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Banning ChatGPT in Schools Hurts Our Kids
![[Image: “Learning with technology” generated by Lexica, 1 February 2023]](https://www.tamaleaver.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0fa4f0c3-f56a-41fb-b04a-a962eeb666f4.jpg "Learning with Technology")
As new technologies emerge, educators have an opportunity to help students think about the best practical and ethical uses of these tools, or hide their heads in the sand and hope it’ll be someone else’s problem.
It’s incredibly disappointing to see the Western Australian Department of Education forcing every state teacher to join the heads in the sand camp, banning ChatGPT in state schools.
Generative AI is here to stay. By the time they graduate, our kids will be in jobs where these will be important creative and productive tools in the workplace and in creative spaces.
Education should be arming our kids with the critical skills to use, evaluate and extend the uses and outputs of generative AI in an ethical way. Not be forced to try them out behind closed doors at home because our education system is paranoid that every student will somehow want to use these to cheat.
For many students, using these tools to cheat probably never occurred to them until they saw headlines about it in the wake of WA joining a number of other states in this reactionary ban.
Young people deserve to be part of the conversation about generative AI tools, and to help think about and design the best practical and ethical uses for the future.
Schools should be places where those conversations can flourish. Having access to the early versions of tomorrow’s tools today is vital to helping those conversations start.
Sure, getting around a school firewall takes one kid with a smartphone using it as a hotspot, or simply using a VPN. But they shouldn’t need to resort to that. Nor should students from more affluent backgrounds be more able to circumvent these bans than others.
Digital and technological literacies are part of the literacy every young person will need to flourish tomorrow. Education should be the bastion equipping young people for the world they’re going to be living in. Not trying to prevent them thinking about it at all.
[Image: “Learning with technology” generated by Lexica, 1 February 2023]
Update: Here’s an audio file of an AI speech synthesis tool by Eleven Labs reading this blog post:
Targeted PhD Projects with Scholarship in Internet Studies @ Curtin Uni (to start 2021, applications close 1 Sept 2020)
Opportunities exist to apply for a range of targeted PhD scholarships located within the Internet Studies Discipline at Curtin University. The window of opportunity for these is short, so if you’re interested, please email the contact person listed in the specific project pages as soon as you’re able!
If folks could share these opportunities with current and recent Masters and Honours completions (and those completing this year), we would be grateful!
The projects available:
1. An Ethnography of Influencers and Social Justice Cultures https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4270
2. Analysing Virtual Influencers: Celebrity, Authenticity and Identity on Social Media https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4324
3. Climate Action and the Internet https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4285
4. Digital Disability and Disability Media https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4318
5. Digital Disability Inclusion across the Lifecourse https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4291
6. Digital intimacies and social media https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4286
7. Diversity, Equity and Impact: Exploring the Open Knowledge performance of Universities https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4341
8. Ethical and Sociocultural Impacts of AI/Autonomous Machines as Communicators https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4360
9. Tracking Australia’s Research Response to the COVID Pandemic https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4347
10. The Audio Internet https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4322
To apply for these project opportunities applicants must submit an email to the contact Project lead listed on the project listing. The email must include their current curriculum vitae, a summary of their research skills and experience and the reason they are interested in this specific project.
The Project Lead will select one preferred applicant for this project and complete a Primary reference on their behalf.
After confirmation from the Project Lead that they will receive a primary reference for this project the applicant must submit an eApplication [https://study.curtin.edu.au/applying/research/#apply] for admission into the applicable HDR course no later than 1st September 2020.
All applicants must send an external referee template [https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/07/RTP2021-Round-2-External-Referee-Report.pdf] to their chosen external reference.
All references are confidential and must be submitted by the referee directly to HDRSCH-applications@curtin.edu.au no later than 1st September 2020.
Scholarship applications submitted without a primary reference or a completed application for admission will be considered incomplete.
