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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.