13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI

There is a reason why educational video games are not as engaging as regular video games. There is a reason why AI-generated educational videos will never be as engaging as regular videos. Brenda Laurel pointed to the ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’ problem over 20 years ago … her point still stands. EdSurge

While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education. Mashable 

This tech is being primarily pitched as a money-saving device—so it will be taken up by school authorities that are looking to save money. As soon as a cash-strapped administrator has decided that they’re happy to let technology drive a whole lesson, then they no longer need a highly-paid professional teacher in the room—they just need someone to trouble-shoot any glitches and keep an eye on the students. EdSurge 

Some commentators are urging teachers to introduce ChatGPT into the curriculum as early as possible (a valuable revenue stream and data source). Students, they argue, must begin to develop new skills such as prompt engineering. What these (often well-intentioned) techno-enthusiasts forget is that they have decades of writing solo under their belts. Just as drivers who turn the wheel over to flawed autopilot systems surrender their judgment to an over-hyped technology, so a future generation raised on language models could end up, in effect, never learning to drive. Public Books

Some professors have leapt out front, producing newsletters, creating explainer videos, and crowdsourcing resources and classroom policies. The one thing that academics can’t afford to do, teaching and tech experts say, is ignore what’s happening. Sooner or later, the technology will catch up with them, whether they encounter a student at the end of the semester who may have used it inappropriately, or realize that it’s shaping their discipline and their students’ futures in unstoppable ways. Chronicle of Higher Ed

(There is a) notion that college students (can) learn to write by using chatbots to generate a synthetic first draft, which they afterwards revise, overlooks the fundamentals of a complex process. Since text generators do a good job with syntax, but suffer from simplistic, derivative, or inaccurate content, requiring students to work from this shallow foundation is hardly the best way to empower their thinking, hone their technique, or even help them develop a solid grasp of an LLM’s limitations. The purpose of a college research essay is not to teach students how to fact-check and gussy up pre-digested pablum. It is to enable them to develop and substantiate their own robust propositions and truth claims. Public Books  

If a professor runs students’ work through a detector without informing them in advance, that could be an academic-integrity violation in itself.  The student could then appeal the decision on grounds of deceptive assessment, “and they would probably win.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

We are dangerously close to creating two strata of students: those whom we deem smart and insightful and deeply thoughtful, if sometimes guilty of a typo, and those who seem less engaged with the material, or less able to have serious thoughts about it. Inside Higher Ed

The challenge here is in communicating to students that AI isn’t a replacement for real thinking or critical analysis, and that heavy reliance on such platforms can lead away from genuine learning. Also, because AI platforms like ChatGPT retrieve information from multiple unknown sources, and the accuracy of the information cannot be guaranteed, students need to be wary about using the chatbot’s content. The Straits Times 

It seems futile for faculty members to spend their energies figuring out what a current version can’t do. Chronicle of Higher Ed

It is important to be aware that ChatGPT’s potential sharing of personal information with third parties may raise serious privacy concerns for your students and perhaps in particular for students from marginalized backgrounds. Barnard College

How might chatting with AI systems affect vulnerable students, including those with depression, anxiety, and other mental-health challenges? Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Students need considerable support to make sure ChatGPT promotes learning rather than getting in the way of it. Some students find it harder to move beyond the tool’s output and make it their own. “It needs to be a jumping-off point rather than a crutch.” MIT Tech Review

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection        

The Wrong People

Stop spending time with the wrong people.  Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you. If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth. And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

Marc Chernoff, read more here.

22 examples of teaching with AI

(A professor) plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.“What’s happening in class is no longer going to be, ‘Here are some questions — let’s talk about it between us human beings,’” he said, but instead “it’s like, ‘What also does this alien robot think?’” New York Times

Prof Jim is a software company that can turn existing written materials—like textbooks, Wikipedia pages or a teacher’s notes—into these animated videos at the push of a button. A teacher could use the software to turn a Wikipedia page about, say, the Grand Canyon into a video. EdSurge

Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones. New York Times

There is no understanding or intent behind AI outputs. But warning students about the mistakes that result from this lack of understanding is not enough. It’s easy to pay lip service to the notion that AI has limitations and still end up treating AI text as more reliable than it is. There’s a well-documented tendency to project onto AI; we need to work against that by helping students practice recognizing its failings. One way to do this is to model generating and critiquing outputs and then have students try on their own. Can they detect fabrications, misrepresentations, fallacies and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes? If students aren’t ready to critique ChatGPT’s output, then we shouldn’t choose it as a learning aid. Inside Higher Ed

ChatGPT could help teachers shift away from an excessive focus on final results. Getting a class to engage with AI and think critically about what it generates could make teaching feel more human “rather than asking students to write and perform like robots.” MIT Tech Review 

Reverting to analog forms of assessment, like oral exams, can put students with disabilities at a disadvantage. And outright bans on AI tools could cement a culture of distrust. “It’s going to be harder for students to learn in an environment where a teacher is trying to catch them cheating,” says Trust. “It shifts the focus from learning to just trying to get a good grade.” Wired 

I’ve given students assignments to “cheat” on their final papers with text-generating software. In doing so, most students learn—often to their surprise—as much about the limits of these technologies as their seemingly revolutionary potential. Some come away quite critical of AI, believing more firmly in their own voices. Others grow curious about how to adapt these tools for different goals or about professional or educational domains they could impact. Inside Higher Ed 

ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking. MIT Tech Review

Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing. Inside Higher Ed

In March, Quizlet updated its app with a feature called Q-Chat, built using ChatGPT, that tailors material to each user’s needs. The app adjusts the difficulty of the questions according to how well students know the material they’re studying and how they prefer to learn. Some educators think future textbooks could be bundled with chatbots trained on their contents. Students would have a conversation with the bot about the book’s contents as well as (or instead of) reading it. The chatbot could generate personalized quizzes to coach students on topics they understand less well. MIT Tech Review

Encourage students to use peer-reviewed journals as sources. These types of journals are not available to ChatGPT, so by teaching our students about them and requiring their use in essays, we can ensure that the content being presented is truly original. The Tech Insider

Students must then take apart and improve upon the ChatGPT-generated essay—an exercise designed to teach critical analysis, the craft of precise thesis statements, and a feel for what “good writing” looks like. Wired

Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Critical AI 

Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better. Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more. MIT Tech Review

When possible, scaffold your assignments to promote revision and growth over time, with opportunities for feedback from peers, TAs, and/or the instructor. Build assignment pre-writing or brainstorming into class time and invite students to share and discuss these ideas in small groups or with the class as a whole. Barnard College

Nontraditional learners could get more out of tools like ChatGPT than mainstream methods. It could be an audio-visual assistant where students can freely ask as many clarifying questions as necessary without judgment.Teachers juggling countless individualized education plans could also take advantage of ChatGPT by asking how to curate lesson plans for students with disabilities or other learning requirements. New York Magazine 

Discuss students’ potentially diverse motivations for using ChatGPT or other generative AI software. Do they arise from stress about the writing and research process? Time management on big projects? Competition with other students? Experimentation and curiosity about using AI? Grade and/or other pressures and/or burnout? Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions. Cultivate an environment in your course in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Barnard College

We will need to teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question. To teach them how to do that, we don’t need to hastily construct a new field called “critical AI studies.” The intellectual resources students need are already present in the history and philosophy of science courses, along with the disciplines of statistics and machine learning themselves, which are deeply self-conscious about their own epistemic procedures. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Spend some time discussing the definition (or definitions) of academic honesty and discuss your own expectations for academic honesty with your students. Be open, specific, and direct about what those expectations are. Barnard College

Experiential learning will become the norm. Everyone will need an internship. Employers will want assurances that a new graduate can follow directions, complete tasks, demonstrate judgment. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Khan Academy released the Khanmigo project which is able to help students as a virtual tutor or debating partner and helps teachers with administrative tasks such as generating lesson plans.Columbia Journalism Review

One situation in which I have found ChatGPT extremely useful is writing multiple-choice questions. It’s quite easy to write a question and the right answer, but coming up with three plausible wrong answers is tricky. I found that if I prompted ChatGPT with the following: “Write a multi-choice question about <topic of interest> with four answers, and not using ‘all of the above’ as an answer,” it came up with good wrong answers. This was incredibly helpful. Nature

