Inside Education 430, Perry Share on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching (4-6-24)

Inside Education - a podcast for educators interested in teaching

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's podcast my guest is Perry Share, who is Head of Student Success at Atlantic Technological University. Among the topics we discuss are:

• The impact of taking a module with Hilary Tovey on rural sociology and a module with Brian Torode and Barbara Bradby on language, discourse and French theory.
• Perry’s belief that artificial intelligence is a catalyst that helps us better understand and question contemporary practices around teaching, learning and assessment.
• Artificial intelligence forces us to ask questions like "What does it mean to assess students?" "How can we teach in ways that are engaging and productive for students?"
• In education, the arts and the humanities, we take text as a representation of what is in students’ heads and tend to make assumptions about the knowledge, understanding or learning held by the student. The foundation is taken out of this when we don’t know where the text comes from.
• Problems are outlined with the take-home assignment, oral assessments and standard written exams but the “unsolvable” problems may constitute a productive space for educators.
• The likes of ChatGPT can be used effectively in fields where you have knowledge. An area of concern in higher education is in relation to fields where people are just beginning to acquire knowledge and understanding. In addition, artificial intelligence threatens opportunities to learn on internships in professional placements.
• Perhaps the role of “learned” knowledge becomes increasingly important for novices in a field whereas in recent years the importance of critical thinking has been lauded.
• It is likely that resources will need to shift from activities we currently value to new – yet-to-be-determined – resources at secondary and higher education levels.
• What prompt engineering is.
• Ethan Mollick’s book Co-Intelligence.
• Examples of good and not-so-good prompts.
• How Perry is using ChatGPT in his own work: summarising large documents; combining documents; Brainstorming; Outlining a proposed structure of a document or presentation. It has been used for computer programming and other tasks.
• Data protection implications may need to be considered in relation to some uses.
• In the future it may be used to grade and provide feedback for public exams.
• Various kinds of data on the results would be available almost immediately.
• Decline in language learning in many countries due to the dominance of English and due to the availability of translation tools.
• The days of the academic essay may be numbered.
• Simulations may be a future direction of assessment in professional settings but these too are not without complications.
• Can we avoid interacting with artificial intelligence?
• Impact on equity in education.
• If students can teach themselves, where does that leave the teacher? There is a job of imagination for teachers to start thinking about how they will work alongside artificial intelligence.
• The impact of artificial intelligence on what (and who) we can trust.
• People Perry respects on the topic of artificial intelligence: Anna Mills, a lecturer in academic writing in the United States; Charles Knight who works for Advance HE; Maha Bali at the America University of Cairo on critical artificial intelligence (environmental, commercial and ethical impacts).
• The purpose of school.
• Daryl Nation
• Raewyn Connell’s book The Good University.

Perry's own expanding list of resources on artificial intelligence is available here.