"Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" by Ted Chiang

With Fall term drawing near, and the impending students questions of "Why do I have to learn this if A.I. can do it for me?" and similar questions has me preparing my quiver of responses.  In The New Yorker, Ted Chiang's August 31st article "Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" has some good criticism of A.I. Here are a few quotes and frames from the article I am drawn to. 

• "Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art."
  
  In short, are you really creating something of worth or value with A.I.?
  
  
• "Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it."
  
  So human 'effort' is a necessary but not sufficient condition an end product is worth reading/consuming. 
  
  
• "Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way."
  
  There are quite a few analogies like this, and the imagery here makes using A.I. seem nonsensical. 
  
  
• "Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable."
  
  This seems intuitive, that it isn't the specific words we say that are important, our use of them in relation to who we are and what we intend with them is what is important. You could imagine a science fiction short story where the protagonist loses their ability to speak their native language due to an alien virus, and instead speaks nonsense. While their words are not understandable, their phrasing, body language, and intention could still be clear.
  
  For students this argument could be phrased as "The goal isn't to get the right answer, it is for you to develop the skills and capacity to arrive at the correct answer."

I'm headed into the office tomorrow and I'm hoping to set aside a big part of the day to reading some articles I've saved from the summer and were sent to me to prepare for Fall term. If you have something you think I should read, please send it my way. 

Mid-Summer catch-up: Accounting and presenting on BTC

 Lots of personal and professional things swirling in my world, and I thought I'd reflect on a few of them here. 

• I am taking an accounting class through my institution. It is online and I just finished my first quiz with a 98%. Being a student I am noticing a few things;
• I really appreciate the well-defined nature of the course. Reading the textbook, completing a few assignments, struggling through some ideas, and taking a quiz every two weeks. It feels very doable and I don't feel overwhelmed. I wonder about this in my own courses, where I have quite a few components and parts, and wonder if their utility in helping students understand math is discounted by student confusion about what to do and when. 
• Being an educator it feels that I am trading my cognitive, social, and mathematical knowledge for money. That's the job, right? In accounting though it seems clear that you are trading a specific skill you have developed, like a craftsperson or an artisan. for money I know this might seem obvious, but it is refreshing to see a profession that doesn't have to consume your entire being.
• I am taking the class because I am going to be the Treasurer for my kid's PTA next year. It has been helpful to use this specific example to put a lot of the accounting ideas in context. How am I going to record purchases for a fundraiser? What reports will I need to generate? 
• While I could read a book about accounting, I am taking a class for a few reasons;
• With my state employee benefits the tuition is only $5, along with paying for books. 
• It gives me a  way to be accountable, and pushes me to sit down and do the work. 
• I get to be a student again, something I loved. 
• I also get to experience what students experience at my institution, and that is really helpful as an educator. 
• Today I am heading to Kennewick Washington to present at the BEdA Biennial Conference on Building Thinking Classrooms. This is the first time I have been invited to speak at a conference and am looking forward to hearing how others outside the math community will react to BTC.

That's it. I still have quite a few summer plans, work I'd like to complete ahead of the next academic year. I'll be sure to share some of those ideas here as they happen. 

Building Thinking Classrooms: Planning for Winter 2024

 I am hosting a professional learning community for my state-level organization (SBCTC) and am sharing some thoughts on how I am planning my next term, using the Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) framework. Below is the post I made on December 20th 2023 to our internal discussion forum.

If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about the BTC framework, post it below!

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I am teaching MATH 104 Finite Mathematics with Support next term, and want to weave thinking questions throughout the course . This corequisite support course allows students can enter the course with below college level placement, and earn college credit in one term instead of two. These students are majoring in business, accounting, or other programs, eventually need to take MATH&148 Business Calculus. The course covers linear equations, systems of linear equations, linear programming, the Simplex method, functions (polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic), financial math, and annuities.

Having tried thinking questions in MATH&146 Introduction to Statistics, I'll be focusing on specific computational skills that students usually have difficulty with. The example on factoring from page 27 of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (BTC) is a good model to start with for curriculum-aligned tasks; ask a question about prior knowledge, extend it, then "ask students to do something without telling them how" (BTC pg. 35). For most topics I feel like I have ideas of how I might go about this (famous last words!) but the non-curricular tasks are a bit of a puzzle. What question(s) will capture student's attention and get them thinking?

I've taught this and the 'standard' version of this course (MATH 105 Finite Mathematics) before, and one area that all of these students have a deep interest in is money. How to earn it, how to spend it, how to lose it, scams on getting more, they are interested in every opportunity to exchange currency for goods and services. Unfortunately we don't cover much of that material until the end of the term, and with a recent change in textbooks I am not setup to move topics around, yet. One of the questions I ask at the end of the annuities section is "How are you going to retire?" It requires estimating how much money students will need on a monthly basis in retirement, calculating the present value of those regular payments over time (an annuity), and then much money they will need to put into a retirement account in terms of a future value annuity. If a student can do this then I am fairly confident that they understand annuities. Most students are very interested in answering this question, and will change variables to test out other assumptions and see what has a bigger impact; interest rates, time, or payments.

So why not start there? Here's my plan for the first day;

• Brief introductions: course name, me, who the course is for.
• Pose the question: How much money will you need to retire? Chapter 9 of BTC has some specific recommendations about hints, but for the start I'll pose the question and see how they respond. I'm planning on letting them think through their answers for 20 minutes, and have groups report for another 20 minutes. I am hoping some students might assign variables for unknowns, and use them in their answer. Here are a few hints I'll share based on where they have trouble. 
  • How much money do you think you'll need a month?
  • When do you anticipate retiring?
  • How long do you think you will be in retirement?
  • In mathematics, if you don't know a quantity, how do we give it a 'name'?
• POGIL activities: one on how to work in groups, and the other about the syllabus.

