each other and the teacher about what they're doing. Grades would be at least partly based on participation, and teachers would get a better sense of what students are actually able to write themselves. If Johnny sits back and picks his nose in the workshop and then hands in a paper that's suspiciously good, it's probably slop even if it isn't obviously so.
Of course, doing this sort of thing would mean taking time away from lectures and wrote learning. Finding the right balance is no easy task and it's going to take good teachers to blaze the way. That can only happen if they're backed with resources and the freedom to alter curriculum.
> If Johnny sits back and picks his nose in the workshop and then hands in a paper that's suspiciously good, it's probably slop even if it isn't obviously so.
Or maybe, you know, he's an introvert.
This is incredibly out of touch. No teacher or even school administrator needs to have that said to them. Students refuse to hear it (despite the bleating of the article). Who are you talking to then? Parents? That's rich