Reflection week II

Today we talked about the topics including the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed” and AI generator Chat GPT.

The documentary I viewed made me consider my perspective and opinion on the education system as a whole. I think that the education system needs to be reimagined if we as a society are in true pursuit of students being well equipped for the future. I often feel trapped in the “game” of getting good grades to that I can progress to the next step of education (ex: university, career, personal academic accomplishments). However, this comes at the sacrifice of my actual learning. In my experience as a student, I do not feel that high school prepared me for the challenge of university and I struggled significantly in my first year. The documentary highlights that as students, we are conditioned to memorize material and forget it soon after assessment. I believe this is not the most valuable way to learn. I hope that in the future of education the focus will shift to meaningful assessment such as project based learning. Through methods such as project-based learning, students will be able to find deeper understanding in specific area of materials which, in my opinion, is more valuable than a broad understanding in a multitude of areas.

I also think, with the emergence of sites such as ChatGPT, which will inevitably alter the future of education, that there must me a shift in what we ask students to do. To explain what ChatGTP is, I will allow the function define itself: “ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It uses deep learning techniques to generate natural-sounding human-like text. It can be fine-tuned for a variety of language tasks such as question answering, language translation, and text summarization. It is trained on a massive dataset of internet text, allowing it to generate a wide range of responses and continue conversations based on the context provided (Chat GPT, 2022).” As I reflect on the diverse abilities of this site, I am faced with a few concerns. The first being the privacy concerns that were discussed in class. The fact that this technology is new and it is unclear of the personal information it uses and what it does with it, I would not be comfortable using this in a classroom setting. The second is a concern as a future educator, this function virtually erases the possibility to ask students to write original essays on topics or reflections. This will reduce the amount of thinking and thus, learning that is done in school classrooms. Which presents the future question – if students can use ChatGTP for all of their work, why are we teaching them skills such as essay writing? In a certain sense, I think tis resource will make educators be substantially more creative with the work they assign students. I believe that in future years we will see in increase in project based learning and personal application of information. Perhaps ChatGPT is the push the education needed to move away from traditional assessment of learning.

Here is a picture taken by a very talented photographer, Rich McCue.

Photo by Rich McCue on Unsplash