From the esteemed Ellen Burns..

My courses this fall will be getting a major revamp to protect students brains from not being used properly. This time last year, I had a more laissez-faire attitude to students use of AI.

It was banned in my classroom, but I told students that I wasn’t going to waste my time policing their work. It was their decision if they wanted to learn.

After one year of experimenting with this technology myself, I’ve changed my tune. Corporate LLMs are — by and large — a menace to healthy brain use, unless used in extremely narrow and specific ways.

But it’s not fair to ask students to recognize that in a world where economic, educational — read, ‘grades’ — and social pressures are all stacked against them to outsource their thinking to AI.

My classroom will be technology free, and intentionally designed in a way that promotes the active development of the most rudimentary reading, writing, and thinking skills.

The argument that this kind of classroom design will not prepare my students for an AI ladened work-world no longer moves me. It’s not hard to pick up these tools later in life and learn to use them in a work capacity, nor is there any shortage of people teaching the skill.

What is hard — and what we are completely failing our students on —is learning how to read, write, and think. The argument that your classroom activities are not imaginative enough if an AI can easily do them, also no longer moves me. I’ve tested the hypothesis. I don’t agree.

Possessing the rudimentary skills of reading, writing, and thinking for yourself are essential pre-requisites to using AI in beneficial ways, be that in the workforce or elsewhere.

We are not focused enough on those skills today, and far too focused on AI.

READERS MAY ALSO SEE ⭢

Another excellent read https://www.ft.com/content/bdb3b820-905b-431e-82c0-386535755af1

‘‘This is a moment in which what we most need is the humane intelligence of free human minds. It is a time for academics and faith leaders to maintain a fierce independence from the AI industry’’