multijimbo

When I was taking high school physics, back in the very early 1980s, sigh, my year was the first year to use a calculator rather than a slide rule. I don’t remember the model number, beyond it being Texas Instruments, but I do remember the excitement of CALCULATOR and the relief of many about not having to learn the slide rule. I’ll admit that I was always a bit bummed, though not bummed enough to go back and learn the slide rule on my own.

This memory came to mind during a recent conversation about ChatGPT and the impact it may have on education. Technology always advances, sometimes more quickly than our ability to handle the implications and aftershocks. If memory serves, Socrates all those many years ago was against writing, as it would erode memory and confuse students into thinking they had knowledge when they had only data. And so these thoughts about different technologies are not recent.

What’s interesting about this conversation is that ChatGPT is just the tip of an iceberg. The technology is advancing, and perhaps we will soon find ourselves in a science fictional universe where we are each followed from our early days by a bespoke Artificial Intelligence, teaching us and testing us and either shaping us to serve a malevolent social order or developing us into the best humans we can be, within their own limits.

But that’s the future. What happens tomorrow, and next week, and next month. How do I design an assignment that the students would be doing in their own time. The easy and simultaneously difficult answer is to impose conditions on the time and space in which students take their assessments, but I would like to contemplate a different direction, if only briefly.

For me, the question is, to what extent should we try to reduce the artificiality of assessment. One aspect of this is, why not design and deliver assessments that allow students to use all available tools. After all, out in the world, people will make use of all available tools to do the jobs they’ve agreed to do and are paid to do.

This is a long conversation, as befits a question that speaks to the foundations of what we do and how we do it. One of our basic purposes, after all, in education is to assist students in developing their knowledge and tools for engaging with the world, understanding the world, changing the world (hopefully for the better), and indeed developing a definition of better in this context.

Having put down some words, I have come to the realization that as vast a question I thought this was, it is actually a larger and broader and deeper and more complicated question. I think I need to step away, stare into the dancing fire and contemplate for more time. More to come, and I hope soon.

~ by Jim Anderson on 30 January 2023.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life