ChatGPT: WILL A POWER CUT REDUCE US TO IDIOTS?

ChatGPT:??WILL A POWER CUT REDUCE US TO IDIOTS?

by Will Ord

Teacher Trainer and Director of Thinking Education Ltd.

Satnav’s great until…

As any driver knows, Satnav is a great convenience.??It’s quick to learn, and it saves innumerable hours of planning time.??It’s a total blessing until, that is, it malfunctions.??Then you feel like a panicked five year old lost in an infinite supermarket.??Waaahhh!??You don’t even know which county you’re in.

Maybe a few minutes later you’ve managed to relocate yourself and all is well.??Or it’s an hour of a hellish mystery tour in rush hour traffic that you had hoped to avoid.??Convenience has become inconvenience, but it’s not the end of the world.??

Outsourcing – and trusting – our skills and needs to Satnav is a gamble most drivers take.??But what if we outsource more than our navigation skills???What if we rely on technology to do much of our?thinking?for us????????

Chatbots… a power for good and ill?

The Chatbots have landed and it’s clear they’re going to revolutionise many aspects of our lives.???Hopefully for the better, though as with any power, it depends on the values and motivations of those who wield it.??As a technology, cars are amazing, but how good (in both senses) is the driver???What’s their destination?

So what are the implications of ChatGPT for how we teach and how students learn???Will these Large Language Models (LLMs) actually improve learning and wellbeing, or simply increase efficiency???Will they dumb us down, sharpen us up, or do both???If we outsource our research, thinking and communication skills to LLMs, will power cuts reduce us to idiots?

7 Chatbot skills…not just Prompt Engineering!

This field of inquiry is urgent, important and complex.??The many consequences – intended and unintended – have yet to play out.??For now, though, here’s the key question:??What skills and dispositions do people??- young and old - need to use LLMs well???Here are seven initial suggestions.??

1)????Motivation to learn.??Young people need meaningful reasons to engage with an LLM. Yes, ChatGPT can provide structured learning steps, heaps of organised information, and formative assessment tasks in accessible language, but are the students motivated to grapple with all of this in the first place???

2)????Curiosity and research skills.??Closely allied to No.1, people need the opportunities, independence and skills to create and follow their?own?questions; to feel a heartfelt ‘gap’ that cries for fulfilment and drives them to search skilfully for answers.?

3)????Ethical thinking.??Technology empowers, but empowers to what end???Students need the ability to identify, develop and enact their own values (principles for action) so that LLMs enable wisdom, not just knowledge.??Powerful tools like ChatGPT can help to serve meaningful and ethical purposes, but they can’t provide them.??

4)????Critical thinking.??The skills to check and challenge whatever they encounter, in text or otherwise:??questioning, reasoning, problem solving, checking sources and facts etc.??The internet is a collection of our ignorance as much as our knowledge and wisdom.??Can we discern between what’s toxic, wrong, and useful and wise?

5)?????‘The Art of Argument’.??A subset of No.4, this is how to think through a claim to reach a conclusion and consider consequences.??It involves seeking for evidence, seeing from multiple perspectives, yielding to better ideas and more.??Young people need to learn how to argue well together, both cognitively and emotionally, in person and online.

6)????Communication skills.??Communicating effectively with LLMs (prompt engineering) is a new skill set we’ll need of course.??However, our ability to collaborate and communicate (in person and online) with others is fundamental to great learning and active citizenship.??What’s more, our quality of relationships is a well-established key indicator of wellbeing and success.

7)????Creativity.??Outsourcing – and trusting – an LLM to generate ideas, lessons and processes for us may be efficient, and could enhance our creativity.??Equally, it might make us creatively lazy too.??People need to keep their creativity alive both individually and with others.

There will be other skills and dispositions to add of course.??But what do you think so far???What’s good, wrong, or missing?

"We do these already!"... Really?

Naturally, many might argue that these skills and dispositions have always been fundamental to education.?True indeed.??However, in England our overloaded and increasingly anachronistic “knowledge rich” curriculum does not allow for their development nearly enough.??Furthermore, the powerful and imminent impact of LLMs on us all simply increases the urgent need for these skills.??

What we need now:

1)????More autonomy for schools, particularly freedom from narrowing test tyranny.

2)????A government that will lead this change (obviously not the present one – election now please).

3)????High quality teacher training that will emphasise these skills and dispositions

4)????An overdue end to the false ‘traditional vs progressive’ debate.??Skills, subject knowledge and understanding are inseparable.

5)????And finally… the freedom to create our own?wisdom?rich, not knowledge rich, curricula.???

In summary…

Chatbots are here to stay.??The potential benefits just in the field of medicine alone are mindboggling.??The potential misuses of them are equally so.??Our inevitable and increasing reliance on them will carry great risks if we are not prepared.??Consequently, my question to you is this:?

Are you teaching the skills young people need to use chatbots well, and the skills to live well?without them?too???

Will Ord??BA MTh PGCE??????Director, Thinking Education Ltd.???

www.thinkingeducation.co.uk???