#261 - Has ChatGPT Done Education a Favour?

Welcome to this episode in our series produced by Professor Rose Luckin's EDUCATE Ventures Research, and hosted on The Edtech Podcast

In this episode, Karine and Rose meet this week to discuss the Online Safety Bill, school absences, and ChatGPT, the latter of which has produced huge public debate, from teacher anxieties to developer felicitations, questions from parents, and columnist think pieces all around the presence of AI in the classroom.  With all of these concerns, however, is it possible that ChatGPT has done education a favour?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is the third and latest version of their text-generating AI technology, and it's been trained on over 45 terabytes of data.  If that seems like a lot, it is: the entirety of English-language Wikipedia accounts for just 1% of that volume in comparison.  The talk of Twitter and intrigued educationalists in schools around the anglosphere, much of the discussion has been around its use as a replacement for human cognition: will students use it to cheat in essays and assessments?  Does its information retrieval dumb-down student opportunities for learning when material is simply parroted, rather than interrogated and the learning then applied in novel contexts?  In this week's episode, Karine and Rose discuss practical uses for this incredibly powerful tool, and explain why human and machine intelligence can work together successfully to improve teaching and learning, and our understanding of AI.

Material discussed in this episode includes:

• • Square Peg's new book by Fran Morgan and Ellie Costello, with Ian Gilbert:
    • Square Pegs: Inclusivity, Compassion, and Fitting In - a Guide for Schools, available here
  • EVR and Cambridge Partnership for Education's Covid-19 report:
    • Shock to the System: Lessons from Covid-19, available here