AI in English Education

  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      

   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...

  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 ...

  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...

  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...