The study cited here is a perfect example of the horrible turn we made in teaching students to write. Whether or not ChatGPT can give comparable feedback to humans is immaterial when the underlying activity is so meaningless. We have to examine this stuff with more depth.

https://twitter.com/jillbarshay/status/1797591507270246821

The study is a perfect example of what I call "academic cosplay" activities which resemble learning, but which really involve a performance of "schooling." If the goal is to learn to write, the assignment is meaningless, the feedback (both human and ChatGPT) is meaningless.

Growing more and more convinced that if you're going to find any use for LLMs as an aid to writing you need to have a robust and flexible writing practice that works without using AI, suggesting having students integrate AI into their processes without these conditions is flawed. A huge complicating factor, as articulated by @Marc__Watkins is that these tools now just show up asking to be used without being actively summoned. Students quite sensibly see them as a normalized part of the writing process.

I am increasingly distressed at how generative AI is being treated as a presence in student writing. To meet this huge challenge we have to get at the roots of what we want students to do and why. Thread of what I've been thinking & an invitation for other thoughts. First, I believe that the primary byproduct of ChatGPT is to show us that much of the work students do in school is probably not worth doing if the goal is helping students learn. If ChatGPT can do it, it's not worth doing. insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/…

If writing is thinking (as I believe it to be) the last thing you want to outsource to AI is the first draft because that's where the initial gathering of thoughts happens. It's why first drafts are hard. That difficulty signals their importance. When I see ed tech people say that students can use AI to "get over the hump" of the first draft I know that they understand nothing about learning to write. They've invited students to abandon the most important part of the experience when it comes to learning.

Propositions I'm pretty sure are true vis a vis smart phones and schools. A list until I run out of thoughts.

1. Smart phones are uniquely distracting, and for some (maybe many) a compulsion.

2. Students have always been distracted and disengaged in schools. 3. Increases in student disengagement with school pre-dates the arrival of smart phones.

4. Some phone behaviors have negative consequences to student mental health.

5. Some phone behaviors have positive consequences to student mental health.

Every time GPT "passes" some kind of test as compared to humans it mostly reveals the test is bad and we should rethink the human activity, rather than outsourcing the bad thing to GPT. That GPT can replicate generic feedback on student writing is unsurprising and not useful.

https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1702853072102318465

There was some thing where GPT aced an MBA without prompting or training, and that should've just alerted everyone to the academic cosplay that is much of MBA studies. That degree was invented in order to extract money from people already in white collar jobs.

A recent piece in the Chronicle had a grad student lamenting that because of ChatGPT students "weren't forced to think anymore." Forcing students to think never should have been the goal in the first place. insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/… Because of the structure of school and the perceived tools available to instructors, some not great practices around learning became normalized. The reality is that thinking has never been a requirement of doing well in school.

Station Eleven is the best series I've watched in the last several years, and that includes Succession, which I like quite a lot. Dive in before it disappears. slate.com/culture/2022/1… Interesting theory as to why more of the actors were not nominated for Station Eleven. Amazing performances.

Would @TheFIREorg be concerned about a climate of self-censorship in that I'm considering writing about them in my blog, but may not because it inevitably brings the most annoying chuds on the planet into my email and Twitter mentions? On the one hand, I have nothing to fear from the chuds because I am uninstitutioned, but they are a combination of the devoutly self-proclaimed heterodox and the thinly veiled white supremacists, and they are truly annoying as hell.

If @TheFIREorg wonders why some of us give them side eye over their cries of being "nonpartisan," perhaps it's because they rushed to the side of the guy who came to a speech prepared to stage a tantrum. cc: @1AMorey slate.com/news-and-polit… I think it's fine if FIRE goes to the mat for this guy's interpretation of the events. They're an independent group that should do as they see fit, but the cries of "but we're nonpartisan!" when they leap into the culture war fray on one side begin to get a little rich.