I am very tempted to provide guidance, variables, and other 'hints'. At the same time my framing of the thinking question will be something like "I want to see what you can do, AND I want you to see what you can do." Providing additional supports would kind of defeat that goal.

For the rest of the week I'll share some other thoughts and planning using the BTC framework, specifically some thoughts on grading, testing out some curriculum-aligned questions, and other thoughts.

 

 

Four Faculty-Focused Email Tips

Emails suck. As a faculty member I have to spend large parts of my day responding to emails, to serve what Cal Newport calls "the hyperactive hivemind" where decisions are made by this constant back and forth of emails. Faculty can't eliminate emails completely, but I have found a few things to help me manage my email load, which could help others.

Two precautions: 

1. Each of our email systems are different, yet most will have a version of what I am suggesting. I use Outlook for my work email, and I am confident that these ideas could work for you in Gmail, Mail on Mac, etc. 

2. Just as our email systems are different, you may use a different learning management system (LMS) than what my institution uses, Canvas. This is not a big deal as most (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) have settings similar to what I use. 

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here are four tips to reduce how much time, effort, and energy you spend on emails as a faculty member. 

Chat GPT, Stats, and Math: What are we going to do?

Along with everyone else freaking out about Chat GPT (John Dickerson did a nice segment on CBS) I thought I might test it out with a few basic questions from classes I teach. This year my focus is on introduction to statistics, so I thought I would start by asking it a few open-ended and computational questions. 

Education Research Writer: Dual-classing Science Writing and Education Writing

As an educator for a few years (uh...16?) I'm seeing a kind of 'blank spot' in the education landscape; individuals who take education research, and write articles and produce other media promoting the teaching practices from this research. 

Contrast that with science writers who make up a whole industry of reading current science research, and writing for publications like Popular Science, National Geographic, and other national magazines. Sure, we might have organizations or institutions (PERTS, the Rand Corporation, Dana Center, etc.) that create initiatives to support the implementation of one set of best practices or another, but we don't have individuals writing about the most recent advances in education research. Granted, there are breakthrough topics every so often that get printed, seemingly everywhere, like the growth mindset based on Dr. Carol Dweck's work. At the same time education topics are not a regular part of most American's media diet. 

An obvious reason might be that science is very accessible and visually impressive to more people than education research. I mean, who wouldn't want to watch a video of rockets taking off, over watching stock footage of students taking a test? I would! It could also be that the American attitude towards education is transactional; you educators give us knowledge, and in turn we pay your salaries. Suffice it to say, I don't agree with this attitude, and believe it likely hurts our educational outcomes compared to other nations'. 

Back to science writers, what do they do? This list of responsibilities from Indeed.com might come in handy:

• "Writing research-based pieces of content to discuss scientific theories, science trends and news
• Adhering to a particular style guide to make sure all content pieces follow company standards
• Conducting interviews with industry experts, including medical doctors, scientists and academic professionals
• Planning content creation and publications
• Keeping updated on breaking news in science and the types of content that an audience wants to read more about
• Proofing written content before publishing
• Selecting supporting documentation to accompany a news story
• Attending conferences, events and meetings to learn about breakthroughs in science"

The job seems bifurcated: half the time you are collecting information through interviews, reading, and additional research, while the other half the time you are creating content. So how might we revise this list of responsibilities for an education research writer? (Unfortunately we can't just say 'education writer' as that includes diverse jobs such as curriculum writer, journalist who reports on education news (not research), among others.) Doing a simple find and replace of 'science' with 'education' on the science writer list of responsibilities we get:

• "Writing research-based pieces of content to discuss education theories, education trends and news
• Adhering to a particular style guide to make sure all content pieces follow company standards
• Conducting interviews with industry experts, including teachers, educators and academic professionals
• Planning content creation and publications
• Keeping updated on breaking news in education and the types of content that an audience wants to read more about
• Proofing written content before publishing
• Selecting supporting documentation to accompany a news story
• Attending conferences, events and meetings to learn about breakthroughs in education "

Changing six words seems to do the trick, but is such a job in demand? Can someone make a living doing this? I have some more thoughts to share on this, and might try it out in the near future. Do you know someone who currently has this job? Let me know in the comments.

Comment on Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower

 I wrote a comment responding to my colleague Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower. In it he talks about the democratization of information through the internet, and the role community colleges play in higher education. Here is my comment, mainly so I can have it in an accessible spot for me to reference later. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts Joe! I’m having similar ‘big’ thoughts about community colleges and higher education in general. You’re right, our commitment to providing a high-quality, personalized education to anyone who walks in our doors is our value proposition, and we need support from the state, administrators, and colleagues to do that. Too often I see people from other departments operate under a scarcity model of resources, that to get ‘mine’ I must take from ‘yours’. That isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Where I see the biggest opportunities for growth in higher education is the mismatch between the new role of educators and the instructional methods that have been brought over from that previous age. As information disseminators, sure, lecturing makes sense in that we are to convey information quickly and efficiently. But if our role isn’t to disseminate information, rather to guide students to grow their own understanding of the world and develop skills, then our instructional methods must change.

The part that really bums me out is the fear that many faculty display when asked to do something other than lecture. Yes, it is absolutely scary to do something new professionally, but we can’t keep lecturing. Besides not aligning to our new roles, too much research has been done to show lecturing isn’t an effective instructional method, along with the negative effects it can have on BIPOC and first generation students.

If we don’t adapt to this new role, using effective instructional methods and technologies, then the private market is going to eat our lunch, ala https://www.outlier.org/.