(TNS) — Comedian Steve Martin as soon as mentioned that educating is like present enterprise. I attempt to hold this in thoughts once I’m giving faculty lectures.But what occurs when the entertaining professor will get upstaged by a chatbot that may produce the lecture in addition to write pupil papers and take the ultimate examination? Does the faculty class grow to be a meaningless joke?Well, no.There are individuals who worry that ChatGPT, Bard and different generative AI bots will let college students outsource their very own studying. But I educate media historical past. I do know that new media applied sciences don’t make folks out of date. Video didn’t kill the radio star.So reasonably than slip some language about ChatGPT within the coverage part of my syllabus about plagiarism (which gained’t cease college students who know in regards to the apps that may rewrite papers to evade detection), my plan this fall is to deal with creating interactive classes that incorporate chatbots straight into my educating.Instead of letting chatbots change the training course of, I’ll present my college students that something that chatbots can do, they’ll do higher.Many of my college students have been already attempting out ChatGPT final yr. Because chatbots may be particularly helpful for performing routine duties, one pupil defined that she had began to make use of ChatGPT at her job in customer support to generate fast responses to complaints, which she would then rewrite to enhance.While chatbots are ready to try this sort of job nicely, extra difficult duties, similar to historic essays, could be a catastrophe. But these limitations additionally open the door to educating workouts that present college students learn how to use this expertise of their work.Professors educating writing expertise can have chatbots generate outlines, drafts and different lists of concepts. Then, the professor can direct college students to work in small teams to rewrite the textual content for better originality.Chatbots additionally supply a chance to show essential pondering and media literacy expertise. ChatGPT is inclined to creating up false data out of the data-driven cloud — a phenomenon its handlers euphemistically name “hallucinations.” This signifies that college students should discover ways to test details and confirm data, utilizing citable sources and databases.Professors may educate college students to be alert to the systemic racism and sexism that AI bots can perpetuate and amplify due to the supply texts they’re drawing from. I as soon as requested ChatGPT to jot down a listing of among the main students of the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. Its response included solely white males — as if no individual from one other background, ethnicity or gender ever studied the U.S. Constitution.An answer to this drawback? Show college students how they may give the chatbot follow-up prompts that generate extra full solutions — say, particularly to incorporate individuals of colour, totally different genders and various backgrounds. When I did this, ChatGPT readily listed Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ange-Marie Hancock and different distinguished constitutional students.For my lessons this fall, I’m additionally creating “AI Moments,” the place my college students will get an opportunity to see who does it higher: the robotic or the professor.After I current a brand new lesson and speak about it with my college students, I’ll immediate ChatGPT to offer a lecture on the exact same topic.To check out this concept over the summer season, I requested ChatGPT to rewrite my brief lecture on the historical past of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, the textual content it generated was horrible. Just one cliché after one other. The AI-generated draft additionally made dangerous phrase selections — changing the phrase “media” with “platform” (not all media are platforms). It modified my query, “Did the emergence of broadcast TV imply the top of going to the flicks?” and as an alternative requested, “whether or not the emergence of broadcast TV resembled the demise of cinema attendance attributable to the rise of radio.” This phrase selection altered the which means of the purpose, which is that new media don’t exchange the outdated.When I re-create this train in my classroom, I plan to have my college students search ChatGPT’s lecture for dangerous writing that they are going to rewrite, turning every cliché into unique imagery and poor phrase selections into one thing extra exact. I’ll additionally ask them to seek out and eradicate bias and fact-check for inaccuracies.What I discovered from my observe matches with ChatGPT is that I do know extra about educating journalism, writing and media historical past — though the chatbot can draw from huge quantities of data on the web. And extra importantly, it can’t share concepts precisely or in a inventive and fascinating means.I would like my college students to be taught to make use of AI successfully, since these instruments will grow to be ever extra widespread and perhaps even indispensable in workplaces and in schooling. I feel one of the best ways to try this is to make this expertise a part of their classroom expertise.ABOUT THE WRITERElizabeth Blakey teaches media historical past at Cal State Northridge. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/opinion-incorporate-chatgpt-into-college-lectures
