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Letting the GenAI out of the bottle

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I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations at work recently about the use of AI in education – prompted largely by sharing this poem

https://poets.org/poem/student-who-used-ai-write-paper

which asks the question “I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?”

It’s a good question and I think is a good one to raise with students, because it reframes the whole relationship between teacher, student, assessment and study. We’re not (or we shouldn’t be) trying to persuade students not to use AI because we don’t want them cheating, or because there’s a standard we want them to attain under some artificial constraints, just to make assessment more challenging (which we shouldn’t) but because there are skills we think they should acquire because they are skills that will develop them, their interaction with the world, and to feel the pleasure of enacting their abilities well.

AI has its place – in the words of someone I was talking to at a conference recently, it’s good for doing the boring stuff we already know how to do. There’s also the possibility you could get by through getting AI to do the work, but to progress past a certain level, you need to have the skills that (if you’ve used AI) you’ve bypassed the acquisition of, for example, you could get AI to write an essay that synthesises different writers, but to create something novel, you need to make associations that aren’t really obvious. To do that you have to have the ability to summarise papers, follows citations, pull out key thoughts and abstract them.

Also, to stick with it, you’ve got to find where the fun is in it. In the degree I’m doing at the moment, I’m enjoying doing the assignments, because I’m finding my own take. For example, my essay on Leibniz I developed by relating each of the aspects of his philosophy to different cake metaphors. Because I like cake but I can’t eat it, basically.

Though, having fun with something is really possible only when you’re not overly concerned with the mark that you’re going to get and that as I said in a meeting last week “is only possible when you’ve reached an age where … err … you’re confident enough that you don’t feel the need to prove yourself further” to which my colleague responded “you mean run out of fucks to give” which is exactly what I was going to say before I self-censored myself. 😀

The issue is that students are just scared, scared by the amount of assessment they have to do, scared by the amount of competition (some people still do normative grading – which is inexcusable) and scared of screwing up. Sitting back and smelling the roses is – or the pleasure in just learning – is rarely possible.

What we can do is make their engagement with AI authentic at least. People who insist on written testing simply so that they can be sure it’s the student’s own work need to think again. If AI can do the thing we’re testing them on and will do that better then – and I’m going to put this in capitals so that this stands out – because it’s key

WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL TEACHING THEM TO DO IT?

If this is a skill AI can acquit perfectly, then it’s not something that’s worthy of a human doing. So, maybe this will rule out a huge chunk of a maths syllabus, for example, or coding. Well fair enough. Rethink your syllabus from the ground up. Maybe it’ll make it easier, well deal with it, you’re now teaching an easy subject and all the people who can’t do the tricky things will take yours as the easy option. But putting in artificial barriers, simply to make the assessment harder (like in person testing), is missing the point of what education is for (the subject of my next post). Find a way of assessing which actually challenges the student on something that has some value, like groupwork, or have an assessment that checks in on them frequently so you can observe their process.

Avoiding coming up with authentic assessments, which test the non-AI skills is simply failing the students, yourselves, and the education system. In fact, that’s where the cheating is, not in the students using the AI.

Curriculum of kindness

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I’m part of a critical pedagogies group at work. It’s often a reading group – someone picks a book, we pick a chapter from it and then talk about the one we’ve read. It’s an excellent way to prompt reading and discussion, but it’s mainly a chance to just chat with colleagues once a month. So many of the meetings we have are around the basic transactional stuff of getting academic development and teaching done, it’s good to have something that’s more about why we’re doing it. We’re always advised to get to know the people around us because it’s helps getting work done, but the vagaries of “just attend lunch” or “just come in to the office” don’t really support that. It has to be more structured than that, but not too structured because then there’s no chance to actually chat about the things that interest us. A reading group hits the sweet spot on that spectrum.

The last book selected was Enacting a curriculum of kindness and I chose the chapter Kindness in curriculum and course design. The two authors work at Southern Cross University’s Centre
for Teaching and Learning. They describe themselves as “lecturers” – the quotes are theirs. The point being that they don’t give lectures. They also don’t have tests. The rationale for the former is that they don’t work as effectively as other forms of learning – as indicated by this study:

Schmidt HG, Cohen-Schotanus J, Van der Molen, HT, et al. (2010) Learning more by being taught less: A “time-for-self-study” theory explaining curricular effects on graduation rate and study duration. Higher Educ. 2010;60(3):287–300

There are rationales for lectures, which is why they still have a place, but they’re not about students’ learning – they’re more about allowing students to get to know their module leader and maybe identify them as a role model. And because lecturers like demonstrating their knowledge (why not allow teachers to do stuff just because it makes them happy? – there’s little enough around that does that).

The rationale for the dropping testing though is that not only is it pointless (it’s testing skills – memorising a bunch of stuff and working under time pressure that rarely have any value) it’s also unkind. It seems a dreadful way to treat other people to put them under that kind of pressure.

Actually, on the lectures thing. It is also unkind to take fees from students and then fob them off with as poor an educational experience as lectures. Sure a few are nice to have, but for them to predominate isn’t giving value for money.

So – Southern cross has already achieved what seems like a far-off dream … no lecturing and no testing.

What was revelatory for me about the book chapter was that the authors recount the opposition to their learning design work from colleagues, who positioned that as unkind. Which sent them into a sort of spiral of self-doubt and questioning – am I being unkind by asking colleagues to do stuff which they’re uncomfortable with?

The example they start with was backlash against online submissions of assessments. Been there. When I was at Coventry, we introduced online marking and to smooth things over I was tasked with 1) looking at devices where people could mark using a stylus like they used to and 2) looking at bulk printers so that academics could print stuff out. As an initial postdoc role, measuring print speeds of various machines was not (I felt) making best use of my PhD.

But it came from a good place – being kind to the academics. But then – looking back, none of that resistance was justified – because we now just mark online and get on with it. And it’s fine.

Throughout the chapter, Mieke and Lachlan lay out how the curriculum reforms institutions are enacting – are all also kinder. Active pedagogies, authentic assessment, constructive alignment would be the obvious ones to me, but they also mention moderated assessment and feedback which makes sense, as it’s through this that students perceive fairness of treatment. It’s not a question we ask regularly enough when we encounter poor and recalcitrant pedagogies – “how is this kind?” As if kindness is somehow not a factor. When ultimately it should be the most important factor. If we’re not hardline about kindness, how are the students going to demand that of each other and themselves? If we’re not sending out a generation of kind people to be in the world, we’ve failed at our most important task.

What Mieke and Lachlan keep coming back to in their chapter in amongst this, is how reform is unkind to their peers. It’s a difficult thread to navigate. Wait. A difficult course to thread. Some metaphor. Balance. How do you balance what needs to be done to be kind against the fact that doing it requires work, stress, re-evaluation?

I’d say demanding change in and of itself is not unkind. It’s the difference between what my colleague who chose the book calls brave spaces as opposed to safe spaces. Spaces should not be comfortable, we should be challenged to change practice, and this in itself should not be stressful. Learn to mark on a screen – it won’t take long to adapt. Where it becomes unsafe and unkind is when the time and the support for the change is not supplied – and that’s a structural thing. The authors’ solution is more support staff to help with the educational technology. Well I’d say more learning designers too. But also time. To redesign. To get your head around the fact that lectures and testing are bad models for learning. To have those parts of the month allocated to sitting around and absorbing the ideas. But then do it.

The self-questioning is also revealing from the perspective of why maybe kindness is more difficult to demand than anything else, because the people who are working from a position of kindness are less prone to making demands. We’re self-doubting and always try to place ourselves in the position of the other person, which acts partly in being self-defeating. Whereas those who are without any self-doubt, get to take the lead because they have no self-doubt, but are therefore usually wrong.

Anyway, read the chapter. I’d strongly recommend it.

Reflecting on reflection

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As part of a project I’ve just started working on I spent two days last week at a castle in Yorkshire.

The project is fascinating – and fun – it’s about integrating playfulness within the curriculum and measuring its impact. You can read more about the project at https://research.northumbria.ac.uk/replay/One of the things that came out of the workshop was being given the task with three other participants of coming up with the structure for one of the final steps, which is where we all reflect on the project. We decided that we’d actually plan the reflection for the whole project all the way through, as one is so dependent on the other. As the learning designers on the project (across six universities) have to do research diaries, it makes sense that these should all be integrated.

As part of this “working group” one of the people in the team shared this: https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/9080/1/Lesley%20Raven_Thesis_2025.pdf It’s really focused on reflection in design education / studio learning – that general domain – but there’s a lot that’s transferable to other disciplines. The key thing that was fed into our process on the day was the key phrase “Reflection is not admin”. If we have to do repeated reflection throughout the project, it shouldn’t feel like a chore, but actually be playful practice too.

I started skimming through it, but there’s such a lot of good stuff in there, i’m reading the whole thing from beginning to end.

What I particularly liked about the bit of it I’ve read so far (p. 34 – ) is the break down of reflection into these five themes. The design ed focus shows through but most disciplines will have something that aligns to these.

1) Technical rationality – This is really the basic “did it achieve what it set out to do?” – most tasks will actually have some learning to acquire, even if it’s not a technique or skill. Bottom line is – did it work?

2) Artistry – again this is obvious for design ed (and art) not so much for other things. Though this book shows how artistry is a principle that can be applied anywhere. Chapter twelve is especially worth a read.

3) Constructivist assumptions – constructivism is the principle that we develop knowledge by building on what we already know – and so this reflection would address the extent to which these assumptions have been met. Did we build on any knowledge?

4) Tacit knowledge – tacit knowledge is the hidden bits of knowledge we have, but we’re not aware we have. This part of the reflection aims to unpack that aspect. So the question here might be “has any knowledge or understanding emerged through the process of reflection?”

