None of us know how the future will unfold, but two technological facts are undeniable: Large Language Models give students a new way to ‘cheat’ on homework, which undermines the learning process. Large Language Models make it much quicker to build online independent learning platforms, not least because they boost human productivity in writing code. …
Continue reading The AI Ate My Homework – A Fortuitous Opportunity to Fix the Timetable?
This is a shortened summary of a talk I gave at researchED Kent in June 2023. In the original talk, I introduced large language models and issues of student motivation. These are now in separate blog posts that you might want to read first (LLMs, motivation). Students who dislike school Few individuals would claim to …
Continue reading How the trickle into elective home education could become a stream
In Mr Barton’s Maths Podcast (around 3:14:00), Mark McCourt shared a view that I instinctively disagreed with. He argued that technology could never replace classroom teachers because, evolutionarily, we are predisposed to value pedagogy and learning from other humans—a concept he referred to as ‘human ontogeny’ (I’d never heard this word). While this is an …
Continue reading Artificial Incentives: Will students feel motivated to work for their AI-masters?
“The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Albert Einstein ChatGPT-4 gave me this quote when I sought insights on …
Let me share a secret with you. Chat-GPT, an AI model, generated the title of this blog post. I fed it my blog text and asked it for ten possible titles. Four of them would have been a little misleading. Five were precisely correct, and yet felt clichéd or otherwise slightly unattractive to my human …
Continue reading Training the human arbiters of taste and truth
Becky Allen 