AI in English Education

Even when we are looking forward to the various benefits of AI based tools in education and elsewhere, we must not forget that there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how we should treat these applications and the results they provide. There are various ethical questions to be asked about when and how to use it, who should be using it and what results we are expecting from them. Elena Zeide was already raising these concerns and questions in 2019 in her article Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Applications,Promise and Perils, and Ethical Questions published in the Educause Review and they are more relevant today than ever. The full article is available at  https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/8/artificial-intelligence-in-higher-education-applications-promise-and-perils-and-ethical-questions  

  The above video is a (more than an hour long) presentation on the AI Dilemma, in which Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss questions like how the currently existing and available AI tools could pose “catastrophic risks to a functional society”. While it has a rather negative tone about AI, it is definitely worth watching to help you think about not only the positives these new tools have to offer but also the question marks about their impact.

  When deciding whether we want to use AI in our classroom or not, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of it. Every classroom is different, and we must look at our and our students’ needs. At the same time someone else’s pros and cons list can help to ensure we include every important aspect before we make our decision. Here is a pros and cons of artificial intelligence in the classroom as a starting point: 15 Pros and 6 Cons of Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom   Here is another list of advantages and disadvantages: Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence in Education I hope some of these give you useful ideas on whether and how to implement AI in your teaching.

  When we sit in front of our computer we hardly ever think about the carbon footprint of what we are doing even though our computers run on electricity, just to mention the most immediate factor in its impact. Therefore, it is obvious that we also don’t ask the same question when we jump at the chance to ask ChatGPT for a summary or a new recipe. But maybe we should ask the question and some people already have. According to an estimate calculated inDecember 2022 , ChatGPT’s daily carbon footprint was at least 23.04 kgCO2e. Is it too much? Is it acceptable? I will leave that decision to the reader. Read the full article here:    https://towardsdatascience.com/the-carbon-footprint-of-chatgpt-66932314627d

  Megan E. Eatman published an article in Computers and Composition under the title Unsettling Vision: Seeing and Feeling With Machines . She argued more than two years ago that AI (at the time she had Google’s AI Experiments as her base to work with, which is an image based AI tool) would be exclusionary, depending on the user’s cultural literacy, resources, and abilities. Some of her ideas on how to use these tools in the classroom could be useful even today, when most people talk about the text based AI, ChatGPT, as long as we view it as a supportive tool, instead of a replacement tool. Read the whole article here:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461520300414?via%3Dihub      

  It is no surprise that there are already several college professors who are adopting ChatGPT just as quickly as their students do. Some of them use this opportunity to have students work out the boundaries of academic freedom and censorship, others are emphasizing its benefits as a personal tutor, while still others are encouraging students to use ChatGPT in every single assignment they turn it. How would you utilize this new tool in your classroom? Is there a too far here? And how far would that be? Read more here:  https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/02/why-college-professors-are-adopting-chatgpt-ai-as-quickly-as-students.html

  There are a lot of videos out there talking about ChatGPT and promising to teach you how to use the chatbot. Many of them are good, too. But here is one by "Obscurious"  that will explain to you how prompt-engineering works and why it is important if you want to get better results from your chat sessions. The better questions one asks, the better answer the bot can give, and the more useful the result will be for your work. Designing prompts could even work as a potential assignment in the composition classroom!

  Some people think of ChatGPT as something that has surpassed humans and is becoming better than us in writing. But, is it true? In their article,  How To Turn ChatGPT Into Your Ultimate Personal Writing Assistant , Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole remind us that the one big mistake we can make when turning to the chatbot is treating it as if it could think. It is capable of a lot of things, it can generate long text within seconds, but that is exactly what it does: it generates text based on input we give it. If we use it the proper way, by feeding it exact scenarios, well phrased questions and ask for a specific format for the output, we might just be able to turn ChatGPT into our personal writing assistant. Among other things, the chatbot can be great at helping with generating ideas, listing and summarizing sources, as well as helping with organizing ideas based on just some keywords. The secret? You must build every scenario for every chat session from scratch. Some alre...

