Professor and friend John Nash co-hosts a podcast on all things online learning. In a recent episode, he shared his work on coaching ChatGPT to write more “human” and the results are… interesting…
While generative AI tools are very cool right now, they are a long way from being truly disruptive and overtaking the world.
Here’s what’s interesting. Scaffolding the prompts, defining perplexity and burstiness, and then prompting an explicit increase of those measures made the text “human” to GPTZero. Still, it also made the text ridiculously flowery and inflated. Kind of like when a master’s student thinks they are supposed to “sound academic.” It was so bad that the ChatGPT output was immediately suspect to my human eyes, even though GPTZero said it was likely written entirely by a human.
It’s testing season as another school year comes to a close. The time when students get to demonstrate just how well we’ve trained them to be little machines.
We’ve covered the content, given the testing tips, and passed out the booklets or the Chromebooks.
We’ve done everything we can to prepare them for the relentless battery of standardized tests they must endure, all because someone who knows nothing about learning needs evidence that teachers have done their jobs.
They want to know how well we’ve trained our little machines.
There’s just one problem: we don’t train machines. We teach human beings.
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More news on the influence of AI in arenas outside of education:
Web analytics firm SimilarWeb reported last month that Stack Overflow has seen a drop in traffic every month since the beginning of 2022, with the average drop being 6%. In March, Stack Overflow saw a 13.9% drop in traffic from February and in April, the website saw 17.7% drop in traffic from March. SimilarWeb argues that some of that dropping traffic could be due to GitHub’s AI helper called CoPilot, but users could also be using the more popular ChatGPT as a way to help debug their code—the same way they may via posts on Stack Overflow’s forum.
Stack Overflow is a popular website among programmers, where they can ask and answer technical questions related to coding. Users can also vote on the best answers so that the most helpful ones rise to the top. The site is widely used as a resource for debugging and problem-solving, and its community is known for being helpful and knowledgeable.
ChatGPT, which uses AI to generate responses to programming questions, has been gaining popularity as an alternative to Stack Overflow. The website’s AI technology can provide more personalized and accurate answers to users’ questions, making it a more efficient tool for debugging and problem-solving.
Love it or hate it, AI is here to disrupt your reality.
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
I continue to be blown away by the power of AI tools. At the same time, I completely understand many of the concerns about AI replacing working writers, artists, and other creators.
There is a way forward, and I think it lies in using AI as a support tool. The possibilities for students to use AI as a support to their work are many, but we must be judicious in its usage.
One quality that AI may put to extremely positive use would be objectivity – a lack of personal biases or prejudices. Properly programmed, my financial advisor AI should not be advising me to invest in areas where the advisor would get the biggest fee, but where I would stand to make the biggest return at the lowest risk. Would my AI dentist or doctor only recommend those procedures and medications that have proven rate of effectiveness not the most kickback from pharmaceutical companies? Would an AI intelligence agent be more likely to uncover double-agents in the office?
Of course, the burning question in education is “Would AIs make better teachers than humans?”
Hey gang. It’s been a bit, but life has been… crazy. However, I’m rounding the bend on a number of projects and have breathing room again.
I did manage to find about an hour each week to watch the final season of Picard—by far the best season—and a quote from Captain Shaw in the final episode really struck me. His recorded review of his first officer, Seven of Nine, described how she was reckless and a rule breaker. But, very often, the rules she was breaking were probably already broken anyway.
My message to you, keep breaking the rules that are already broken. Trust me, there are plenty of them out there.
And now, for this week’s 10 Things…
10 Things Worth Sharing
Somehow, I’d never watched Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” until I had to do so for classwork. What a shame. Of course, Daniel Day-Lewis is superb, but so is just about everyone else in the film. If you want to catch a small glimpse into what it took to get the 13th Amendment passed, spend 2.5 hours with this film. Or read the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin that goes into much greater detail on Lincoln’s political brilliance.
In other classwork explorations, I’ve read Joseph Rost’s Leadership for the 21st Century. His idea of a “new school of leadership” has me thinking about how digital learning coaches like myself should apply this thinking to our jobs. Promising stuff I’ll talk about more soon.
The final meeting of my teacher fellowship happened this past Tuesday, and we began planning the professional development event we’re hosting for our district in June. As my fellows struggled to come up with session ideas they believed were “good enough,” I reminded them that what may be obvious to you is amazing to others.
Career and competency-based education programs continue to grow here in the United States. My own district is remodeling our old elementary school into a new CTE center with multiple pathways for students to explore, many of which may lead them directly into a career right after graduation. College isn’t the path for everyone, and I’m excited to see that apprenticeships are on the rise here in the US.
Personal news: I’ve pretty much abandoned Twitter. I still check in with the folks I want to hear from, mostly professional connections. I’m moving to Mastodon for many social interactions. Also, I’ll be adding ActivityPub to my blog to better syndicate content. Come hang out with the cool kids 😉
The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!
Hey, y’all. We’re nearing the end of March, and for many public schools, that means Spring Break is near (or maybe already arrived). It’s a very busy time for educators as one school year ends, and plans for the next are already taking shape.
My hope for you as we approach the end of another school year is that you take the time to take care of yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and it’s easy to get caught up in all the things at the end of the school year.
Take a beat, catch a deep breath, and center yourself. Rediscover what is really important to you and what you can control.
“We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on.” – Austin Kleon
Anyways, here are ten things I thought were worth sharing with you this week:
10 Things Worth Sharing
I worked with a senior English class this week, showing them some AI tools. They might write a book.
Here’s a curated list of prompts, tools, and resources regarding the GPT-4 language model.
The TikTok trial is a mess and is only proving that the US government is targeting this specific company over other social media platforms. Any issues with TikTok are the same with Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and many others.
What is the right amount of agency to give to learners during their interactions with EdTech? Blog post and paper
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![Title: "Az 1848-49-iki magyar szabadságharcz története [With illustrations.]"
Author(s): Gracza, György [person]
British Library shelfmark: "Digital Store 9315.h.13"
Page: 272 (scanned page number - not necessarily the actual page number in the publication)
Place of publication: Budapest
Date of publication: 1894
Type of resource: Monograph
Language(s): Hungarian
Physical description: 2 köt (4°)](https://mikepaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/11131183716_1e9f05dde9_b.jpg)
