Hi, I'm Amanda! After writing 12 Pawsitive News issues over 6 months, thought I'd introduce this new snippet to introduce me! Two facts about me: It's my birthday!! Thank you! (How old? I'm a Millennial in my 30s.) I have a BA in English & Philosophy. I like thinking. I like learning. I like thinking about learning. (Then I did an NCTJ in journalism. Pawsitive News makes a lot of sense now... origin story for another day.)
So that's why I've been thinking about education, AI and how we feel about it, now and in the future...đŸ |
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Open Letter: Gen AI not fit for education.An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education has over 700 verified signatures (6th August) - spanning international Universities, schools and organisations - since publication on 6th July. "In its current form, GenAI is corrosive to the agency of students, educators and professionals... GenAI is a threat to student learning and wellbeing. There is insufficient evidence for student use of GenAI to support genuine learning gains, though there is a massive marketing push to position these products as essential to studentsâ future livelihoods." "Further, GenAI adoption in industry is overwhelmingly aimed at automating and replacing human effort, often with the expectation that future âAGIâ will render human intellectual and creative labor obsolete. This is a narrative we will not participate in." The letter pledges to uphold 8 commitments in education work (and asks educational institutions, school leaders and policymakers to honor their right to enact them): We will not use GenAI to mark or provide feedback on student work, nor to design any part of our courses. We will not promote institutional GenAI products built on unethically-developed foundation models like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok or Llama. We will not allow corporate-institutional partnerships to compromise our academic freedom. We will not accept without evidence the sales agenda of people who are not educators, nor will we spread hype at the expense of student learning and vibrant pedagogy. We will not train our students to use generative AI tools to replace their own intellectual effort and development. We cannot endorse the automation and exploitation of intellectual and creative labor. We will not ask students or staff to violate the spirit of academic integrity by promoting the use of unethical products. We will not rewrite curriculum to insert generative AI into it for the purposes of "scaffolding AI literacy". We will not contribute to the erosion of academic freedom and educator agency by forcing educators into compliance with technology they find unethical. We honor students' rights to resist and refuse as well.
You can sign the letter here. "This open letter is exactly the kind of resistance to Generative AI that we need to see more of." Jim Amos asks in his video about the open letter: "why would we push students to become habitual users of generative AI, when the whole point of generative AI is apparently to replace all future human labor?" "There is nothing inevitable or unstoppable about generative AI or any technology. As a society of human beings with agency, we absolutely can push back on agendas that aren't aligned with the common good. and we absolutely can call for regulation and policies that protect the most critical and vulnerable members of our society. Why wouldn't we?" "These educators are simply standing up for the rights of teachers and students to say, this is a technology that's so far proving to be harmful in so many ways." |
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Kids learn confident AI answers are not rightWhile current AI chatbots make mistakes and hallucinate, they answer with a confidence more persuasive than real humans. Adults regularly fall for it. It's even more difficult for children when they don't have the contextual or domain knowledge to sense something is off. Visual logic puzzles are easy for humans but hard for AI - and a new game "AI Puzzlers" shows where AI fails in reasoning puzzles (and explanation) compared to their own. In the game, the kids solve ARC (Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus) puzzles by completing patterns of coloured blocks. They ask AI chatbots to solve the same puzzles and explain the solution - which they nearly always fail to do accurately. Researchers at the University of Washington built 12 ARC puzzles that kids can solve and tested the game with over 100 kids (ages 8-13) at the College of Engineering's Discovery Days as well as 21 children (ages 6-11) at KidsTeam UW - a project that works with kids to collaboratively design technologies. After children solved the puzzles, they picked various AI chatbots to compare their answers. An âAsk AI to Explainâ button generates a text explanation of its solution attempt. Even if the system gets the puzzle right, its explanation of how is frequently inaccurate. "Kids naturally loved ARC puzzles and they're not specific to any language or culture," said lead author Aayushi Dangol, University of Washington doctoral student in human centred design and engineering. The puzzles only need visual pattern recognition, "even kids that can't read yet can play and learn." "The kids get a lot of satisfaction in being able to solve the puzzles, then in seeing AI - which they might consider super smart - fail at the puzzles that they thought were easy." âAssist Modeâ lets kids guide the AI system to a correct solution, learning how the AI system learns from that. âKids are smart and capable,â said co-senior author Julie Kientz, University of Washington professor and chair in human centred design and engineering. âWe need to give them opportunities to make up their own minds about what AI is and isnât, because theyâre actually really capable of recognizing it. And they can be bigger skeptics than adults.â Kids could spot errors both in the puzzle solutions and in the text explanations from the AI models. Even when the answer is right, the explanation is wrong. Kids learned to question confidently stated misinformation, and learned to recognise differences in how human brains think and how AI systems generate output. âThis is the internetâs mind,â one kid said. âItâs trying to solve it based only on the internet, but the human brain is creative.â The findings were presented in June at the Interaction Design and Children 2025 conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. The research was funded by The National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences and the Jacobs Foundation's CERES Network. |
Why this professor banned ChatGPT in the classroom."I'm banning ChatGPT in my classroom." A bold start to this Linkedin post by Professor of Strategic Management, Maja Korica: "In my class of responsible leadership, final year undergraduates consider thorny questions... The point is to make accessible what scholars mean by morality, ethics and responsibility, then discuss how today's corporate world fits such definitions (or doesn't). As Hannah Arendt put it, students are meant to 'stop and think'." "âŠI fear even the best teacher cannot work against the seductive ease GenAI tools offer⊠I know that for too many students today, saddled with debt, stressed about their careers, overwhelmed with commitments, and just generally tired, any kind of short-cut will reasonably feel like a no-brainerâŠI don't blame them." "âŠBut as a society, we need students to develop and sustain intellectual curiosity. We need them to respect each other enough to want to hear each other - as humans with unique minds and experiences. We need them to be surprised by one another, to grapple with alternative perspectives, to be physically encountered with difference, to think as they write. Not because any of that will make them more productive, but because it will make them more human." "âŠI also refuse to participate in outsourcing my students' moral consideration to systems that do not think for themselves and take no responsibility for what they produce, designed by irresponsible people primarily concerned with cheap extraction, optimisation and scaling." The post has 1,200+ reactions, 300+ comments and 70+ re-posts. Filip Bar, CEO and Founder of ThinkingBeyond - commented: "Indeed, learning is and should be hard work and uncomfortable, otherwise there is no learning. I wonder whether banning LLMs is going to help though? How can you enforce that out of the classroom?" "I cannot enforce it out of the classroom, I can only change what I am doing inside mine and explain why. I extensively explain all of this to my students," replied Prof Maja Korica. "For reasons I cite in my post, a good portion of them still find it easier and quicker than doing the work themselves." Phil Woodford (trainer and lecturer on business psychology and marketing communications) wrote a Substack on these issues and commented: "The rapid takeover of AI in university classrooms⊠runs contrary to literally decades of established psychological research on learning. We know that people internalise and recall information better when they play an active role in the learning process." "There is an argument to say that the process is the education to a large extent rather than the outcome." Professor Maja Korica runs an open class on Linkedin (Prof Maja Korica) and TikTok (DrKorica) titled 'Surviving Organisations'. Each week, she covers one academic paper/book that deals with the reality of organisations and how to better navigate them, with topics like: how career progression really happens, how to deal with difficult co-workers, how to drive change (when you don't have much power), and how to drive power for good. "Free public education matters more than ever." |
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"Learning how to write teaches you how to think, and the downstream problems presented by a population who can't think are actually scary." Joseph Bernstein Reporter, The New York Times |
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