@cwebber I‘ve looked over students’ shoulders in seminars to see them asking ChatGPT the questions the instructor is asking the class

@cwebber I'm frustrated that we've degraded the value of education to the point that "Nothing matters, just get that paper" is considered the only worthy goal.

I was the kid who failed to do any homework but did all the reading and aced the tests. In retrospect there's a lot of neurodivergence involved for me but the busywork they kept assigning actively made it harder for me to engage in the real work of education.

@cwebber Kind of the final nail on the coffin of my ol’ dreams of one day(tm) getting back there to get a degree (I dropped out 26y ago).

@cwebber
I have been telling teachers, for a few years now, that they need to embrace LLMs / GPTs. Let the students use them, they are going to need to master their to do their jobs in 10 years any way... But, require that they students provide the prompts and references they used. With that the teachers should be able to determine how well the students learned the material, but almost as importantly how well they learned how to use the LLMs / GPTs.

@cwebber wow, this in particular is so depressing...

Medien: 1

@cwebber

In the 1970s it took a while to adapt math education to the advent of calculators. Something analogous and much more comprehensive will be required. It involved significant changes to the curriculum. Hard to imagine how it will be implemented.

Also, passing off AI generated work as one's own needs to be clearly understood to be cheating (honor code etc.) and enforcement needs to be commensurate with all other types of plagiarism (eg. expulsion).

@cwebber The incentives in education currently make ChatGPT and other cheat tool use pretty much inevitable and inexorable and that was a really depressing sentence to have typed out.

Fixing this isn't complex, but like many not-complex things I don't think it's going to happen. Unfortunately.

@cwebber@social.coop I think that education needs a massive overhaul. I am very opinionated on this topic because I am very intertwined with education. For starters I am a student, I have been a student and I've been a student in several different states throughout elementary school, middle school and highschool. To set the scene from Elementary to Middle I had only been at the same school for more than one school year once and that was 2nd-3rd grade. My grandmother is an elementary school teacher, my mother was a special ed teacher, a special ed director and a is a certified counselor. I do contract IT for multiple school districts within my state.

I think that schools failed to adequately consider the internet. I know that there were people who understood the implications - that with access to so much information at once you need to focus less on memorizing specific information and more on filtering out that information. Figuring out what are reliable sources of information and what aren't. A lot of places never really did that, I mean I was told back in the day that I could "always" trust a .org domain because they had to be an organization. Imagine my shock when I made an account for a domain registrar and found out anyone can get a .org domain. I was told that I could always trust .gov domains and that I could cite them freely. I remember citing cdc.gov directly for a paper in hs I did about the addictiveness of nicotine and the concern regarding flavored vapes.

A lot of curriculum is memorization based. I remember some of my hs math units felt like "memorize this formula, use it and give me the answer". My homework where I had 10+ of the same problems and needed to plug those into a special formula wasn't really teaching me much. My physics class was sometimes similar. I'm thankful both of my teachers provided the formula on the tests (well, my physics teacher allowed us to bring the formula in and I believe they were open note. my math teacher had the formulas above the problem). My history classes were much worse though, remembering SPECIFIC dates of specific incidents without much around the implications. It didn't really feel like I was learning much from history. I'd just memorize the date and forget it after we moved onto the next unit. There were not really much reflections such as "How did this specific event impact things at the time" until like my junior year of highschool. Hell, I had to memorize vocabulary words all the way until Jr year. My freshman and sophomore English teachers would hand us these lists of vocab words (I remember it feeling weird even then!)

This isn't entirely a problem to blame on teachers. Sure there exists a lot of shitty teachers who do what I call "Teach by the textbook" where if you ask them "How do i do x?" they'll reply "It's in chapter 14 of your book". The teachers who give you online homework through Pearson etc. That existed before but when we hit COVID and schools went 'virtual' they realized that they can stack a lot of online classes and not have to pay for more faculty members. I know a lot of colleges that I've attended where I had a professor who had a virtual class, they were a professor from another college and they taught at like 3 other colleges with the same online class. Impossible to reach them, if you ask for help they never have time and it's just this churn. I can totally see why kids look at this and decide "I'm using the slop machine, if they can't even dedicate time for me...".

There's also the angle of teachers with good ideas of how to make their classes more interactive and engaging... are often restricted by school administration. This takes form in multiple ways. Most common has got to be a lack of funding. My mother and several of her teacher friends who were my teachers in HS would pay out of pocket for basic classroom supplies like pens and pencils. My physics teacher spent money out of pocket on scientific equipment for our lessons. It's hard to get your hands a hold of something interactive. My class was the last class in my highschool to perform physical dissections in biology because it was cheaper for the school district to do virtual labs that took the fun out of getting up close and personal you know learning the material. I don't judge the kids who had to take virtual dissections because they were grossed out, I'm glad virtual dissections are an option I just wish it wasn't used as a cost saving measure because it fucks over students that want to physically inspect things.

My first chemistry course was all online, I was given the results of experiments and basically had to do a bunch of calculations like unit conversion. When I went in person and actually did those experiments... using my own numbers in those calculations... I learned better. There's a complete lack of nuance when it comes to personalizing education for each individual student. School districts do not want to pay for that, instead they try to make everything uniform and shove people in the same box. It is rare that you are allowed to modify curriculum that much (my mom was frustrated by this. she had the expectation that you know she'd get to pick the books and stuff she taught from... but she didn't. it was basically handed to her and she had to teach what she was given)

@cwebber I can confirm, as head of an associate degree(full online)that it's like that, and (exaggerating) while the previous generation couldn't read a book, the new TikTok generation can't even watch a video of more than 30s.
And not because they can't learn but because they don't know that they can.