   Lin and Chang offer a study about developing and using a chatbot in post-secondary composition instruction in Canada, published in the Educational Technology & Society . What is most intriguing about it is that they published their article in 2020, two years before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Obviously, their chatbot is nowhere near as developed as ChatGPT, but the study shows that the idea of chatbots, as well as incorporating them into education is not new. Ling and Chang used the chatbot to help them deliver writing instructions when teaching students how to develop a thesis statement for an argumentative essay. Their research results show that the majority of participating students had a positive learning experience, and gained new knowledge while using the bot. On the other hand the study was limited, and further research is required. The full article is available here: https://www.j-ets.net/collection/published-issues/23_1 and here: https://www.jstor.or...

  Everyone is concentrating on how AI will revolutionize writing in most fields. But there is at least one other aspect that could help students, educators, and scholars alike: it can help with reading. As Christopher Brennan explains it in his article, The real value of large language models like GPT-4 isn’t in writing, it’s reading : When working on any type of research, we of course need to search for relevant information in the scholarship, which can take a long time. Some of the articles we read will be absolutely useful, others not so much. When someone is limited on time, ChatGPT can help by summarizing articles, chapters, or even whole books, so that we can decide whether it is helpful in our work. Once these data points are in front of us, we can decide which source we want to read in full to be used in our research. This can be really helpful in trying to narrow down dozens of potential sources. Have you thought about using the chatbot this way before? Find the wh...

  In their article in Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence  Swiecki et.al. look at the AI dilemma in teaching from another angle: they suggest that we could use AI to help with the assessment of our students. There are of course various ways to automate the assessment of student writing, and we may or may not have access to some of them in our institutions. While they don’t yet talk about chatbots, they mention AI-assisted peer assessment and various platforms that have already offered such technologies. In my opinion some of these combined with the abilities of ChatGPT would be interesting to explore. They also discuss challenges that such assessment methods could pose, such as questions of accountability and how the pedagogical role of assessment may change, which definitely make it a worthwhile read. Have you ever used AI assisted assessment? You can find it here:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X22000303?via%3Dihub ...

  Kristine L. Blair closes her Letter from the Editor for the March 2023 volume of Computers and Composition by pointing out that the discussions about AI and ChatGPT have already started. While there aren’t many scholarly articles out there yet, this will soon change, as we cannot ignore the importance of the topic. I would definitely keep an eye on this journal for any future volumes.

  Christine Elgersma summarizes what educators can and shoulddo in their classrooms when it comes to the use of AI.  Of course, the current concerns of educators are valid. We need to discuss questions of plagiarism, ethics, and issues of biases and misinformation. Elgersma doesn’t just ask the questions but also offers some ideas on how to start the conversation about them. Have you run into any of these problems in your classroom or institute? Read the article here: https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/chatgpt-and-beyond-how-to-handle-ai-in-schools  

  Nancy Gleason was ahead of the flood when she published an articleback in December on the use of ChatGPT in higher education. At the time it was still fairly new and the version most people could access produced less “ready” text than what today’s version does, but it was already obvious that this was going to be a huge new tool. While she warns that we should be very careful to make sure we evaluate our students rather than AI, she also offers ideas on how to incorporate the chatbot into a writing class by providing a sample class activity: let your students use the bot during class time, and then have them discuss its generated text, so that they can assess what the AI came up with. I do not think this will end academic dishonesty, but it is a great first step in teaching our students how to use the chatbot in an ethical way. What are your thoughts? Would this work in your classroom? You can find the article here:   https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/chatgp...

