School districts are issuing guidance on the use of AI, but in many cases teachers will be better served by their own common sense. Benjamin Riley blogs about Chicago’s guidelines.
A few days ago, my friend Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Harvard Writing Center and author of the great Writing Hacks newsletter, pointed me to this “AI Guidebook” created by Chicago Public Schools with help from an organization called AI for Education. As I sit here typing this on August 21st, it’s not entirely clear that CPS has pushed this out yet, but AI for Education has posted it on its website and it looks legitimate, so I’m treating it as such.
Yesterday, as I read this document, my initial irritation rose to genuine outrage. Only one thing to do – take to Twitter! And so I unleashed a mini-tweet storm wherein I took issue with some of the most egregiously misguided statements that CPS and AI for Education are promulgating as a matter of policy.
As I type this, that thread has 69,000 views and counting, and has been shared by people worldwide with huge followings (including the fearless Timnit Gebru, which brought me special satisfaction). As much as anything I’ve ever tweeted can be said to have “gone viral,” this has gone viral. Now look, as I wrote just last week, Twitter is not real life – but between this yesterday and the broad pickup of Cognitive Resonance’s guidebook last week, Education Hazards of Generative AI, it’s clear to me that there’s widespread yearning for a counternarrative to the AI hype that is currently dominating the “education discourse.”
I have mixed feelings about my role in this. When I launched Cognitive Resonance way back in, um, April, my aspiration was to stay in the “pragmatic center” regarding AI – and that’s still true. What’s more, I was not planning to focus my attention exclusively or even primarily on the use of AI in education. But old habits die hard. With a nod to the Hegelian dialect, if the dominant thesis in education right now is that teachers need to integrate AI into their pedagogy because “the future”…I am prepared to be the antithesis.
Here’s just one reason why. I concluded my thread on the AI Guidebook with the subtle observation that, “The side-by-side cliches of teaching with or without generative AI…are the purest example I’ve seen yet of the stupidity running rampant in education right now.” I stand by that statement. To the very limited credit of CPS and AI for Education, they at least have the courage of their convictions to state exactly what they hope to see changed in elementary, middle, and high schools as a result of this new technology.