For further information on the application process or for more RTP2021 Round 2 scholarship project opportunities visit: https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/hdr-scholarships-funding/rtp-policy/
Thanks for sharing!
Hybrid Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Pre-Date the Pandemic
One of the most tiresome things about thought pieces on the future of universities pumping out at the moment is the constant presumption that a move to a ‘hybrid’ model of teaching (ie mixing face-to-face and online learning) is something new to everyone. It’s not. As just one example, Internet Studies has taught both face-to-face and online versions of all the units in our major for more than 15 years, both at Curtin University and via Open Universities Australia. Students have *chosen* whichever mode fit their lives best, and students can excel in either.
Also deeply disheartening is the presumption that online teaching is intrinsically less impactful than face-to-face. It’s not. But it takes significant work in curriculum design and learning & teaching modes (yes, even via lectures) to engage online learners. Despite workload models that presume the opposite, teaching units online well takes more time, not less, & it’s rare that just one platform (or ‘learning’ management system) offers enough to encompass that learning. Multiple tools work if there is sufficient support for each. Shifting learning material online at very short notice (because of a pandemic) does not equal online learning, it’s making the best of a bad situation (& colleagues across the sector have done so much more than that), but this isn’t the benchmark against which online learning should be judged.
And despite unprecedented pandemic times, hybrid teaching, online teaching, or even face-to-face teaching that is mindful of the complicated context learners are living in, can clearly be better designed by consulting the mountains of work & research on each of these modes. The pandemic has challenged higher education in profound ways, but we have to do what we do best: build our responses on the research, scholarship & best practice that already exist. We know better than reinventing the wheel in any other context, let’s remember it in this one, too.
Edit: On Facebook Mark Pegrum pointed me to work that frames going online for teaching during the pandemic as ERT, or emergency remote teaching, which is quite compelling terminology. I particularly like this quote:
In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances.
Workshops past & coming soon…
So 2016 seems to be all about the workshops and Summer School so far!
Just finished:
- On 1 February, my first day back from leave, I presented “Developing a Scholarly Web Presence and Using Social Media for Research Networking” at the Perth Research Bazaar (ResBaz) held at Murdoch University (slides available here). The talk was vey well received, with some great questions. Also, kudos to the organizers for the ease of parking!
- Last week I had the great pleasure in facilitating several workshops with my collaborator Tim Highfield, updating our “Instagrammatics: Analysing Visual Social Media Workshop” (slides here) for the 2016 CCI Summer School on Digital Methods hosted by the fabulous folks at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. This was a fabulous event, with participants from across the world, all exploring the nuances of Digital Media methods and research. Tim and I learnt just as much from our participants as we brought to the table, which makes events like this so very rewarding. And there may have been one or two moments of levity, too!
Coming Up:
- On March 8th I’ll be giving a talk Introducing TrISMA – Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analytics with Alkim Ozaygen. This will be held in the new Internet of Everything Innovation Centre at Curtin and is hosted by the Curtin Institute for Computation (CIC).
- On March 30th, I’ll be facilitating a workshop at ECU Mouth Lawley (and livestreamed elsewhere, I believe) on “Promoting Your Research Online and Social Media Awareness”. This is tailored for ECU’s postgradaute students, but is open for anyone else to attend.
- Finally, for now, on May 2 I’ll be the first presenter at the Socialising Your Research – Postgrad and ECR Workshop @ UWA (flyer below). This event is open at anyone interested in WA, but RSVPs are needed (see the flyer for details).
Open Access Week 2014
So, it’s Open Access Week this week, and just in case you’ve not been paying attention, yes, I am a fan. Open access journals like the fantastic Fibreculture ensure anyone – whether in academia or anywhere else – can read the work published there (including my own Olympic Trolls: Mainstream Memes and Digital Discord?). Gold open access (proper, full, unrestricted) is the best, but ‘green’ open access arrangements also mean that many commercial publishers at least allow authors to share an early version of their work, so while you might not be able to access the final published version, at least a post-print (a version not formatted and edited by the journal, but still 100% the same content) can be hosted elsewhere, which is why you can read Joss Whedon, Dr. Horrible, and the Future of Web Media over at Academia.edu.