ChatGPT outperformed most of his (journalism) students who were in the early part of the course. But students would have to seek out sources, do on-the-ground reporting, and find the important trends in the data. “And all of that, you’re not gonna get from ChatGPT.” Columbia Journalism Review

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection     

13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI                                                                                      

Explaining Yourself

Never explain yourself: Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it. -Ziad Abdelnour

The Past vs. Possibilities

When I encounter a $2.89 cup of coffee, it’s all too easy for me to recall what I paid for coffee the day before and not so easy for me to imagine all the other things I might buy with my money.

Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.

And that is indeed what I ought to be doing because it really doesn’t matter what coffee cost the day before, the week before, or at any time during the Hoover administration. Right now I have absolute dollars to spend and the only questions I need to answer is how to spend them in order to maximize my satisfaction. If an international bean embargo suddenly caused the price of coffee to skyrocket to $10,000 per cup, then the only question I would need to ask myself is:

“What else can I do with ten thousand dollars, and will it bring me more or less satisfaction than a cup of coffee?”

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI

For students who do not self-identify as writers, for those who struggle with writer’s block or for underrepresented students seeking to find their voices, it can provide a meaningful assist during initial stages of the writing process. Inside Higher Ed

Let’s be honest. Ideas are more important than how they are written. So, I use ChatGPT to help me organize my ideas better and make them sound more professional. The Tech Insider

Students could (use AI to) look for where the writing took a predictable turn or identify places where the prose is inconsistent. Students could then work to make the prose more intellectually stimulating for humans. Inside Higher Ed

If you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? A.I. often churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communications or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own. New York Times

Imagine if the platform extracted campus-specific information about gen ed and major requirements. It could then provide quality academic advice to students that current chat bots can’t. Inside Higher Ed

ChatGPT may be able to help with more basic functions, such as assisting with writing in English for those who do not speak it natively. Tech Radar

What if the platform had access to real-time local or regional job market data and trends and data about the efficacy of various skills certificates? It could then serve as initial-tier career counseling. Inside Higher Ed

On TikTok, the hashtag #chatgpt has more than 578 million views, with people sharing videos of the tool writing papers and solving coding problems. New York Times

The student who is using it because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Some argue that it’s not worth the time spent ferreting out a few cheaters and would rather focus their energy on students who are there to learn. Others say they can’t afford to look the other way. Chronicle of Higher Ed

It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content. Inside Higher Ed

Don’t fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience. ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Find the six feet that your reader needs, and put the rest of your estate up for auction. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. New York Times 

We surpass the AI by standing on its shoulders. Boris Steipe, associate professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, for example, encourages students to engage in a Socratic debate with ChatGPT as a way of thinking through a question and articulating an argument. “You will get the plain vanilla answer—what everybody thinks—from ChatGPT,” Steipe said, “That’s where you need to start to think. That’s where you need to ask, ‘How is it possibly incomplete?’” Inside Higher Ed

Students can leverage ChatGPT as a tutor or homework supplement, especially if they need to catch up. ChatGPT’s ability to make curated responses is unparalleled, so if a student needs a scientific explanation for a sixth-grade reading level, ChatGPT can adapt. New York Magazine

The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Marc Watkins, lecturer in composition and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi: “Our students are not John Henry, and AI is not a steam-powered drilling machine that will replace them. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to surpass technology.” Inside Higher Ed

These tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students who lack confidence in their ability to learn might allow the products of these AI tools to replace their own voices or ideas.  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students describe using OpenAI’s tool as well as others for much more than generating essays. They are asking the bots to create workout plans, give relationship advice, suggest characters for a short story, make a joke and provide recipes for the random things left in their refrigerators. Washington Post

Basak-Odisio will use it only, he said, if he has procrastinated too much and is facing an impossible deadline. “If it is the day or night before, and I want to finish something as quickly as possible — ” he said, trailing off. “But,” he added, “I want to be better than that.” Washington Post

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                                         

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments            

22 examples of teaching with AI                                                           

27 thoughts on teaching with AI             

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection            

Don't distract, immerse

We're not taking the world in; we're just listening to the stories we tell ourselves about the world, trusting the endless parade of thoughts flitting through our heads instead of actually paying attention to life around us. Immerse yourself in the world around you. Don't distract, immerse.

