Great piece. I hope the freedom to experiment with AI tools becomes more common. Such a better response than requiring teachers to attend webinars and workshops telling them what not to do, or worse, imposing particular AI products.
Thanks, Rob. Fortunately, we have a lot of flexibility at my school to experiment. Teacher conversations, as you can imagine, are all over the map, with some teachers wanting nothing to do with it and others playing around and trying things out. I've spent a tremendous amount of time on reading about and using different AI platforms in various ways and have been open with students about what I think works, is interesting (I love my AI image generations), and what makes me nervous (the new Deep Research models). Most teachers and administrators, however, simply have not had the time to follow the progress in the AI space which has been considerable and shows no signs of slowing down. The landscape has shifted from November 22, 2022 in significant ways but most people in education still talk about AI as if it's still in its initial incarnation. The coming wave of AI agents and the deeper reasoning models are going to continue to be pushed on an ignorant populace who may not understand because it's all happening so fast. I'm excited by the possibilities of AI but have also seen the very real risks across the board. The implications for teaching and learning are profound. I am all about the practical so I like to see what they can actually do versus what is claimed. They are great for some things, mediocre for others, and quite misleading in other respects.
Thanks. I totally agree that we are way too obsessed with plagiarism (I count myself within the "we" here) and not focused enough on how AI can help with, e.g. understanding a text. My university (graduate) students pointed this out to me when I taught a course on academic reading and I've been pondering it ever since. Though you are right that it's all in the prompts, which implies a certain level of skill already.
I'd be curious what your students said - did they share any tools or an example of what they meant? I am interested how students at the graduate school level may be using AI platforms in their research and organization of materials. Tools like Elicit are going to become ubiquitous and will transform the way people interact with scholarly papers and journals. https://elicit.com/
Yes thanks Steve. This was a class on academic reading-ie how to figure out how to read "smart" when you're assigned way too much on a graduate syllabus. They were principally using tools like "Claude" (whom I've heard other academics recommend) to generate summaries for them of articles so that they could decide whether to read it or not and if so which parts. Also Jenni. But honestly my feeling is that just using Adobe Acrobat to do the summaries is enough and I'm going to start incorporating this tool as a recommendation , whilst still suggesting that they use their own brain and "old school" tools like skimming and scanning once they get into the guts of the piece. Hope that's helpful
Steve! This is the tech product we built! Please check us out at www.TrueMark.ai! We think that a controlled AI environment doesn’t circumvent learning, but helps teach students critical thinking and ethical use of Generative AI. It is also renting aligned which helps teachers get feedback back to students faster.
Pretty interesting. I watched the video. Which LLM is being used? ChatGPT? I think your product has possibilities but would likely raise lots of questions for skeptical educators. What is the background of the folks who built the product? Did you consult with teachers? Do you have feedback of students and teachers who have used the product? I've seen a dozen of iterations of different kinds of products (though not this one exactly) and I think the challenge for you is, for the teachers who might gravitate to this kind of product, they are likely already tech savvy enough to do something similar on their own. Not sure how you convince other teachers to sign up and jump through the hoops to get to the end result. But I like the recording feature and I would be really interested to get my kids feedback on the writing process in such an environment. Thanks for sharing.
Great piece. I hope the freedom to experiment with AI tools becomes more common. Such a better response than requiring teachers to attend webinars and workshops telling them what not to do, or worse, imposing particular AI products.
Thanks, Rob. Fortunately, we have a lot of flexibility at my school to experiment. Teacher conversations, as you can imagine, are all over the map, with some teachers wanting nothing to do with it and others playing around and trying things out. I've spent a tremendous amount of time on reading about and using different AI platforms in various ways and have been open with students about what I think works, is interesting (I love my AI image generations), and what makes me nervous (the new Deep Research models). Most teachers and administrators, however, simply have not had the time to follow the progress in the AI space which has been considerable and shows no signs of slowing down. The landscape has shifted from November 22, 2022 in significant ways but most people in education still talk about AI as if it's still in its initial incarnation. The coming wave of AI agents and the deeper reasoning models are going to continue to be pushed on an ignorant populace who may not understand because it's all happening so fast. I'm excited by the possibilities of AI but have also seen the very real risks across the board. The implications for teaching and learning are profound. I am all about the practical so I like to see what they can actually do versus what is claimed. They are great for some things, mediocre for others, and quite misleading in other respects.
Hi Steve! I recently met one of your former students who just transferred to HW. Hope you are well!
Thanks. I totally agree that we are way too obsessed with plagiarism (I count myself within the "we" here) and not focused enough on how AI can help with, e.g. understanding a text. My university (graduate) students pointed this out to me when I taught a course on academic reading and I've been pondering it ever since. Though you are right that it's all in the prompts, which implies a certain level of skill already.
I'd be curious what your students said - did they share any tools or an example of what they meant? I am interested how students at the graduate school level may be using AI platforms in their research and organization of materials. Tools like Elicit are going to become ubiquitous and will transform the way people interact with scholarly papers and journals. https://elicit.com/
Yes thanks Steve. This was a class on academic reading-ie how to figure out how to read "smart" when you're assigned way too much on a graduate syllabus. They were principally using tools like "Claude" (whom I've heard other academics recommend) to generate summaries for them of articles so that they could decide whether to read it or not and if so which parts. Also Jenni. But honestly my feeling is that just using Adobe Acrobat to do the summaries is enough and I'm going to start incorporating this tool as a recommendation , whilst still suggesting that they use their own brain and "old school" tools like skimming and scanning once they get into the guts of the piece. Hope that's helpful
Steve! This is the tech product we built! Please check us out at www.TrueMark.ai! We think that a controlled AI environment doesn’t circumvent learning, but helps teach students critical thinking and ethical use of Generative AI. It is also renting aligned which helps teachers get feedback back to students faster.
Pretty interesting. I watched the video. Which LLM is being used? ChatGPT? I think your product has possibilities but would likely raise lots of questions for skeptical educators. What is the background of the folks who built the product? Did you consult with teachers? Do you have feedback of students and teachers who have used the product? I've seen a dozen of iterations of different kinds of products (though not this one exactly) and I think the challenge for you is, for the teachers who might gravitate to this kind of product, they are likely already tech savvy enough to do something similar on their own. Not sure how you convince other teachers to sign up and jump through the hoops to get to the end result. But I like the recording feature and I would be really interested to get my kids feedback on the writing process in such an environment. Thanks for sharing.