Instead of blowing my own trumpet further, though, I’d rather talk about two recent open access developments that are far more interesting. The first is a truly outstanding collaboration by a group from the Association of Internet Researchers (and the Selfies Research Network on Facebook) who’ve created an open access, Creative Commons licensed, Selfies course. Each of the six weeks covers a particular perspective or area relating to selfies, with readings, provocations, suggested assignments and, of course, selfie activities. The breadth of ideas, and structured learning activities, make this a great course in its own right, but even more impressively it’s explicitly presented as material that can be used, explored, utilised and built on by other educators across a range of disciplines and levels. This sort of collaboration and sharing epitomises the very best of open access education, and it doesn’t hurt that the people behind it are some of the smartest thinkers about online culture around today.
So, kudos and well done to the talented group who’ve created this amazing resource, namely: Theresa Senft (New York University, USA); Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen, Norway); Elizabeth Losh (University of California, San Diego, USA); Kath Albury (University of New South Wales, Australia); Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University, USA); Gaby David (EHESS, France); Alice Marwick (Fordham University, USA); Crystal Abidin (University of Western Australia, Australia); Magda Olszanowski (Concordia University, Canada); Fatima Aziz (EHESS, France); Katie Warfield (Kwantien University College, Canada); and Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University, USA).
I’ll be attending the preconference event Show Me Your Selfies: A pedagogy workshop where we’ll be discussing selfies and the selfies course, which should be a wonderful and stimulating morning, and a great lead in to Internet Research 15 which is in Daegu, South Korea this week.
Secondly, and speaking of amazing open access work, I was ever so pleased to get my hands on Jill Walker Rettberg’s new book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. It’s a fabulous and timely read, situating selfies, quantitifed selves and other recent phenomena with historical context, but also asking fascinating questions – and giving quite a few answers – about where these forms are going. Jill will have hardcopies of the book at IR15, but it’s completely open access, which means anyone – yes, that means you – can download and read it for free in a range of formats right now! (Update: You can read Jill’s detailed thinking behind paying for an open access monograph here.)
Looking back towards Perth, here’s a video I participated in put together by Curtin Library talking about why open access matters to researchers:
I’m the last talking head, and the bit of my interview they used is where I emphasise the importance of The Conversation using a Creative Commons open access license that explicitly gives permission for the work to be republished elsewhere. I know from first-hand experience, a piece in The Conversation can turn up in a lot of different places.
If you’re in Perth this week, there are lots of events on for Open Access Week run by Curtin Library, the details of which are here!
Enjoy Open Access Week: it’s all about sharing, after all!
[Photo by biblioteekje CC BY NC SA]
Facebook in Education: Special Issue of Digital Culture & Education
I’m pleased to announced that the special themed issue of Digital Culture and Education on Facebook in Education, edited by Mike Kent and I, has been released. The issue features an introductory article by Mike and I, ‘Facebook in Education: Lessons Learnt’ in which we may have some opinions about whether the hype around MOOCs and disruptive online education ignores the very long history of learning online (hint: it does). As something of a corrective to that hype, this issue explores different aspects of the complicated relationship between Facebook as a platform and learning and teaching in higher education.
This issue features ‘“Face to face” Learning from others in Facebook Groups‘ by Eleanor Sandry, ‘Exploiting fluencies: Educational expropriation of social networking site consumer training‘ by Lucinda Rush and D.E. Wittkower, ‘Learning or Liking: Educational architecture and the efficacy of attention‘ by Leanne McRae, and ‘Separating Work and Play: Privacy, Anonymity and the Politics of Interactive Pedagogy in Deploying Facebook in Learning and Teaching’ by Rob Cover.
Also, watch this space in about a month for the related and slightly larger related work in the same area.
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