I don’t want to structure this too much for fear of being labelled as using ChatGPT. Or I could have just prompted ChatGPT to play the role of a paranoid, fearful, educator posting about AI in education…oh noooo, I’ve gone all cross-eyed…I recently had a viral cornea infection I feel like I’m owed one eye-related idiom.
I have many thoughts about AI in education but nothing really that well formed. Lots of disparate feelings and opinions…unlike the throngs of AI specialists and prompt engineers who have popped up on LinkedIn and Twitter. I could proclaim I’m one of those. But I’m not.
First of all, ChatGPT3.whatever hit everyone like a tidal wave. It was here all of a sudden and it was causing a lot of environmental “damage”. I’ve been in the ed tech game for 20 years now, I don’t think there has been anything like this that has emerged that threatens the stability of educational “norms”. Cloud platforms, such as Google Drive/apps, made educators fearful of digital peeking over the shoulder behaviour and fearful of stepping out of their desktop silos of Word and Powerpoint documents into the wild west of shared resources. Those fears feel microscopic when compared to the cubic volume that AI is now piling down around us.
Then, as we scrambled for cover, the aftershock of ChatGPT 4 emerged from the digital horizon. Once again, within a couple of months, our perception of reality and predictions of the future were washed away like redundant flotsam.
The paradigm shift wave crest is upon us and we are in need of educating ourselves on the riddles of AI and how to ride the wave or sink and drown.
From reading the hundreds of op ed pieces and articles over the past few months, there are a lot of “should” directives but nobody really knows anything:
Ban or not to ban? The entire country of Italy banned. VPN usage has thusly skyrocketed.
My old stomping ground, HKU, banned ChatGPT.
Back to paper and pencil exams as assessments? AI will be used to bring us back full circle
More oral exams? Flashbacks of Irish Leaving Certificate oral exam reappears…Colin is ainm dom…andddd done.
More personable assessments….
…more creative assessments….
Promoting the use of AI detection tools….will they ever be 100%….ChatGPT5 will probably be able to tell us were we went wrong in life and tell us how to get over ourselves…not kidding(!)
More multimedia AI generation from descriptive texts….makes an approach towards “more creative assessments” redundant already. What will creativity mean? I was weirdly proud of the images I generated from Midjourney. I didn’t create them, the AI did. I created the prompts. Prompt and circumstance? The images that adorn this post are “robot penguins in a 90s sci-fi movie” and “a pixar animated movie about the French impressionists”.
“This will change education forever...” Well, Bill Gates thinks so…
To be continued..when other thoughts float on by…or when ChatGPT5 arrives…