This week’s post shares a bunch of intellectual air with John Warner’s thinking about AI writing and undergraduate assessment. There’s often a lot of alignment between my thinking and John’s when it comes to talking about writing assessment, but he published first, so let me point you to his excellent piece, ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything…
A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…
The ChatGPT handwringing of late has bothered me, not least because it is cloaked in a kind of shock, like the domain of higher education has suddenly been sullied by this profane technology. But babes, it was always already here. Many faculty are learning about the impacts of artificial intelligence on their own practice as…
The first time I used ChatGPT, I was fascinated. You stick in a prompt and it spits out something. The prose is grammatically correct. It’s coherent. It knows basic paragraph structure and it connects ideas together. It obeys the prompts and offers a kind of clarity, if we define clarity in terms of accurate prose….
It’s hard not to be aware of the encroachment of artificial intelligences* on our teaching and learning spaces if you work in education these days. The launch of ChatGPT a few weeks ago has caught many teachers and learners off guard with its level of sophistication and its capacity to absorb the seemingly mundane writing…
I promised a toolkit in this final post, and a sense of what resistance can look like. Sometimes I think the most helpful way to think about this work is to recognize that every choice we make every day is part of the larger constellation of resistance, which I get sort of sounds exhausting. I promise, I get that. And I don’t think we can possibly fight every fight or be ready for a fight every second of the day. But taking the “every day, every choice” approach also means that every day has myriad opportunities to challenge the status quo, to start a difficult conversation, to ask a question no one else is asking. I find that hopeful, because it means that when you do step back, or opt out, or take time to breathe, the next opportunity to make the small connection that sparks the change is just around the corner.
Here are the moves that I think should be in every post-secondary reformer’s toolkit.
And of course, Western chauvinism drips from the preceding paragraph: to be even at this stage of this unending trial is due to the accident of birth of vaccine privilege, which the richest countries in the world seem determined to horde like Gollum’s ring (and you know what happens to hobbitses who horde rings). But with the wealth of opportunity we have had to protect and care for ourselves and each other, it’s all the more disheartening to see how quickly the collective solidarity of the early pandemic days has fallen away. We’re heading “back to normal,” which I guess means “everyone for themselves” — because the normal we had before didn’t work for an awful lot of people. If there’s one thing this moment has made achingly clear, it’s that the ableism baked into how we do business in the post-secondary sector will take a lot more than a global pandemic to unseat. And that if we don’t use this moment to imagine something a damn sight better than normal, it’s hard to imagine that we ever will.
How depressing. Let’s dig in.
When everyone first left the campus and went home to teach and learn remotely, there was a lot of talk about how we would reduce assessment loads and reframe our evaluations to meet the moment. Many institutions offered a Pass/Fail option in the immediate term and instructors were encouraged to find compassion for students in crisis.
And then, you know, universities gotta university. By January 2021, students were reporting a perception of increased workloads and by June 2021, the sector had decided everyone was cheating and somehow the idea that our processes should change in a, you know, global pandemic became a lot less attractive. Instead, what became a lot more attractive was surveillance.
So last week, we talked about fatigue and burnout, and I promised you I would give you some reasons to keep engaging with the things that matter. I didn’t promise a cheery chat — and the title today reinforces that! — but I am going to provide some reasons to hope even as I try to spook you into action.
Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism, as she outlines in the Shock Doctrine, is one that resonates. We’ve talked about it in these pages before: it’s the idea that bad, exploitative policy — of the neoliberal variety — typically follows on from crisis. Klein herself has acknowledged the parallels to this moment. And I’ve argued that we’re seeing this same thing happen in educational technologies, as universities floundered to sign agreements and then get stuck with tools they are ill-prepared to effectively manage and use.
I don’t know what it’s like in your circles, but in mine — which, thanks to Twitter, span a broad range of English-language academics, and sometimes a little beyond — everyone is done. Everyone is burnt out and tired and feeling pulled beyond what they can do. And in many ways, things feel bleaker than they did at the beginning of the pandemic, because we’re now all too aware that everything we hoped was temporary, from critical staffing shortages to the demands of working in multiple modalities, is probably not, in fact, temporary. Anytime an institution finds it can run with less, it rarely goes back to more. Even if the cost is human; maybe especially when the cost is human. Humans are infinitely replaceable. Capital projects are forever.
Thank you for your resilience.