5) Mind and body dualism. This is a bit trickier to apply generally. The thesis isn’t really suggesting we adopt mind body dualism but be aware of it. We often ask ourselves how have our minds developed, but of course design ed is also about physical skills. The two are intertwined so much the idea of dualism is outdated. Embodied learning. Post-humanist post-dualism etc etc. Lots of post. It’s a bit difficult to say what your body has learnt from … say a maths lecture … except lecture seats do not provide adequate lumbar support for 62 year olds. For me this makes sense in terms of Gibbs’s “feelings” stage of reflection. How did it make you feel? When you reflect do you cringe or smile? There’s a quote by Polanyi (1974) which helped me get my head round this – “practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action”. So basically, don’t overlook the embodied aspect. It’s the ontic before the ontologic (to get all Heideggery again).

Also reading the thesis I realise how much scope there is to reflection – it’s not a boring chore if you do it properly – it can be a creative act in itself. Maybe the most creative part of the cycle if done in a fun and playful way, which is what we’re here for.

Obviously I blog, I do podcasting and I have a constant internal self-critical monologue so reflection is something I do a LOT of, but finding alternative mechanisms to reflect that are creative and invite people to want to reflect is, I’ve realised, going to be a fascinating parallel part of the project.

Polanyi, M. 1974. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

An Edutechy Wonderland

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This is written in response to a post about re-entering Second Life and the changes (and lack of changes there after a two year break) written by Bex Ferriday at http://mavendorf.tumblr.com/post/45827913344/second-life-second-attempt

Firstly, the problems Bex relates about the course weren’t really due to the design of the course, or the design of SL, in my opinion. I think with anything like that there’s often a problem of commitment from the people taking it. People just over-estimate how much time they have, other things crop up, and so participation wanes. Look out the dropout rate from MOOCs and they only use tried and tested technologies. I got a lot from it anyway.

I think the biggest advantage and disadvantage of using virtual worlds for education was that for most of the latter part of the noughties, virtual worlds were synonymous with just one platform; Second Life. The advantage was that nearly everyone you knew teaching and researching the field were in the one place. If you wanted to visit their build, observe what they were doing, guest lecture in their teaching, then you didn’t need to learn to use a new interface (unless Linden Lab itself decided to screw around with it), you could use your own avatar, inventory etc. If they held a social event, you could meet up with everyone you knew  and worked with, invite other people over to what you were doing. If your work involved a social dimension (like exploring digital culture, or digital identity) then you had a living complex world to send them out into, full of 10s of 1000s of people. There was a real sense of a community of educators working together.

The disadvantage of course was that it was all operating under the discretion of one software company, and when they pulled the plug, it all fell apart.

Well “pull the plug” is a slight exaggeration. For anyone who doesn’t work in the field, Linden Lab, who ran Second Life, ended the educational subsidy. So most institutions could no longer afford to stay in there, and a lot of cheaper options emerged.

Last year I was trying to organise a tour for a group of students, and so went through the normal list of landmarks to show them different resources. Fewer than half were still there. The numbers of people using it are down, but apparently revenue is up. So the customer base is a smaller amount of more committed people. Which I guess suits the provider. Not so helpful for us using it for education though.

The impact on education towards making it more mainstream has been negative. The fragmentation of the community means it’s more difficult to show colleagues the range of stuff it can be used for. It’s more difficult to find good examples of practice, because you first of all have to know where to look.

Bex’s other point is that the technology hasn’t moved on at all. I’m less worried about this. As long as it’s good enough to give you a sense of immersion, (and it can be) and a sense of copresence (and it does) then overall tech quality isn’t a problem. A lot of people’s equipment is still not great, so keeping the graphics at a lower end gives the majority of users a chance to catch up. I’ve given up on IT departments ever doing so though. What I was hoping for though is for the problems to be resolved. But the lag is as bad as ever. In a session I was teaching last week, it was the worst I’ve ever seen, I got booted out several times and struggled to get back in.

But there are still fascinating things to see there, which reassures me that the technology is here to stay, and is an essential part of the educator’s kit. Just the ones I’m involved with:  there’s the palaeontology course at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The Science Ethics course at the University of Iowa. The digital cultures course at Newman University, the Human Behaviour course at University of Southern Maine, the Extract / Insert performance and installation by Stelarc, Joff Chafer and Ian Upton. All fascinating. All excellent from an education perspective, (or performance), and all only really possible in a virtual world. And all, (maybe coincidentally, maybe not), taking place in Second Life.

I think what will emerge is either another single platform that will replace SL and everyone can migrate back to that to recreate that single community, or the technology for hypergridding (i.e. linking together the different platforms) will fill the same role. In this thread responding to Bex’s post in Facebook, Anna Peachey she always thought of SL as the fluffer for the bigger event. In the physical world, the work of the fluffer has been made redundant by Viagra. Hopefully the field of virtual worlds will see a similar game-changing technology.