I think in the abstract for what it invokes about academic freedom the Amy Wax case is interesting, but at the same time it's also sui generis because she is almost uniquely terrible in her insistence on and pride in being a public white supremacist.

https://twitter.com/ijbailey/status/1635369239111680000

My personal view is that Wax is incapable of being a fair or effective instructor for minority students. This makes her unfit for that duty, certainly as an instructor of required courses. Is that fireable? Maybe. But maybe the institution can assign her other duties.

FIRE has what my grandfather would call a "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining problem." That their public comms people deny it by claiming there's nothing there only exacerbates the problem.

https://twitter.com/ijbailey/status/1634907544719347712

And a large part of the 20+ year record of FIRE is in its right wing, election denying donor base. I am more than happy to see them pivot to a different space, but part of that is being transparent about where they've been and where they are. sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foun…

I've always been curious about what happened between Deresiewicz's "excellent sheep" that he first identified in 2008 and the "coddled" students first named in 2012 by Haidt/Lukianoff. They come from the same spots, elite higher ed, but they're described very differently. Deresiewicz's excellent sheep are described as passive accepters of the meritocratic system, grinding away in the name of mindless achievement. Deresiewicz finds this troubling as the students seem to have no independent sense of self.

Cracks me up that a couple of guys who objected to how college students were exercising their speech rights had to invent a psychological pathology to delegitimize that speech, and now lots of people just accept that invented pathology as gospel. It ain't. 👇

https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1633813635691843586

As the episode makes clear, the Coddling book offers zero causal evidence between what they call the "great untruths" and actual student attitudes. It's a classic case of "begging the question" by declaring the untruths than claiming they see evidence of them everywhere.

I don't know, man. Madeline Levine published "The Price of Privilege How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids" in 2006. Maybe not an epidemic, but perhaps the first signs of the "virus." amazon.com/Price-Privileg…

https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1633811138512146435

Levite's "Teach Your Children Well" was published in 2012 when she'd already been writing about a clear trend of declining mental health in the most privileged kids for years. nytimes.com/2012/07/29/boo…

Really recommend listening to this episode. It's a fascinating artifact in and of itself revealing the mindset/mentality of those who absorb and boost the message of that Coddling book.

https://twitter.com/etvpod/status/1633184058183131141

The thing Aaron pinpoints in the discussion that really resonated with me is how those who embrace the Coddling frame make a demand that we treat the views of others with "charity" while extending very little charity to the views they find disagreeable.

I am begging the large platform punditocracy to please consider our culture of schooling as a potential source for the increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among young people. Far better explanation than social media exposure. nytimes.com/2023/02/24/opi… There is lots of evidence that students experience tremendous amounts of school-related pressure, even though they're not necessarily spending that much time on schoolwork. How can this be? insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

So I've been talking about the digital, self-paced course I've developed for people who teach writing, but I'm also pleased to announce more projects designed to help students have authentic writing experiences. educationalendeavors.substack.com/p/making-chatg… These projects are in partnership with Chicago-based student services company, Educational Endeavors. @EEtutors for several years we've been doing summer workshops for students utilizing the curriculum in The Writer's Practice. It works. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

When Common Core architect (now College Board head) David Coleman declared about students, "people don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think" there should've been an uprising. Instead, it was embraced. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis… I am convinced that Coleman's mentality is at the root of the current problems of student disengagement, anxiety, and depression. Our system has been signaling exactly what Coleman expressed, "People don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think.”

Big announcement. I'm launching a digital, self-paced course to help teachers/instructors move away from worrying about ChatGPT and towards giving students engaging and empowering writing experiences. whytheycantwrite.com I wrote a little bit about my motivations for and approach to the course today @insidehighered, but essentially, the algorithms change very little about what students should be learning, to write and think in genuine rhetorical situations. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

When I've taught courses on humor, I show students videos and ask them to listen not to the jokes, but the audience response and then notice if there's a difference between actual laughter and clapping/whooping and what they think that means...

https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1624092005163839496

Invariably students hit upon an understanding that laughter is a spontaneous response rooted in some kind of "truth" that something struck them as funny. Clapping/whooping is about merely agreeing with the idea being expressed. By that standard, this ain't funny.