Search | Menu Chatting About ChatGPT with Madison College's Sarah Z. Johnson
Large language models. Artificial Intelligence (AI). ChatGPT. Bard.
In the past year, these have become household terms. But it wasn’t that long ago that the general public wasn't unaware of any of these. Many experts believe 2023 may be the year that AI transformed everything, including education. And 2024 is sure to see more innovation and change in this space as we adapt how we teach and learn.
As with all things that lead to significant change, the learning curve is steep. Fortunately, Madison College's Academic Integrity Officer and Director of the Writing Center, Sarah Z. Johnson, can help navigate these waters.
An early adopter of using these tools in the academic setting, she has also served on the joint task force convened by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs) to develop resources, guidelines, and professional standards around the use of AI and writing.
Tell us a bit about your background and why you got interested in AI in the academic setting?
I have been the academic integrity officer at the college for the past six years. Generally speaking, that means I help guide changes in policy and help faculty navigate academic misconduct. I'm a resource when a faculty member wants advice about sanctions or what counts as cheating and other things related to that.
I knew as soon as ChatGPT started getting a lot of attention in November of 2022 that this was going to be significant. That's when I really started to pay attention and started playing around with it.
I volunteered to serve on a joint task force of the 4Cs and the MLA to look at the issue of AI and writing. I felt very strongly that on these kinds of task forces, two-year colleges need to be represented. I wanted to make sure that that voice of open-access institutions is included as we create policy and guidelines.
Are these AI-powered tools something we need to restrict or rein in, or are they tools we need to incorporate into our teaching plans?
The task force strongly advised against focusing on regulation and surveillance. It doesn't do us any good to get into an arms race with our students on these technologies and view them only as tools to use in cheating. I'm looking forward to preparing our students to critically engage and ethically think about how they're going to be using generative AI in the future, because we need to be teaching them to think and write in ways that will prepare them for what's next, whether it's additional college or the workplace. So, it's not realistic for us to just manage the downside without considering the tons of possibilities as well.
How are you using ChatGPT with your students?
I help my students get used to it and practice with it. But I use it more extensively to train peer tutors. I've used ChatGPT to create fake student papers, because that's something that I always need. The tutors need to see papers that are badly organized or papers with a lot of run-on sentences. Rather than hunt through old papers and curate it that way, I can just have ChatGPT do it. That way, I'm not using a real student's work.
Last semester, I dug in a little deeper. Students did an inaccuracy scavenger hunt to demonstrate that, while these tools can feel miraculous in some way, they're also flawed. They used ChatGPT to write up something about a topic they're familiar with then went on a "scavenger hunt" to find the inaccuracies. These large language models work, not necessarily to be right, but to sound plausible. They can be confidently wrong.
I found that ChatGPT is good at outlining content that it's been provided, so I had students feed their content into ChatGPT and prompt it to outline the main ideas and organization. Many times, students have a hard time recognizing their own flaws in organization, so this exercise allowed them to compare the outline derived from their content to what they intended to communicate and see if they match up or not.
Do you wish you had ChatGPT as a student?
Oh yeah, absolutely! For those of us who have learned those things the hard way, we look at this we're like, "That is amazing. That is so useful."
Do you have any worries about these tools?
I do worry a bit about whether the very shortcuts that are the most useful for students are shortcutting them out of the learning they need to do to be able to use these tools intelligently.
I think that's always been one of the fears of any kind of technology that comes along. We're afraid it's going to make us dumber, right? That's what Socrates said about the technology of writing to begin with. It's what we said about calculators.
Right now, I also worry about the lack of clarity and consistency for students related to policies about AI in the classroom. Students can absolutely use it in my class. We talk about how to use it and when. Some of their other instructors are still taking more of a denial and regulate approach. So, I think just helping students understand that not all their professors are going to just shut it down and that it's not about cheating. It's about using these tools ethically and smartly to become a better writer.
What are some other benefits of ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms?
Cognitive offloading could be a huge benefit. If I'm not consumed with thoughts and activities that aren't bringing value, things that a generative AI platform can handle for me, what can that free me up to think about? Things like a calendar. If I don't have something saved on my digital calendar, it's not happening. I talked to my mom about this, and she's horrified, because, of course, she writes it down on a piece of paper, and then she remembers it. You could argue that makes me dumber. But on the other hand, you could argue that it allows me to think about other things, freeing up cognitive space.
I also think that we can help students use generative AI in a way that boosts creativity and critical thinking. It also can give them a jumping-off point, especially in writing. So many of my students are terrified of the blank page that they just get stuck. Sometimes just having help getting started is really all they need.