  Hong Yang is offering some answers to this very current and important question : how we can use the chatbot(s) in a responsible way when we are teaching. The article was published in Nature . Yang of course recognizing that students could use this technology for cheating, but instead of instantly punishing them, he concentrates on ideas of how to change his own teaching to better accommodate the changing world of academia. The first of his ideas is rethinking assignments so that students do more hands-on work rather than writing literature reviews. Surely, it seems as an easier solution when we talk about science subjects rather than English, and especially composition, but reconfiguring our assignments will likely be the very first step we have to take. He also offers some practical tips, out of which my favorites are diversifying our assessments and to be aware of what risks ChatGPT possesses so that you can be ready for what your students may bring to your class by using it. W...

  When the world started to blow up over the release of ChatGPT, educators, and especially English teachers, started panicking as their first thought was that this is the end of essays and especially composition teaching. The initial response was that we need to ban everything related to the chatbot and to be able to do so effectively, we need to be able to catch those cheaters. While I disagree with this view, I also recognize that implementing new techniques takes time, and while we are working on those, we may need other tools to check in with our students and their work. The first AI generator detector that was publicized was built by a college student, Edward Tian at Princeton.  His version is just the first of many. I present the following collection in hopes that you will use it not to punish your students but rather to help them and yourself to recognize how they can make their own writing better with the help of AI. The checkers can serve as a tool to see the diffe...

  Murphy has already explored the idea of using artificial intelligence in education back in 2019. While he could not have seen the emergence of ChatGPT, he already talked about research into the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems (which first appeared the 1980s!) used in “math, physics, computer science, language, and literacy”. Based on research reports from 2014 “scores on standardized or researcher-developed tests, ITS-based instruction resulted in higher test scores than did traditional formats of teacher-led instruction and non-ITS online instruction and produced learning results similar to one-on-one tutoring and small-group instruction” (p.5). This in itself points to a topic that is worth exploring. He mentions automated essay scoring as an option, especially since using some sort of automation can save tremendous amounts of time. He also touches upon the challenges presented by these systems. One of these is learned bias, which is proving to be one of the mai...

  This short video (9 minutes) by CGP Grey will show you how the current boom in artificial intelligence is not new at all. If you are interested in learning about how these systems learn from us, humans, but you have zero programming background (like me), this can be a good starting point. If you look at the title of the video and when it was originally published, you can also notice that algorithms can easily be convinced that something is new when they are not, or relevant when a theme reappears. The next time you are presented with a captcha, remember, you are not only tested whether you are human, but also training an AI somewhere, because AI is only as smart as we teach it.

  By publishing their work in Educational Technology & Society , Hwang and Nian-Shing may have provided the very first scholarly article on generative AI (GAI), specifically ChatGPT, (though they rightly mention that in the future this will likely be valid for any other GAI,) and its impact on education. They offer some guidance on where to start our exploration into the future of education. Of course, as an editorial position paper, there are several questions left unanswered, but this work can be a great starting point to form your own opinion and figuring our ways of how GAI can be helpful in your specific case.  It is interesting to see how many different roles GAI can take on. Right now, the first role that comes to mind is a cheating tool, but if we flip that around, it immediately becomes a learning tool. I think this, as well as the various aspects of tutoring should be the main focus of educators when discussing GAI.  Some of the ideas on how GAI (and they sp...

This blog is intended as a repository for English teachers who would like to know more about Artificial Intelligence (especially ChatGPT) and how it could be used as a helpful tool in the classroom. My focus is on utilizing this futuristic tool in the community college composition classroom, but I hope that teachers at other levels will also find it useful. You may ask why. Let me ask for a little bit of help to explain. The above video? I asked an AI to create it in less than 10 seconds after finding the platform in a simple web search. I am sharing it here as an example of how AI is already taking over aspects of our life in ways we would not have thought of before. As the AI generated person states in the video, AI is here to stay. If we decide not to learn with it, we will get left behind by those who do. The goal of this repository is to help you find your way in the fast-growing new world of AI and AI assisted technology as being introduced to education, especially, but ...