ChatGPT Isn't the Problem

It's Education Technology in General.

(NB - AI is a fast-developing topic with some pretty hilarious and scary headlines every day; stay tuned for future updates.)

The newest virus to infect American education isn't a highly transmissible subvariant of SARS-Covid-2. It’s ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence-based search tool that can instantly spit out well-written essays in response to whatever inputs a user types.^[1] (Want an essay on Alexander Hamilton? Presto: a well-researched, well-structured, grammatically correct essay pops out.) In response to the perceived threat to academic integrity, many K-12 schools and universities have already banned the bot.

ChatGPT raises serious ethical and legal concerns, and the apocalyptic response to it is understandable.^[2] But the AI bot is only the most dangerous symptom of a larger problem in education: the ever-expanding presence of, and reliance on, technology.

Education technology (edtech) has been growing steadily for years. Web-based learning programs—whether for literacy, numeracy, foreign languages, or organization/administration—are now central to every aspect of the student experience.

Many kindergarteners use iPads, on which they learn to read, spell, and count. In elementary school, students transition to Chromebooks and then to more powerful laptops in middle and high school. Computers are now the conduit through which all academic communication flows—clearly mirroring how the rest of society operates. The College Board recently announced that, starting in 2024, the SAT will only be available digitally. “Bubbling” in your answers and No. 2 pencils have gone the way of good handwriting.

If, like me, you’re alarmed at all this, it’s probably because you were born before 1990 and you still remember the pre-smartphone world. In the late 1990’s, I used AOL dial-up to access the internet (the scratchy, high-pitched sound of the modem is indelibly recorded in my inner ear). Throughout high school, I carried textbooks in my backpack. To research a paper, I went to the library—and sometimes even used a microfiche machine from the Jurassic Period.

Twenty years ago, after surviving the Y2K hysteria, I was amazed by my college’s ethernet connection, but I still used interlibrary loan to find the books I needed. I wrote essays on a cranky laptop, but that was pretty much the only way technology mediated my academic engagement.

I’m not a luddite, and I’m not advocating to bring back the abacus and the slide rule. But though digital literacy is a necessary skill for all students to develop, the role of technology in education needs to be evaluated more carefully. Computers are useful, but they’re also distracting and in my experience they end up being used for entertainment and diversion as much as they aid in working. (This goes for adults, too!)

From my two decades of experience working as a tutor and running a tutoring company in New York City, I’m increasingly aware of how technology—particularly portals, graphing calculators, and advances in word processing—warps the engagement and behavior of students and how their reliance on technology prevents them from developing many foundational skills.

Portals

Portals (a.k.a Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, Moodle, or Google Classroom) have become standard for all students, beginning as early as Kindergarten.^[3] Portals are the interface for all communications between teachers and students, and LMS control the dissemination of materials (including syllabuses, PDFs of textbooks, video links, etc.) and the assigning/submitting of problem sets and essays. Little needs to be printed and handed out in class because everything is uploadable/downloadable from the LMS. Edtech boosters and educational institutions value LMS because they streamline administrative functions and make the bureaucracy more manageable.

It sounds good in theory, but consider the following exchange I commonly have with students:

“What homework do you have tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you write it down in class?”

“No, I’m supposed to check my portal.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, I don’t understand it.”

“What did your teacher say in class?”

“He told me to check the portal.”

Is the technology malfunctioning? No. But relying on the portal is degrading how teachers and students interact, in particular by reducing how much listening and clarifying happens in the classroom. It’s making students lazy because the system teaches them to figure out their work later, when they’re already home (in other words, to procrastinate). Students assume the portal will give them answers. But the portal doesn’t have the answers; it’s just a delivery mechanism. Confusion and uncertainty persist because the portal is an inefficient middleman.

It’s not just students. In my opinion, teachers who rely on the portal to disseminate information communicate less clearly. At the end of class, instead of spending the time to go over a particular assignment carefully, many simply say, “Go check the portal for tonight’s homework,” or “The study guide is up on the portal.” The portal has become an info dump, a place to store data, which is useful… in theory.

But as a tutor I’ve sat with kids who simply can’t figure out where the information has been stored (in the course description? in the assignment tab? in some other clickable box?); or, if they do access the assignment, they don’t know they need to scroll down to the bottom of that particular field to get all the details; or they don’t understand how to connect their Google Drive with the TurnItIn feature in the portal in order to submit assignments. The list of possible glitches is long and is exacerbated by the fact that in addition to the school portal, they also have an email account to monitor, which teachers use to communicate and provide additional information. The digital bureaucracy is ever-expanding.

When I work with students, much of my involvement is in helping them take responsibility for their work, but I often find that both of us are working against the portal. Portals take away student agency because they reinforce systems of organization that have not been created by the student.

In those old days three decades ago, students received a weekly planner on the first day of school and were expected to bring it to class to write down notes and keep track of assignments. At the end of class, the student took out his planner and wrote down what the teacher said. That was his one chance to listen carefully and ask questions. Then, when he got home, he used the planner to organize his studying: What did he want to work on first? How much time did he want to devote to it? How did he want to plan out studying for major assignments or writing papers? The weekly planner was the essential tool in organizing the student’s academic life the way he needed it.

Today, the portal is the delivery/submission mechanism, but it doesn’t help students plan and organize, and therefore they don’t develop these foundational skills on their own. Technology has robbed them of the responsibility of keeping track of both materials and deadlines. In fact, I see something worse: the technology overwhelms them and interferes with what students actually like: engaging with and learning new things.

