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Another school year begins – which means another year of tests written by AI, sets of problems completed by AI and, for teachers, the programs generated by AI. For the first time, the elderly in high school had all their career in high school defined to some extent by chatbots. The same goes for seniors in college: Chatgpt published in November 2022, which means that unlike the end of last year, this year’s harvest had a generative AI at hand all the time.
My colleagues Ian Bogost and Lila Shroff have recently written articles on these students and the state of AI in education. (Ian, a university professor himself, wrote on the college, while Lila wrote on the school.) Their articles were striking: it is clear that AI was largely adopted, by students and teachers, but technology also transformed the school into a kind of free for all.
I asked Lila and Ian to have a brief conversation on their work – and on the place where AI goes to education.
This interview has been modified and condensed.
Lila Shroff: We are a few years in AI in schools. Does the conversation mature or change in one way or another in universities?
Ian Bogost: The teachers are less surprised than exists, but there may be a little dead angle to the adoption state among the students. I saw a panic in 2022, 2023, as, as, as, as, as, as, as Oh my God, it can do anything. Or at least there were questions. Can it do everything? How much is my class at risk? Now I think there is more sense, Well, this thing still exists, but we have time. We don’t have to worry about it right away. And it could be a worse reaction than the original.
Lilac: The language of advantage also sounds like the high school environment. I spoke to some high school students – I got a very small sample, but basically it seems that everyone uses it all the time for everything.
Ian: Not just for school, right? Everything they want to do, they ask for the Chatppt now.
Lilac: I was a second year student at university when Chatgpt came out, so I witnessed this first -hand. There was much more anxiety – it seemed that the rules were not clear. And I think that our two stories mentioned the fact that for this new class of high school students and colleges, they barely had one of these four years without Chatppt. Whatever kind of stigma or confusion that could have been there in previous years, it is discoloration, and it becomes very lacking and standardized.
Ian: Standardization is the thing that struck me the most. It is not a concept that I think the teachers wrapped their heads. Teachers and teachers also adopted the AI carefully or casually – or perhaps even in a more professional way, to write articles or letters of recommendation, on which I wrote. There is always this feeling that it is not really a part of their habit.
Lilac: I examined the teachers at level K – 12 for the article I wrote. Three in 10 teachers use the weekly AI in a way.
Ian: A kind of overhaul of educational practice may be necessary, which is easy to say for me in an article. Instead of an answer, I have an approach to reflection on the answer that bounced in my brain. Do you know the concept in the development of software called technical debt? In the world of software, you make the decision to design or implement a system that feels good and just at the time. And maybe you know that it will be a bad idea in the long term, but for the moment it makes sense and it’s practical. But you never stop making it really better later, so you have all these non -optimal aspects of your infrastructure.
This is the state in which I think we are, at least at university. It is a little different in high school, in particular in public high school, with these various regulations for regulatory at work. But we have accumulated all this educational debt, and not only since AI – there are aspects of the teaching to which we must pay more attention or do better, like, This class must be smallerOr These types of missions do not work unless you have a lot of practical iterative comments. We were able to survive under the weight of the educational debt, and now something broke. The AI has come on stage and all these bad or questionable – but understandable – decisions about how to design learning experiences come home to perch.
Lilac: I agree that AI is a point of rupture of education. An answer that seems to emerge in high school is a more practical education based on skills. The College Board, for example, announced two new AP courses: business and cybersecurity AP. But there is another group of people who are really concerned about the way in which the overcoming of these tools erodes the skills in critical thinking, and it may mean that everyone should read the classics and write their tests in cursive writing.
Ian: My young daughter went to this set of lessons outside the school where she learned to wire a outlet. We used to have workshop and metal lessons, and you could learn a job, or at least start in high school. Many of these things have been disinvested. We used to touch more things. Now we move the symbols, and that’s a bit.
I wonder if this nature everything or nothing of the use of AI has something to do with it. If you had a place in your day as a high school student or a student where you just painted, or if you have to do a job in the field in the community, or apply the work you have done during statistical to solve a real problem – maybe you want to finish just as quickly as possible so that you can get on the next thing in your life would be less acute. The problem of AI is a symptom of a greater cultural disease, in a way.
Lilac: Students use AI exactly as it has been designed, right? They just make each other more productive. If they did the same thing in an office, they could get a bonus.
Ian: Some of the students I spoke to said, Your boss does not care about the way you get things done, just that he is as effectively as possible. And they are not mistaken about it.
Lilac: A student I spoke to said that she felt that there was really too much to do, and it was difficult to stay at the top of everything. His message was, perhaps slowing down the pace of work and giving students more time to do things more richly.
Ian: The students I talk to, if you slow down everything, they are more likely to create a new club or practice the butt one more day per week. But I like the idea of a slow school movement to counter AI. This does not necessarily mean excluding AI – it simply means not to fill every moment every day with so much request.
But you know, it does not look like the victory of deliberation and meaning in America. Instead, it seems that you always go to fight the reader to perform even more.
