This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
NGL, it’s really f*cking depressing when you give students 30m to create something of their own imagination, and they do it in the first minute with chatGPT and spend the other 29m playing games the phone and asking to “go to the bathroom” whenever they notice someone in the hallway.
The excuses you hear when you do something so oppressive as to request they keep their phones in their own backpacks for the duration of the task.
I regularly advocate for banning phones from schools but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea, start talking how that'll leave them defenseless in an emergency, how it is torture, how they absolutely can't live without them
Not thirty years ago nobody had cellphones in school, they barely existed, and everything was fine, everyone was fine without and with cellphones I see so much shit going on. Yes, it's the Future, kids need cellphones, but they also need to learn to be without cellphone, and they need to learn responsible use.
honestly a few years ago I didn't agree with it, but now things are enshittifying so much that it really seems to be the better option now. it'll unfortunately bar even those from using their phones who would use it for other things than mindless scrolling, using ai chatbots and playing microtransaction and ad filled games, but for the whole class and the whole generation it would be better in the end.
I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.
Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.
Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.
If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.
(after all, it said “for educational purposes only”)
The FCC hates this one simple trick
One proposed Florida law I actually agree with is: phones off during school - all of school, including between classes and recess. Possible exception for lunchtime. Definite exception for when the teacher is specifically using the phones as a fully engaged teaching tool, which should be no more than 20% of overall classroom time, but definitely could be used as a way to "grab attention."
I get wanting to be able to track little Ginny and make sure she got to school O.K. and know when to go meet the bus to pick her up.
There should definitely be "Cybersafety" education in our schools, and the phone as a teaching tool definitely makes sense there.
Having AI write the first draft of your assignment can be a good lesson too, but the remaining 28 minutes should be spent understanding and refining what the AI has given you.
TBH, I'd AI can screw up the education system so fast then it is the fault in the education system. AI is bad, but our education system is not good either.
but our education system is not good either.
No Child Left Behind has fucked us for over 20 years...
People are blaming these college kids, but their entire k-12 was under No Child, they were never taught critical thinking, what the fuck are they supposed to do? No one ever taught these kids to think for themselves.
We failed an entire generation, and it's too late to fix it for them now, the best we can do is fix it for the kids that will start public education in a few years.
But we'll be paying the price for decades
Like all things republican, you ruin the public service, then tell everybody we need to get rid of this public service cause only the free market can provide that service in good quality.
Vouchers will save us our children!
It’s ok, they dismantled the department of education. Surely the states can figure it out!
looks over at Oklahoma
…fuck
I would go further back than that. Our entire education system has failed to adapt to the fact that rote memorization is not the most important form of learning and that any question that could be answered in a multiple choice manner is not really worth asking to verify if someone understood the taught material.
We have an education system that has failed to adapt to the easy availability of references which should have resulted in a focus on teaching a "skeleton" of knowledge to students since the exact details can always be looked up as long as you know the information exists and how to interpret it (e.g. you don't need to memorize which element carbon is and how much it weighs, you need to understand what an element is and what important properties of chemical elements are).
We have an education system that failed to adapt to the availability of video recording which would have meant it would be easy to have every student understanding the same language watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones, presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers, falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education.
We have an education system that still struggles with the teacher for a subject as a single source of failure, both in terms of absence and in terms of that teacher not being very compatible in their explanations with the way specific students think instead of having some kind of online forum or matching of teacher to student for one on one questions in a more flexible manner.
We have an education system that still rigidly adheres to categories like physics, chemistry, mathematics, languages, history, geography,... designed in the 19th century for its degrees even though many jobs require more flexible mixes of knowledge and many also require learning for the entire life, not just at the start.
Students today learn for exams a few days before they happen, then purge that knowledge again a few days or hours afterwards.
There are many, many things wrong with our education system and we failed to even acknowledge that there are possible alternatives.
This 100%.
The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.
One of my professors had an AI policy. Using AI for an outline or to find resources was okay, as long as it was cited with the exact prompt used. I think having rules for how to use AI on her assignments actually cut down on use compared to professors who outright banned it.
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.
I teach at a community college. I see a lot of AI nonsense in my assignments.
So much so that I’m considering blue book exams for the fall.
For anyone who is also not from the US:
A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.
EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:
Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".
Importantly it is hand written, no computers.
Biggest issue is that kids’ handwriting often sucks. That’s not a new problem but it’s a problem with handwritten work.
Give them typewriters
There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it's non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I'm still getting to the point where I'm not sure what's left to do other than sandbox "exploitable" graded work in a controlled environment.
I have a friend who has taught Online university writing for the past 10 years. Her students are now just about 100% using AI - her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
Sadly, that may be the best we can hope for.
Going to have generations of people unable to think analytically or creatively, and just as bad, entering fields that require a real detailed knowledge of the subject and they don't. Going to see a lot of fuck ups in engineering, medicine, etc because of people faking it.
That's going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.
On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.
It's breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.
Cynical? I call that realistic. That's what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.
Unpopular opinion:
I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn't it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they're getting? We know that's what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it's kind of exciting too.
Though it's also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated... can we not, please?
I'm thinking the only way people will be able to do schoolwork without cheating now is going to be to make them sit in a monitored room and finish it there.
Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.
These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.
Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.
What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn't understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Yikes.
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
If we're going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we're better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.
As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We're also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious 'oh that's a problem' than the AI stuff.
What's breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are failing at their jobs. They've been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.
Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.
The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).
The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).
If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^
How are other countries handling it? I can't imagine AI being an American only education issue.
It's in France and I guess everywhere else. Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
I've also seen a few young engineers using ChatGPT to do their job because it's easier than working. When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I'm not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
We're doomed.
I work in higher education making online courses. It’s really stressing everyone out.
