Campus Technology Insider Podcast March 2023
Listen: AI and the Future of Writing Instruction
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Much has been made of plagiarism concerns around the use of ChatGPT in education, and there's no doubt that generative AI technology will impact the role of writing both in higher education and in society in general. But as my guest Mark Warschauer points out, the use of AI for writing and communication presents an inherent contradiction: Those who can best write with AI will be those who can best write without it, because they'll need to be able to write good prompts, evaluate the AI output, and edit the resulting text into a usable final product. Warschauer is a professor of education and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and founder of UCI's Digital Learning Lab. We talked about the potential of AI for teaching and learning, overcoming faculty skepticism about AI tools, research questions that should be asked about AI in education, and more. Here's our chat.
Hi, Mark, welcome to the podcast.
01:20
Mark Warschauer: Hi Rhea, great to talk to you.
01:23
Kelly: So I thought maybe to start, you could just introduce yourself briefly and talk a little bit about your background and your work.
01:31
Warschauer: Thank you. I'm a professor of education and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. And basically, I've been doing research on technology, literacy, and learning since about the mid 1990s. I conducted one of the first dissertations on online learning in 1995 to 1997. And ever since then, I've been focused on how new digital media including AI is changing how we communicate, and what that means for diverse learners, language development, literacy development, and learning.
02:07
Kelly: So of course, with your focus on technologies like AI, I wanted to ask you about ChatGPT. So, you know, so much has been, so much attention has been paid to kind of the plagiarism concerns with this new technology. Where do you stand on that? Is this, is this a bad thing? Is it a useful tool? What do you think?
02:30
Warschauer: I like to frame this, Rhea, as the what I call the June-July contradiction. In June, when students are finishing up their classes, they may be punished by their instructors for using AI as a writing tool. But in July, when they're out on the job market, they can be punished by their employers or potential employers for not knowing how to use AI as a writing tool. Because employers care a lot more about efficiency and productivity than they do about authenticity. So I think our job is to help students get from here to there.
03:07
Kelly: I love how you brought up the, the workforce skills angle with that. So plagiarism aside, I'm just curious how you think this will impact writing instruction in general. Because I mean, even if employers appreciate the skills that go along with utilizing AI, is ChatGPT a crutch that kind of impedes learning a good sort of base of, of good writing practices?
03:39
Warschauer: Great question, Rhea. And here we get to another contradiction, which I call the "with it or without it" contradiction. On the one hand, people who write and communicate in professional life will definitely want to take advantage of AI's powerful affordances, so they will need to learn how to do so. But ironically, those who can best write with AI will be those who can best write without it, because they'll need to be able to write good prompts, to corroborate what comes out of it, to evaluate what comes out of it, to edit AI output. So if learners use it too soon and too extensively, it can definitely become a crutch that will rob them of the opportunity to develop foundational skills. I think a good analogy here is the graphing calculator in mathematics instruction. If children depend on calculators at too young of an age, they'll be robbed of opportunities to develop, to develop basic knowledge and skills that will help them in the long run. On the other hand, by the time they are taking more advanced math in high school, it is only natural to deploy graphing calculators to do the grunt work. But even then, high school students are often given assignments and assessments both with and without calculators, so students are learning how to do math with them and without them. I think we need to develop a framework to help students learn how to use AI writing tools well in a developmentally appropriate way. We're suggesting what we call a five-part framework that will implement these goals over time. We believe that students need to: One, understand tools such as ChatGPT and how they function, how they work. Two, know how to access and navigate them. Three, learn how to effectively prompt them. As you may know, prompt engineering itself is becoming a big deal. Four, learn how to corroborate their output. And five, learn how to effectively and ethically incorporate that output into their own work, which includes transparently describing how output from ChatGPT or other tools was used in their final product. So this is what we all have to figure out together, when and how, at what age you start introducing this in what way, so students develop both the foundational skills and the skills to exploit these powerful new technologies.