AI in English Education

  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 ...