It's fair to say, I think, that I am something of a Luddite. I don't like technology, I am not comfortable with it, and I use just as little of it as I can get away with.
This is sometimes a challenge, though, because of course it's very hard to avoid technology in our current culture, and most especially in education. Even more especially, in online education.
Our school has an online program in which I help students with special ed. accommodations in English. This year, for the first time, the program has a regular writing component. The students are supposed to write a two-sentence reflection at the end of each lesson. In our brave new world, we of course have had to specify that any student using AI to generate an answer will receive a zero on that assignment.
They do it anyway, but it's pretty obvious and several students have in fact failed their assignments because of it.
Something else that should have been obvious to me but wasn't came to my attention yesterday when I was working with one of my students. This particular student doesn't appear very frequently for our scheduled meeting time every week, but he was there yesterday. He happened to be on a quiz in his coursework. I can't give him the answers, of course, but I can read it to him.
So that's what we were doing. There were a couple of questions he asked to skip and come back to later, because he wanted some time to think about them. When we got to the end of the quiz, we went back to those two questions.
I read the first one again. Silence. I read it again. And this time I hear, "Hey, Siri . . ."
What?
"Ty!" I exclaimed. "You can't ask Siri!"
"Why not?"
"Because that's cheating. You need to know the answer on your own."
"But I don't know it."
"Well, then, take an educated guess. But you can't ask Siri."
Honestly, it never occurred to me that students do this. But of course they do. I mean, it never occurred to him NOT to do it. For these kids, the answer is always available if they just talk to their phones or whatever.
In the end, he chose his answers and got a 75% on his quiz. This is a pretty good grade for him, so I was able to point out to him that yes, he can in fact pass his quizzes without the help of a computer.
Not that I think he'll never ask Siri for the answer again, but I guess he knows now not to do it in front of a teacher.
Very interesting. I have always been surprised when people wonder about how to do things and continue wondering instead of looking them up. A weakness of our current educational lives is that we fail to commit enough to memory. Maybe Siri could be thought of as a step into deeper discovery. It would be truly tragic if inquiry stopped with Siri. Centuries ago, two kinds of knowledge were defined: one, knowing the answer; two, knowing where to find it.
ReplyDeleteYour post makes me so sad for kids today, not experiencing the thrill of figuring something out for themselves.
ReplyDeleteGuess your student knew it wasn’t really OK to use Siri since he didn’t say, “Wait just a minute so I can ask Siri”, instead, that he had to “think” about it. Really, how are you supposed to know what to pick up on, other than AI will not read like something you know your student would write. Very troubling for the future.
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