Teaching, Learning and Technology

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”

• Socrates

What Then is Learning?

-Brian Tomlinson, Dec 2023

So, I was at an AI Conference at my University the other day, and it just confirmed to me what I’ve felt for awhile that the majority of college professors- at least the ones I interact with on a daily basis, seem to not accept change. Now this is such a blanket, and  uneducated guess. But let me explain. Most of my colleagues that I have come across, and I am not naming the school or names, seem to think of GPT's and AI has a tool to cheat. Some nefarious thing that will undermine everything thing the institution of higher education has been doing for hundreds of years. Well, to that last point, I HOPE SO!. 

I can remember way back when, educators were saying the same thing about calculators in school. In the mid to late 70's and early 80's calculators were becoming a think to use in schools, but most schools, most teachers would not allow you to use them. My father, a mathematician, taught me how to use it to get the correct answer, but then made me exaplain HOW the calculator got the answer. So getting the answer was not the end, it was ARRIVING at the answer, it was understanding the steps to get the correct answer, and not only that, but if I got the wrong answer, why did I get it and to understand how I got there. This only made me understand the specific concept even more. It kept me up many a night too. That was some ahead of time teaching right there!

Throughout my entire school experience I fought with my teachers because well, one, I did little to no homework, I was always playing sports, or trying to talk to girls...regular 80's kids stuff. But every teacher I had, at least until I got to my senior year in high school, was all about getting the right answer. "You must get the right answer if you want to learn and do well". To me all these teachers cared about was getting the right answer, and passing exams, oh! Don’t get me started on exams!! They thought that was actually learning. 

Fast foward to today. I have been a high school math teacher, and now a college instructor of political science, American history, and philosophy where there are actually no real right answers. Maybe only wrong decisions, but that's for another post. 

My issue with some of these faculty today, and not all, I have had some really great conversations, and gotten some really fantastic suggestions on using ChatGPT and other generated ai tools in the classroom. However, my issue is when teachers, already assume that it's cheating when using these tools. Which is sometimes not true. I am not going to go into how AI works or all the stuff that goes into the behind the scenes, but, and this is a big ole’ but, using these AI tools, you need to know what to ask, and how to ask it to get not just the “right answer” but the desired response.

The whole idea behind technology is that it is always changing how we live our lives, and how we learn and more importantly how we teach. As teachers it is our job to harness new tech and think of new ways to engage our students with it. They will be using the tech later to do jobs, and run the world. I sat in one talk where all they did was bash the ethicacies of AI, which they are not wrong, it is the wild wild west right now, and we must raise all the red flags that this new tech produces and introduces, and there are tons of them, beleive me, there are race, age, sex biases in all of these models, not to mention copyright issues and much much more. But as teachers we need to be at the forefront, along with those creating it, so we know how to utilize it correctly in our classrooms. 

I use it in my class, I am experimenting with it, and you know what, I am also failing with it as well. But you know, that's a good thing, because I am learning best practices, and not so best practices. I am teaching how to arrive at the correct or best possible answer, as well as making sure I understand how I got the wrong ones as well. If we are are not teaching the right way and the incorrect way, then what then is learning?"