“Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our prompt, and the text next to the green icon is ChatGPT’s response.”
“The issue with the will to equip, then, is not the desire to prepare students for the future, but the impoverishment of our educational imagination that so often accompanies it. In the grips of the equipage mentality, we forget, first, that the educational experiences of young people can carry their value in themselves and not only for the sake of something else outside of them, to be experienced later in life. Moreover, we tend to equate educational “success” with future material pleasures, won through the enjoyment of consumer goods, and afforded by maximally lucrative and socially respected occupations. These two tendencies are closely related: we have a circumscribed view of personal success in part because we overlook the kinds of goods that are already available to young people in the classroom.”
“The unplanned event has strained the campus and kept the little chapel filled at all hours, prompting administrators to wind down the spectacle and disruption. Beginning Friday, the school said, there will be no more public events. Students said they were ready to return to their normal campus rhythms. Nascent revivals are now breaking out at other college campuses, including at Lee University in Tennessee and Cedarville University in Ohio, though it remains to be seen if they will sustain the same fervor seen in Asbury.”
“Data published by the CDC and analyzed by emergency pediatric psychiatrist Tyler Black show a clear pattern: children die by suicide at much higher rates on school days than they do on weekends or during summer months… Like many of his peers in pediatric medicine, he calls for later school start times, among other measures, to help improve kids’ mental health.”
“For example, the editors of Science have decided that authors should not use text generated by ChatGPT in a submitted manuscript. Fair enough. But can authors use ChatGPT to generate an early outline for a manuscript? …What feels most different about ChatGPT compared to other assistive technologies is the possible reduction of intellectual labor. For most professors, writing — even bad first drafts or outlines — requires our labor (and sometimes strain) to develop an original thought. If the goal is to write a paper that introduces boundary-breaking new ideas, AI tools might reduce some of the intellectual effort needed to make that happen.”
“As we got to know each other, Sydney [the A.I. chatbot] told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson