As we kick off a new semester, the university where I teach hosted an AI webinar today under the heading of “Navigating the Brave New World of Generative AI in Higher Education.” It was an informative session that came from a position of what could be described as a resigned curiosity. No one was seeking ways to block it or catch its use. It was noted at the outset that we’ve all lived through several periods of “great disruption” (here’s looking at you the internet, Web 2.0, MOOCs, etc.), but the 80 or so of us on the call seemed to agree that recent AI entrants (e.g., that bring AI to the masses) feel like a significant shift.
In addition to ChatGPT, we reviewed other tools that we’ll likely all encounter this semester. Some AI tools students will likely use when crafting assignments (e.g., Moonbeam), but others will offer just-in-time feedback (e.g., Explainpaper) or support when starting a literature search (e.g., Consensus). In fact, our library is piloting Consensus with a description that notes:
“[Consensus] uses artificial intelligence to surface research findings that are relevant to students’ questions. The search engine used by Consensus is built over the Semantic Scholar dataset (which includes 200 million peer-reviewed documents). Note that the results from a Consensus search are not meant to be taken as a final truth. They instead represent a snapshot of relevant research findings related to the question posed by the student.”
School Library
Here’s some snippets of thought that came through the text chat and discussion:
- Our role is to keep making school relevant. Engage students in new ways to challenge their critical thinking skills. There are still opportunities for sharing knowledge/critical thinking beyond the crowdsourced data.
- Find opportunities to have students show work and thought process along the way; Focus on the process versus their product.
- Ask students to consider AI as an opportunity to reflect on what’s changed in the world because of AI? What should we do? What is the unique human contribution? How can you find ways to develop your own unique voice?
- AI is only as good as data captured, as well as prompts. Being great at finding the best search results requires deep knowledge of materials to ask the right question prompts.
- Ethical implications are huge from asking students to go on sites to knowing how to cite the AI’s work product.
Featured Image Photo by Nathan Watson on Unsplash