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When word processors became popular, educators lamented over the loss of handwriting skills. This became generally true. Many people have terrible handwriting,
by nunez 2y ago
When word processors became popular, educators lamented over the loss of handwriting skills. This became generally true. Many people have terrible handwriting, since, as it happens, if you don't practice something, you lose the ability to do that thing over time.
When spellchecking became popular, educators were afraid of students losing the ability to spell. This also became generally true. How many people do you know depend on spellcheck to write an email?
When the Internet and Wikipedia became popular, educators were afraid of people being unable to do their own research. This became generally true. Many students (afaik) still turn in Google search results and Wikipedia articles as sources, and mis/dis-information is a massive problem that's been hyper-accelerated by the rise of low-information, high-volume social media.
When smartphones became popular, educators were afraid of students getting sucked into them during class. We all know what happened here.
These technologies have certainly made our world better, but let's not forget that real skills were lost in each evolutionary step.
As for "actual evidence" of AI causing educational regression, honestly, talk to teachers. ALL of them have stories on stories on how AI is short-circuiting critical thinking skills.
- elric 2y agoIs this a problem of teachers lacking teaching skills? We're not getting rid of word processing, spellchecking, phones, calculators, etc. It's up to the teacher (or rather the collective of educators as a whole) to come up with ways of incorporating these tools or working around the challenges they present. A teacher might be successful in banning some technology from their classroom, but they'll fail at banning it from the lives of their students, or from the world at large. I have a friend who's an English teacher. She has her students write papers with ChatGPT at home, and has them critique those papers in the classroom. Seems like a much more constructive attitude than saying "AI is making children dumb as fuck" on Reddit.
- nunez 2y agoThat's great that your friend is doing this. Ask them about how the student body has changed over time. I can almost guarantee you that they will wax poetic about how difficult it is to get their kids off of their phones. Or how curriculum in public schools is slowly but surely being dictated by whatever parents feel is important instead of what's actually important. Or how failing kids is way more difficult than passing them, even if they totally deserved those marks. Or how taking phones away isn't feasible anymore because the amount of blowback their admin, and, thus, them, will get over it far outweighs the benefits. Most teachers out there are extremely qualified to do their jobs. They just aren't given the tools or the environment to do that in most cases.
- mike_hearn 2y agoALL of them have stories on stories on how AI is short-circuiting critical thinking skills. My experience of teachers/lecturers is that they usually can't give a precise definition of what they mean by critical thinking skills, explain how their curriculum helps develop them or explain why this is an important skill to begin with. You'd think people who claim to be good at critical thinking could knock this out of the park! Usually you just get a sort of semi-circular answer, in which the skill of writing essays that please the profs is defined as skill in critical thinking. If you ask for what specifically they look for, or a course in critical thinking that's specific to critical thinking and independent of their specific subject, they get all huffy. Of course you can't develop such skills without also memorizing lots of critical theory, or archaeological dig sites in Turkey, or whatever. > Many students (afaik) still turn in Google search results and Wikipedia articles as sources The alternative is what, academic papers that aren't written for outsiders to learn from at all? Wiki articles cite sources just like academic papers do, and both can be written by anyone. The prohibition against citing Wikipedia never made much sense and people genuinely skilled in critical thinking would challenge it ;)
- crtasm 2y agoI can't understand why anyone would argue for being allowed to cite Wikipedia. It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all, so it'd have to be required to note if the part you're using is cited... and if you can do that what's preventing you from just using the actual source?
- dvdkon 2y agoThere's various levels of rigour. For casual conversation any source is usually enough, even Wikipedia or a Reddit comment. And sometimes anything short of independently verifying is not enough. The question is, where on this spectrum do elementary/high school essays fall?
- crtasm 2y agoThat's a different question to what I was replying to, but if they do require citations then it seems like a poor idea to teach anyone to rely on this slight shortcut.