Hello, my name is Katherine Ornelas and I plan to teach English to high school students. So far my only experience in education is with elementary school students, and my time with my young students was incredibly challenging and rewarding. I personally feel that certain forms of media technology have no place in schools, such as social media and generative AI. Social media is a form of entertainment and it distracts students from their lessons. More than that, social media use can be dangerous for especially young students. Even alert students who try to keep themselves safe from strangers online are at risk of becoming anxious and isolated when they rely too much on the internet for socialization. As far as generative AI goes, there are ethical ways to use it to assist students during the brainstorming stage of their projects, but the way I've seen it used by students has only been detrimental to their education. Programs such as ChatGPT not only plagiarize ideas from existing published works, they also regurgitate that information in such a way that it creates a "final draft soup" for essays and presentations which consist of made-up statistics pulled from made-up sources. Students who get caught using generative AI to do their homework from them have to deal with the added embarrassment of turning in a product so nonsensical and robotic that it becomes clear to those students that they could have done a much better job if they'd so much as completed the project themselves hours before it was due. At least by doing your project the night before, you have a decent chance of retaining a fraction of what you've learned for that class, which cannot be said for copy and pasting projects churned out by ChatGPT. Of course I don't think that all media technology should be kept from classrooms, but we need to try to inform administrators, parents, and students of the risks and downsides to generative AI and social media in the classroom.
I also agree that AI and social media don't really have a place in the classroom, for the same reasons you provided. I understand how AI today is being allowed to some extent, but I admit that I am extremely biased against AI in general, and hate the direction it's taking in the world, which drives my opinion, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I would like to highlight the point you made about AI taking nonsense (made up) information online. I wouldn't think that's a risk that would be worth it to take for those who DO use it, because getting information completely wrong is just about as good as not doing the assignment at all, just with added repercussions. I understand the idea of using it to brainstorm, or using it to lead you into actual assignment in full, but I also think the ability to do such yourself without the help of AI is a valuable skill to have (and you simply don't NEED AI to be able to do it). All that to say that I don't think it's a necessity in the classroom, having considered some nuanced ways students can use it "fairly."
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ReplyDeleteHi, Katherine! I found your comments about AI (Artificial Intelligence) interesting as applied to the classroom. I honestly don't know that much about what the people in the know are doing with it, except that it is reviled in English writing! For instance, when I Google something now, it immediately provides an AI summary, which now just skip over and on to articles. I don't know why students would completely rely on AI to write papers, except if they were trying to get it done in time or something. I think AI may have it's place in the world to gather information, but students can't depend on it. It's an unfortunate trend right now. It just shows that if there's a good tool that can be wielded in different ways, it may be used incorrectly. For instance, I don't even know where to find ChatGPT without an internet search, nor would I use it. I think that students now need to be educated about the ethics of such a thing as part of their education. Signed, Jennifer Morrow.
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