AI in English Education

  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.

  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!

  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.

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 ...