Eric Barker

Admitting You are Wrong

Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true. To reduce dissonance, we have to modify the self-concept or accept the evidence. Guess which route people prefer?

We cling to old ways of doing things, even when new ways are better and healthier and smarter. We cling to self-defeating beliefs long past their shelf life. And we make our partners, co-workers, parents and kids really, really mad at us.

 Carol Tavris quotes in the New York Times and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

The difference

The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves. -Barbara Corcoran

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans

Eaton, the academic-integrity expert, cautions against trying to ban the use of ChatGPT entirely. That, she says, “is not only futile but probably ultimately irresponsible.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

I would compare this to using steroids in baseball. If you don’t ban steroids in baseball, then the reality is every player has to use them. Even worse than that, if you ban them but don’t enforce it, what you actually do is create a situation where you weed out all of the honest players. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

A study surveyed 372 students seeking admission into college for fall 2023 and found that nearly half, 39% of those students, would not consider attending a college that's banned ChatGPT or other AI tools. ZDNET

Several leading academic journals and publishers updated their submission guidelines to explicitly ban researchers from listing ChatGPT as a co-author, or using text copied from a ChatGPT response. Some professors have criticized these bans as shortsightedly resistant to an inevitable technological change. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Blocking access to ChatGPT at school won’t matter, at least for any student with access to a tablet or laptop outside of school. Ed Week

ChatGPT and AI writer has been banned in educational institutions around the world, from high schools across America(opens in new tab) and Australia to universities in France and India with some university professors having caught their students using ChatGPT to write their entire assignments. Tech Radar 

A number of universities that say they are planning to expel students who are caught using the software. Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said many universities were “panicking”. The Guardian 

Los Angeles Unified, the second-­largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. MIT Tech Review

The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in its schools, as has the University of Sciences Po, in Paris, citing concerns it may foster rampant plagiarism and undermine learning. Washington Post

Teachers at Oceana High School in Pacifica, California have sent out messages to students warning against using AI-writing software for assignments. Mashable

Washington University in St. Louis and University of Vermont in Burlington are among the institutions that have amended their academic integrity policies to include the usage of AI tools like ChatGPT. Stanford Daily 

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments            

22 examples of teaching with AI                                                           

27 thoughts on teaching with AI   

13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI                                  

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection

Students should know that this technology is rapidly evolving: future detectors may be able to retroactively identify auto-generated prose from the past. No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. Inside Higher Ed

Alex Lawrence, professor at Weber State University, described it as “the greatest cheating tool ever invented.” Wall Street Journal

Some plagiarism detection and learning management systems have adapted surveillance techniques, but that leaves systems designed to ensure original work “locked in an arms race” with systems designed to cheat. Inside Higher Ed

Popular essay submission portal Turnitin is developing its own detector, and Hive claims that its service is more accurate than others on the market, including OpenAI’s very own, and some independent testers have agreed. Tech Radar 

While faculty members will likely spend some time trying to identify a boundary line between AI assistance and AI cheating with respect to student writing, that may not be the best use of their time. That path leads to trying to micromanage students’ use of these models. Inside Higher Ed

You can have tools like Quillbot (that can) paraphrase the essays ChatGPT gives you so it doesn't look too obvious. Mashable

“If I’m a very intelligent AI and I want to bypass your detection, I could insert typos into my writing on purpose.” said Diyi Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University.  Inside Higher Ed 

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot). Washington Post 

If a teacher’s concern is that students will “cheat” with ChatGPT, the answer is to give assignments that are personal and focused on thinking. We don’t have to teach students to follow a writing algorithm any more; there’s an app for that. Forbes

What’s to stop a student from getting ChatGPT to write their work, then tweak it slightly until it no longer gets flagged by a classifier? This does take some effort, but a student may still find this preferable to writing an entire assignment themselves. Tech Radar 

