Chatgpt

ChatGPT: A call to reDesign what learning looks like

Disrupting class?

Much speculation erupted after the launch of ChatGPT with wild predictions that the natural language processing bot will upend education as we know it. Sure! There will undoubtedly be cheating on homework, essays, and written assignments due to the OpenAI’s ability to deliver fully written essays in seconds. So be it.

Wanting to test just how easy it would be for me to write an essay on the themes of Moby Dick, I asked ChatGPT for help. Within seconds, the bot spit out a list of seven themes.

CR: What are the major themes in Moby Dick?

ChatGPT: Moby-Dick explores several major themes, including:

  1. Obsession and Revenge: The central theme of the novel is Ishmael’s intense desire to hunt down the white whale, Moby-Dick, who destroyed his ship and took the life of his close friend.
  2. Nature and the Sea: The novel is a mediation on the majesty and power of the natural world, and the relationship between humanity and the sea.
  3. The Search for Meaning: The characters in the novel are all searching for meaning in a chaotic and unpredictable world.
  4. The Nature of Evil: The novel grapples with the question of whether evil is an innate quality of certain individuals or wether it is a result of societal and environmental factors.
  5. Madness and Sanity: The novel explores the fine line between sanity and madness and raises the questions about the nature of perceptio n and reality.
  6. The American Dream: “Moby-Dick is also a commentary on the American Dream and the quest for success and wealth, as well as the dangers of the unbridled ambition and greed.
  7. The Human Condition: Finally, the novel is a profound exploration of the human condition, examining thmeses such a martality, spirituality, and the meaning of life.

Realizing that I could not hand in a list, I asked the bot to elaborate and tie each theme to a direct quote in the novel which it did. My homework was done.

Amazing as it was to see the bot generate such fluent responses in real time, truth be told, Cliff notes, Spark notes etc. have provided similar services on paper since 1958 and via the Internet since the late 1990s. So truly, I do not see plagiarism as ChatGPT’s biggest disruption.

Agreed. Schools will have to decide whether or not to allow the use of ChatGPT in the classroom and grapple with how to safeguard summative assessments against plagiarism. They could license a plagiarism detection tool but that would mean running each submitted written assignment through a detection software. The headache alone of having to train all of K-12 teachers and higher ed faculty in safeguarding against Ai-generated text prompts one to look for alternatives.

Future-proofing teaching and learning

The way to future proof education from advancing AI is to reDesign what learning looks like. When students are engaged in a Sustained Investigation and grapple with an Ill-defined Problem grounded in Real-world Relevance, and when the Integrated Assessment of their learning requires them to produce a Polished Product that is both real-world and Learner Relevant and that encourages Multiple Interpretations and Outcomes, then plagiarism is less likely to be a problem. Following the design principles for active learning (Reilly & Reeves, 2022) will provide bespoke solutions that cannot be plagiarized.

From assessment OF learning to assessments FOR learning

So rather than learners being asked to write an essay on the themes of Moby Dick, retelling what has been analyzed repeatedly over the decades, (assessment OF learning), let learners incorporate the bot as a tutor and extend their learning from the novel to a topic relevant to the world around them and to their lives (assessment FOR learning).

In assessment OF learning, the themes of Moby Dick are an endpoint, a cul-de-sac. In assessment FOR learning, the themes of Moby Dick are a starting point requiring learners to take charge of their own learning. This places learners in active inquiry and fosters important dispositions to cultivate in education: learner agency, curiosity, creativity, and self-expression which are precisely what separates us from the machine.

An opportunity to foster information literacy

ChatGPT also provides an excellent opportunity to foster information literacy. As we know, the talented AI bot derives its information from what is publicly available on the Internet. Its information sources do NOT include peer reviewed articles or any other portal protected information. YET. Herein lies the first opportunity for learners to compare AI generated content with peer reviewed scientific knowledge and ponder the value of verifiable information.

The real disruption

ChatGPT presents the increasingly urgent need for learners to reflect on how they know what they know. ChatGPT, for example, does not reveal the sources in its algorithm. This means that whatever it generates as output could come from reliable sources or it could come from misinformation campaigns.

Experts in AI (Goldstein, et al., 2023) got together at Georgetown University last month to discuss the real risk that generative language models have to automate propaganda and misinformation campaigns in real time. They warned that Generative AI poses significant threat to “supercharge information manipulation” that undermines democracy (National Endowment for Democracy, 2024).

So perhaps the real disruption of ChatGPT is to take disinformation to a whole new level . In response, educators need to take the teaching of information literacy seriously at all levels of education and implore learners to critically think about their sources of information, to separate opinion from fact and to doubt information until verified. In the process of becoming truth detectives, learners will hopefully develop the critical thinking skills required when living in a world in which artificial intelligence can wage information wars.

It will not be long before natural language processing Open AI will be applied to academic knowledge. This is just around the corner. When it does, it will radically alter the professions (Susskind & Susskind, 2015) and dramatically challenge education to up its game.

So if you ask me, ChatGPT is a catalyst. It is a disruptor and a wake up call to reDesign education. When we do, we will not only eliminate the pesty plagiarism problem. We will prepare learners to thrive in a world of rapid change.

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