An Educator’s Dilemma
ChatGPT, should we sing its praises, or just beat it to death with a stick? It has been made available for almost four months now, but it has maybe had the fastest and greatest impact on education since rows of desks were established. Since its inception, ChatGPT has been upgraded twice, and the fourth iteration will soon be available. As I contemplated this very thing, while attending a recent National Education conference, I was somewhat dismayed to find that many educators were unaware of what ChatGPT was.
Fortunately for educators, the education system’s always-aware, and knowledgeable leadership has been right on top of the situation, and in its infinite wisdom, it has issued mandates to protect us all. Specifically, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and NYC are among the major municipal school districts to make the knee-jerk decision to ban the use of the AI language tool, ChatGPT.
So, what is ChatGPT and why should you care? To start off, I Googled it: ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Of course, that is a technical definition, so what is it really? It is a language app that can do more than just write intelligently. It researches, analyzes, and writes using different points of view or writing styles. It does this based on the direction of the user. It will write original, intelligent: paragraphs, essays, emails, research papers, and poetry as directed using different perspectives, or voices as directed. It is more than GOOGLE. In short, it does everything that we want our students to be able to do on their own.
I have not used ChatGPT for any part of this post. I did however give it a task for my own personal edification. I directed ChatGPT to read all of my blog posts from My Island View and write a profile of the author based on the posts. The answer took about ten seconds. I thought the answer was pretty interesting, and I was somewhat pleased with the result. It may also be used to create or update lesson plans and generate emails, announcements, or assignments. I bet that now has your attention.
Now you should be getting the picture, and understanding the fear.
The sky is falling!!! The sky is falling!!! Students will never do any more work. ChatGPT will write all of their assignments for them. We must Ban this evil app now and forever!
Not so fast! If we take a breath to think of what our goal is as educators, we may have time to better consider this gift. First, let us consider the history of tech in regard to education. The obvious big contribution to education, aside from the wheel, came during the Renaissance with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440. There were block printers and scribes, who hand-wrote texts, but the printing press evolved publishing. Most people didn’t object, probably because it opened up a whole industry of publishing. It was a big plus when public education came along and teachers needed textbooks to teach.
Another biggie was the Calculator. Math teachers originally banned it, so kids wouldn’t cheat. The calculators got smaller and easier to hide. Well, a decade or two went by and teachers began not only to allow calculators, but they also required their purchase by all math students. I always thought that is what made Texas Instruments so profitable with its graphing calculator.
The next big innovation was the word processor. Of course, we had the typewriter, but that was always a business course in schools, not a staple of public education. English teachers were never big fans at first. Yes, the “Ban” word was thrown around a bit. A big change for me was a computer lab at my school. I had my classes on those computers word-processing all their assignments. This was not true of some of my colleagues. They required students to do a rough draft and a final draft, and then they could put it on the computer. They ignored the research showing that word processing improves thinking skills, editing skills, spelling, and vocabulary. Connected to this was the introduction of a spell checker. It was viewed as another way to cheat and beat the system. Yes, spell check was disabled, or banned in the beginning. I would be at a big loss without it. Thank god cooler heads prevailed.
And now up to now, the biggest innovation for education ever, GOOGLE. Google was banned by everyone, along with Wikipedia. Yet today, where would we be without them? Google stepped up and improved curation, a term that was rarely used before. The benefit of Google is that teachers had to reframe their assignments. If a kid could Google the answer, maybe the question wasn’t thoughtful enough. This evolved the way we teach.
As Google forced teachers to rethink and ask more thoughtful Google-proof questions, I am hopeful a similar strategy will be employed with ChatGPT. We need to teach smarter. We too often get caught up in confusing the completed task for the intended learning. In the example of word processing replacing handwritten assignments, higher-order, technology-driven skills were employed to complete the assignment. The student started off beyond the paper and pen as he or she began to process their words on a screen. They were freed from many impediments that discouraged, or restricted organizing, editing, and refining their work.
We need to rethink our goal as new innovative tools come before us. Let us look at ChatGPT as a tool that enables our students to move the starting point of their learning a few steps forward saving time and energy to create deeper thinking and more creative assignments. Teachers need not work harder, but they will need to think and work differently. They cannot lose sight of the goal of their students’ learning because some assignments use technology to get to an end a little easier, requiring different skills than the teacher has experienced. I grew up with standard-shift cars. Unless you are a car enthusiast, you would be at a loss trying to drive one.
I fear that ChatGPT is the type of tech that students will get and use before a majority of educators know what it is, let alone use and teach it effectively. Then it will be labeled as an evil cheating app. What a waste until educators catch up? Every educator should download the free app and play with it for a while to get somewhat familiar with its capabilities. This should be done before it is thrust upon us by the powers that be in their infinite wisdom and flawless leadership.
