Course Info, Thoughts on AI
Clay Burns
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 615.904.6789 ext. 23353
Required Supplies:
-Paper
-Pencil
-School issued laptop
Recommended Supplies:
-Tissue donations for the classroom are appreciated
-Princeton Review APHG Prep (latest edition recommended, but anything after 2021 should be fine)
-AMSCO Advanced Placement Human Geography textbook (we should have a class set but it could be useful to have your own copy, but definitely not necessary)
Some thoughts on the use of AI in Education:
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
a poem by Joseph Fasano
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
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From an EdWeek article titled: AI in the Classroom is Often Harmful. Why Are Educators Falling Prey to the Hype?
AI products merely generate statistically probable responses to prompts; they cannot think or “know” things. Using them to write for us is therefore particularly problematic since, as educator John Warner put it, “the fundamental unit of writing is not the sentence but the idea.” To write is to construct meaning and persuade a reader whose perspective you try to imagine. A chatbot can only sneeze out some words that resemble an essay or a summary of someone else’s. In one novelist’s apt analogy, students who use this software won’t learn to write any more than they’d become physically fit by bringing a forklift to the gym to lift weights for them.
The people most receptive to this technology, according to a recent survey, are those who know the least about it. Specifically, they may not be aware of AI’s staggering energy requirements, allegations that it was built on stolen data, the fact that corporations are less interested in assisting workers than in replacing them, its contribution to mass surveillance and the disruption of elections around the world, and the troubling implications of normalizing relationships with counterfeit humans for therapy, friendship, and even romance.
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In his article, The Death of the Student Essay, and the Future of Cognition, Brian Klaas writes:
In Dune, Frank Herbert features an exchange in which individuals are tested for their humanity.
"Why do you test for humans?" he asked.
"To set you free."
"Free?"
Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
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From "The Illusion of Learning: The Danger of Artificial Intelligence to Education, Robert Pondiscio writes:
"Teachers, too, are vulnerable to AI's siren song of efficiency. AI can spit out lesson plans, differentiated materials, or essay feedback in seconds. But efficiency is not the same as expertise. Teachers become skillful through the deliberate act of designing lessons, anticipating misconceptions, reading and responding to student work. Offload those tasks to AI and you hollow out the craft. The teacher becomes an editor of machine output rather than an author of instruction. In time, that can only erode the kind of pedagogical expertise that separates a novice from an expert."
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There are many negative effects of generative AI. Here are some examples:
- Why My Students Shouldn't Use AI
- AI's Environmental Impact: Calculated and Explained
- I'm a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education
