What might ChatGPT mean for higher education? (Future Trends Forum)

[cogdog]

Sadly event timing is always going to mess up half the globe; I will confirm that Bryan is fantastic at not only posting the recordings, but blogging the details and notes.

Thanks for this in depth reply, Martin. I hope you know I am neither an AI star gazer nor a caster of doom for it ruining education or taking jobs. I’ve been posting around here since June in more of a questioning/curiosity/slightly critical mode. It’s been my home to stir up exactly these kinds of discussions, but also, maybe, just maybe, coordinate some action by those interested in more than tweet length spouting.

I think a major challenge in understanding AI is that our intuition and conceptual models are failing because the workings of this is both utterly complex and hidden. So we are trying to make sense by the limited examples we can get from the responses of the generators we are hearing about.

I have lingered some on this way of operating called “promptism” I read in a newsletter from Seb Chan.

@cogdog

My social media feeds overflowed with DALL-E and Midjourney ‘promptism’ visuals. The coining of ‘promptism’ by others nicely deflects attention from the underlying technologies to the craft of finding the right language (the prompt) to ‘talk to the machine’. Its a bit like those people who seem to have a magical ability to craft ‘the perfect Google search query’ but aren’t trained librarians and have really just have done a bit of SEO work in their past.

Thinking about some of the projecting that we might turn tasks of building/creativity to AI, like writing code. Or I just some CodePen demos where ChatGPT was prompted and spit out custom SVG images from prompts. On one hand possibly impressive, but what if we lose the foundational capabilities to debug or diagnose what the machine spits?

The limited thinking and panic about what this means for essay writing that you address makes me tired. That is so limited. I am motivated by what you described

@moodler

Well, in the rest of our lifelong learning, we assess each other and build reputation through LONG-TERM ENGAGEMENT. You know if a colleague is good at their work or not, because you see what they do in an authentic context every day for a long time. or perhaps you read someone’s blog for a long time. It’s the same in a homeschool, or an apprenticeship, or any really small class.

In my teaching I never assessed on quizzes or essays and all based on what students wrote, reflected, and showed in public (or at least community) spaces, often, but not only blogs.

I’d hope we can rally some more brains here, there (fediverse and beyond) to take these on. Are you willing, interested to motivate some OEGlobal community action? What can we do?

And please never apologize for long form writing. I could not agree more with your last paragraph- this has been a loss in the last few years of sliding to social media platforms for thinking out loud.

@moodler

it FEELS GOOD to express oneself in text, and I think this is another angle we should double down on in our educational practices - the joy and need of self-expression and creation for mental health)

Now this is something to champion! Thanks again