I think that the culprit is the basic school system that doesn't teach to learn, to ask, to fail; then kids focus in the wrong goal which are grades instead of acquiring knowledge and experience.

@cwebber here's a bypass for the paywall by the way https://archive.is/oHg56

@cwebber The best writing professor I had basically would give you feedback on your assignment and then let you take it back multiple times to adjust and fix, the only way you could get a bad grade really was not bothering to stay in class.

School hated him but I imagine his students learned the most, because it was a process not a score.

@cwebber I don't know about other countries, but I learned in ex-USSR, and I'm jealous to modern students for having AI tools. I won't lie if I say I was one of the best students of my year (if not the one), but writing any work was the most daunting, exhausting, depressing part of my studies, because you need to pour tons of water (if you haven't seen the discussion about this Russian expression here on Mastodon, it means that you have to provide lots of common chit-chatty data about how important is your work, ten pages of explanation of what you're doing and why and how and in what Moon phase, and so on, and so forth). I wish I could just say F** it, let's go ChatGPT, so I could concentrate on the core part of my research.

@cwebber The solution is easy, in my opinion: focus on in-class work and less on homework.

That could hurt a student's discipline a bit, but also removes the ability to cheat easily and makes them actually learn hands-on.

@cwebber

Every day, it increasingly feels like we either need a Butlerian Jihad to minister LLM GAIs or we will be naught but fodder for the machines.

@cwebber “We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again”

We are so fucking cooked

@cwebber back in my day we still had to copy homework from someone who actually did it or just accepted our fate as we prayed that the teacher would just forget to check homework

@cwebber putting on my resume "no i really did this shit"

@cwebber I wonder what these students do during exams?

But certainly the end of cursus memoir is dead.

@cwebber yeah I wonder how much this is because we've made school (and the white collar jobs it is so often aimed at filling) increasingly robotic, so of course we get the robots to do it.
It feels like a natural outcome of disempowered teachers and the workers alienation from the product of their work.

@cwebber

Grades will have to be based on work kids do right there in front of you in class - short essays, etc, handwritten. That's the only way to know if they actually learned anything.

@cwebber

If your students "cheat" with #AI then;

a) Your education department has not developed an AI use policy.
b) You are not preparing your students for the world beyond the walls of the school.

The simplest way to integrate AI in school is to simply ban it.
I'm kidding of course, because prohibition was always shown to work well.

My #education department has an interim policy, #students may use AI but they need to show understanding of their work when challenged by the teacher.

Many folks still struggle to understand that AI is taking us from the world where we teach "How" to the world where we teach "Why"

@cwebber it's lazy teaching methods that are the problem not chatgpt. If a teaching method fails in the face of a new technology then it's either a poor method, or what's being taught is redundant.

@cwebber Well educators could just do the obvious thing and raise the bar now that this tool exists. Like you know make every exam an open book one. When you're tasked to write an assay you get criticized as if you'd be a professional writer and every wrong quote or even slight inaccuracy gets you one point removed.

That's what has always happened when new tools come in. Last time happened when Google and Wikipedia joined the scene...

@cwebber Honestly the best response to this in my own education was the tutorial system at Oxford. The format (for my philosophy coursework) was to go off and spend a week researching and writing a paper, and then to spend an hour with the tutor (professor equivalent) reading it, asking questions, and having a discussion.

Getting asked "why did you conclude x" and then having a conversation about it in person is nearly impossible to bluff your way through. It's more labor intensive of course, but I think lecture-style presentations of gatekept knowledge will never be the ideal form of education.

The single most impactful lesson I had was spending a week trying to answer "what was Heidegger's political philosophy" and showing up a week later sheepishly admitting that I hadn't figured it out. We spent the whole time talking about the gaps in where I'd been searching, him giving me pointers in where to look in secondary sources, and so on

@cwebber This thread is so full of "kids these days" bullshit and that is even more depressing to me than any of the extremely depressing AI bullshit.

This is the world WE made. Not young people.

@cwebber worst is the way that schools have to (?) adapt -- my teen basically never gets assigned to write papers; it's all in-class essays, some advance prep, no editing or improving...

@cwebber Yep. Phones and AI are making kids stupid. I’ve seen it in classes. I even had some kids gambling online during a class I was subbing for. It’s bad.

@cwebber
Still, part of this might be that education might be best if it's not actually based around grading, but working with students to actually be excited about learning -- I said this for the 32 years I taught HS and got nowhere - grading only became more pervasive (my unkind take - Parents care more about grades than learning)

@cwebber I totally agree with ending grading — imagine if education was about learning instead of gatekeeping

I do think educators are gonna have to go back to hand-written essays in class

@cwebber Computers have caused the human brains to adapt by utilizing less energy expenditure in not having to store facts to memory. Doing so may not allow for synthesis of material which is necessary for critical thinking/problem solving. Tools are meant to make our lives easier, but we have to use tools wisely and also prepare for the event when tools may fail us. It's disappointing how AI has affected education so negatively to produce students who cannot think critically.

@cwebber @Raven67@zirkus Once one student knows another is using AI to cheat, others may feel they are at a disadvantage. Next thing you know, everybody is using AI in order to not be left behind. What a vicious cycle.

@cwebber Precisely. If the goal of the class is to pass the test, people will seek the path of least resistance. Also this is an easy setting for the educators, since the burden is on the students.

If the goal of the class is to make students interested in a topic and have them learn most, much more of the burden is on the educator to think about how to facilitate that.

@cwebber We don‘t need any certificates or grades anymore.

These are completely out of time. We should use this disruption to seriously turn education into sth. new. Sth. which is more fun and really put‘s knowledge and permenent learning into focus.

Maybe we should simply skip degrees. Maybe a Structure like reddit or Stack Overflow would be better. We can monotor engagement for the job world.

And teachers just focus on Education, nothing else.