It is rather arrogant to think any educator cannot allow students to use a technology that every student has access to. We have gone through these thoughtless obstacles with almost every innovation. People are told to innovate and then their creations are blocked because they cause discomfort from the “tried and true”. Think about cell phones and students’ debate.
ChatGPT is here to stay. Microsoft just dropped $10B on it. As educators, we either teach students how to use it ethically for higher-order thinking skills or find another job. We may have reached a point in time where learning happens in spite of reluctant educators.
To better educate our kids, we need first to better educate their educators.
Any new, useful tech tool is a tool worth learning to use. Teachers and students should be a study team.
We’ll done, Tom! You have raised some very important issues related to change and the importance of educators being lifelong learners. The Google example and your description of some similar and some more sophisticated challenges presented by ChatGPT was a very appropriate and timely example. Your old pal Gutenberg started some revolution!👍
Harvey, You likely have been one who supported these remedies for many years. Thanks for all you have done!
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Hi Tom! I’m interested in how you asked ChatGPT to read your blogs and write a profile of the author. Since I write about several different topics, I’d love to try this too, but my attempt failed (see below). Can you share the prompt that you used to do this successfully? I’d very much appreciate it!
Thank you!
Read all the blogs on https://www.sheilabrobinson.com/blog/ and write a profile of the author I’m sorry, but I am an AI language model and do not have the capability to browse the internet and read all the blogs on a specific website. Sheila B Robinson, Ed.D Custom Professional Learning, LLC http://www.sheilabrobinson.com/ https://www.sheilabrobinson.com/ @SheilaBRobinson https://twitter.com/SheilaBRobinson
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I just published a post on that very question. Thanks.
Great! Thanks for sharing this. It still doesn’t work for me, but I think it may be in how your website is set up. Your blogs are all here on the home page with a continuous scroll. Mine all have “read more” tags. Still interesting! Sheila B Robinson, Ed.D Custom Professional Learning, LLC http://www.sheilabrobinson.com/ https://www.sheilabrobinson.com/ @SheilaBRobinson https://twitter.com/SheilaBRobinson
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Sheila Robinson is a Public Relations Specialist, former journalist, and avid traveler. Her Twitter page is full of her adventures and reflections from her travels. Through her tweets, Sheila shows her commitment to promoting diversity, inclusion, and international relationships. She seeks to learn about different cultures and share her experiences with her social media followers. Sheila is also a strong supporter of human rights. In her recent posts, she speaks about anti-racism, Black History Month, social justice movements, and more—making it clear that she stands with marginalized communities and advocates for their rights. Additionally, she gives her own opinions on important topics, such as politics and current events. Overall, her posts demonstrate her passion and enthusiasm for learning and sharing knowledge, as well as her resilience and determination in fighting for social change.
[…] It was a great chance to catch up with so many friends and colleagues. I especially enjoyed have a chance to chat with Tom Whitby, the social media guru, blogger, and founder of #Edchat on Twitter, and much more! I always enjoy reading Tom’s post on his blog, My Island View. Check out his recent post on ChatGPT: Kill It, or Use It? […]
I love it! It’s not me though. 😁 While I’m a definitely a supporter of anti-racism, BLM, social justice movements and stand with marginalized communities, I don’t write about these topics, or politics, current events or travel. I’ve never been a Public Relations Specialist nor a journalist. But I do have a common name!
I think this phrase comes closest: “her posts demonstrate her passion and enthusiasm for learning and sharing knowledge.” I sure hope that is true about me. 😁 Thanks for trying Tom!
You may want to experiment with some different AI apps.
This is a whole new way of thinking outside and inside the former box. Thoughts meld, but many don’t, and apparently AI helps us find which is what and why. I haven’t much more than a welcoming “clue” about the essence of my thoughts and conclusions, but ChatGBT seems to help us grab what matters and toss what’s not. In addition, we may not agree even if we get it.
This may be gibberish to you. It’s already that to me and I’m trying to write about it. But, Chat GBT, I guess, can help me find and connect logical conclusions which I’d likely not find on my own. Take Point-Set Topology for example. Please! It may not be what we think, if indeed we can think much at all. But that’s just what I and others of us may see see, if at all. When I first took the above course some years ago, I found immediately it was a new way of thinking that went far beyond the logical conclusions we had in geometry.
Try to think in a new way if we can. Many can’t. It like a 3 year old, with no prompting, sits at the keyboard and plays Mozart by ear. Only. Some of us will deduce from this, but more will not.
It’s a new world. It’s us and the programmed Artifical Intelligence machine bumping into some of us. Fear not. We’ve always got this able young runner throwing her sledge hammer through the screen. Apple showed us years ago.
Thanks to Tom Whitby and Sheila Robinson for lighting the fire of ChatGBT. Higher-Ed has its own issues. PK-12 learning fosters the needs of essential education. I do know that Team Learning well done increases the understanding of each team member. Why not GBT on laptops and cellphones? That’s where we all are anyway 🙂
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