When tutors from my company work with students, one of the first things is to show them how to take the information from the portal and create their own planner—a to-do list—which can help them identify their short- and long-term assignments, and then to set up a schedule accordingly. Those basic skills are the important ones in an education, not how fast an assignment can be completed or submitted, not how clickable the lesson is.

Calculators

Beyond portals, there are also issues of academic integrity raised by the use of graphing calculators.

When I was in 10th grade, I received a Texas Instruments TI-82, which was necessary for Algebra II graphing and trigonometry. This was back in 1997, and it felt like a big deal. The tech-savvy kids in my class not only understood how it worked, but they also found some way to download a dot-matrix video game called “Drug Dealer,” in which you were rewarded for pushing the right buttons on the calculator to sell “drugs” and make money. (In comparison with today’s video games, what you could do on the TI-82 was pretty tame.)

Texas Instruments has now come out with TI-Nspire™ CX II CAS—and impenetrable acronym for a piece of technology whose functionality vastly outstrips my tin-can TI-82. Calling it a calculator is a misnomer; it’s really a computer, and using advanced technology like this has now become the norm—even the expectation—of schools and the standardized testing industry. In a major change, in 2024, when the SAT goes completely digital, students will be allowed to use a graphing calculator for the whole test.

Is using a calculator as powerful as a small computer not cheating, in the same way that using ChatGPT is? We don’t seem to value the computational skills that previous generations had to master. Relying on a calculator and being allowed to use it all the time will necessarily weaken recall and automaticity. What math skills are now deemed necessary for kids to perform independently, and what skills are not?

Word Processing

Technological advancements in word processing are undoubtedly good. It would be hard for me to conceive of writing this very essay if I had to use a typewriter, as so many generations of students did before me. Microsoft Word and similar word-processing programs make it easier to brainstorm, outline, draft, edit, and share the written word. Google Docs are even better at facilitating collaboration; I use live-synced online documents all the time when I tutor, and yet…

Embedded in all word-processing programs is AutoCorrect (sometimes referred to as SpellCheck), which alerts the writer to typos and other irregularities. But does this not raise any ethical qualms?

Microsoft introduced Autocorrect in 1993,^[4] and it now inserts little red and blue squiggly lines underneath text that is either misspelled or grammatically incorrect. It’s useful for catching an errant typo or for pointing out faulty subject-verb agreement, but it has almost certainly led to poor spelling and weaker grammar skills. It would be one thing if AutoCorrect did the essential teaching of spelling and grammar, but I see how students use it. At the end of their draft, they go through the essay, click on the squiggly red lines, and simply accept the computer’s suggestions. It doesn’t matter if they’ve misspelled a word seven times in seven different ways; they never actually learn how to spell it correctly because they know the software will catch their mistakes. This is to the detriment of future writers everywhere.

SpellCheck, though it may not sound so pernicious, is the logical precursor to ChatGPT. We may not be scandalized by it, but its widespread use demonstrates how we’ve all accepted edtech’s role in the domain of writing. But doesn’t AutoCorrect promote cheating at spelling and grammar in the same way that ChatGPT promotes cheating at research, argumentation, and structure?

We’re now witnessing the mobilization to combat the ChatGPT virus. Some teachers feel the easiest way to do so is simply to go back to blue examination booklets and require all writing be done in class with a pen or pencil. Some college professors have decided to go “medieval” by assessing students with oral exams. Others try to ask questions that can’t be answered with formulaic knowledge; in other words, the writing needs to have human individuality, which, it may be hoped, AI won’t master.^[5] However, other professors, seeing the use of AI as an inevitable “emerging skill,” are meeting the challenge more directly: they are requiring students to use the bot, provided that they disclose the extent of that use.^[6]

In an ironic twist to the ChatGPT saga, it turns out that one way to counter the AI chat bot is with another AI chat bot. A 22-year-old computer programmer has designed an app called GPTZero, which can analyze text to determine if it was created by ChatGPT.^[7] Writing has now become a SciFi battlefield. Humans have created software programs that fight each other in order to authenticate their humanity.

There’s no going back to the “good ol’ days” when Pythagoras scratched theories on an Italian beach, or when boys and girls in one-room schoolhouses wrote with chalk on slate. Those were simpler times. But at some point, we will need to stop adding technology to make things “easier” and “faster” and instead gives kids more time and ability to figure things out for themselves. (You’d be surprised at how many students simply don’t know how to use the index or contents page of a book because they’re so used to scrolling and searching command F.) More devices and apps do not always add up to a better education.

Remote learning was the answer during the pandemic, and many institutions are now investing heavily in tech to scale up their response to learning loss. That may be necessary for the short term, but still, ChatGPT should be a clarion call about the pitfalls of too much technology in education.

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^[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3816348-what-is-chatgpt-ai-technology-sends-schools-scrambling-to-preserve-learning/

^[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2023/01/22/generative-ai-chatgpt-is-going-to-be-everywhere-once-the-api-portal-gets-soon-opened-stupefying-ai-ethics-and-ai-law/?sh=257ceb1824f5

^[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2022/12/19/the-vital-hidden-role-that-learning-management-systems-play-in-the-education-market/?sh=1f45d67f59e7

^[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/magazine/who-made-that-autocorrect.html

^[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-chatgpt-college-professors-students-cheating-2023-1

^[6] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151499213/chatgpt-ai-education-cheating-classroom-wharton-school

^[7] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1150228762/a-college-student-aims-to-save-us-from-a-chatbot-before-it-changes-writing-forev