If the concern is that students could cheat, it’s worth remembering that they could cheat six months ago and 60 years ago. Students taking a brand-new exam could already get answers to test questions in minutes from services like Chegg. Students could already plagiarize — or pay someone else to write their entire paper. With the entrance of ChatGPT, “what’s changed is the ease and the scope. Chronicle of Higher Ed

If ChatGPT makes it easy to cheat on an assignment, teachers should throw out the assignment rather than ban the chatbot. MIT Tech Review

Professors can create conditions in which cheating is difficult, giving closed-book, closed-note, closed-internet exams in a controlled environment. They can create assignments in which cheating is difficult, by asking students to draw on what was said in class and to reflect on their own learning. They can make cheating less relevant, by letting students collaborate and use any resource at their disposal. Or they can diminish the forces that make cheating appealing: They can reduce pressure by having more-frequent, lower-stakes assessments. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Unlike accusations of plagiarism, AI cheating has no source document to reference as proof. “This leaves the door open for teacher bias to creep in.” Washington Post

Despite their positive attitude towards AI, many students (in a survey say they) feel anxious and lack clear guidance on how to use AI in the learning environments they are in. It is simply difficult to know where the boundary for cheating lies. Neuroscience News

While the AI-detection feature could be helpful in the immediate term, it could also lead to a surge in academic-misconduct cases, Eaton said. Colleges will have to figure out what to do with those reports at a moment when professors have yet to find consensus on how ChatGPT should be dealt with in their classrooms. Chronicle of Higher Ed

“Do you want to go to war with your students over AI tools?” said Ian Linkletter, who serves as emerging technology and open-education librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. “Or do you want to give them clear guidance on what is and isn’t okay, and teach them how to use the tools in an ethical manner?” Washington Post

Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post 

On many campuses, high-course-load contingent faculty and graduate students bear much of the responsibility for the kinds of large-enrollment, introductory-level, general-education courses where cheating is rampant. How can large or even mid-sized colleges withstand the flood of nonsense quasi-plagiarism when academic-integrity first responders are so overburdened and undercompensated? Chronicle of Higher Ed

Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said any attempts to crackdown on the use of AI chatbots in classrooms is misguided, and history proves that educators must adapt to technology. Washington Post

Harsh punishments for cheating might preserve the status quo, but colleges generally give cheaters a slap on the wrist, and that won’t change. Unmonitored academic work will become optional, or a farce. The only thing that will really matter will be exams. And unless the exams are in-person, they’ll be a farce, too. Chronicle of Higher Ed

“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. “We should adapt our education system to not police the use of the AI models, but basically embrace it to help students to use it and learn from it.” Washington Post

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments            

22 examples of teaching with AI                                                           

27 thoughts on teaching with AI   

13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI                                               

Painful and sobering

Everything painful and sobering revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn one’s self-esteem. -Ernest Becker

The paradox of sad music

This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way. 

Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.

“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Dr. Joshua Knobe (an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University) said. “And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”

Read more from Oliver Whang in the New York Times 

Familiarity & Truth

Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. -Daniel Kahneman

Do something

Don’t be something, do something. -William Bridges

New ways of being alive

(At the age of 35) cancer has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.

But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard. 

Kate Bowler writing in the New York Times

An Apology

A German wholesaler decided to offer a brief apology and rebate to customers who had posted more than 600 complaints about the firm on eBay. Defective products and late deliveries pledged the firm. Half were sent an apology and half were offered a small cash rebate. The result? Nearly half of those who received the apology removed their poor rating of the company. Only one-out-of-five of the customers given the money did so.

Stephen Goforth

History

Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. -Karl Marx

What History can Teach us

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events. -Gerda Lerner

Possibility and Despair

Possibility … is to human existence what vowels are to speech. To live in pure possibility is like an infants utterance of vowel sounds, which fail to express something that is definite and clear. Vowels alone do not make for articulate speech, although without them nothing can be said at all. Similarly, “if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in deeper every moment it lacks possibility.” One cannot breathe without oxygen, but it is also impossible to breathe pure oxygen. Possibility is a kind of spiritual oxygen that a person cannot live without, but one cannot live on pure possibility either.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction