Zeynep Tufekci, writing for the New York Times, presents another way generative AI tools can be embraced in a classroom setting:
Schools have already been dealing with the internet’s wealth of knowledge, along with its lies, misleading claims and essay mills.
One way has been to change how they teach. Rather than listen to a lecture in class and then go home to research and write an essay, students listen to recorded lectures and do research at home, then write essays in class, with supervision, even collaboration with peers and teachers. This approach is called flipping the classroom.
In flipped classrooms, students wouldn’t use ChatGPT to conjure up a whole essay. Instead, they’d use it as a tool to generate critically examined building blocks of essays. It would be similar to how students in advanced math classes are allowed to use calculators to solve complex equations without replicating tedious, previously mastered steps.
Teachers could assign a complicated topic and allow students to use such tools as part of their research. Assessing the veracity and reliability of these A.I.-generated notes and using them to create an essay would be done in the classroom, with guidance and instruction from teachers. The goal would be to increase the quality and the complexity of the argument.
This idea is similar to Ben Thompson’s proposal that I wrote about last week. While still not perfect, Tufekci’s plan at least wouldn’t require the use of bespoke educational technologies that would necessarily lag behind state of the art general-purpose alternatives.