[Nate Walker]

Hi David!

Thank you for your thoughtful engagement. In addition to my role here at ELA, teach First Amendment and human rights law at Rutgers Honors College and for undergraduates in the department of religious studies. In this context, I’ve been thinking about ChatGPT in these various ways.

1. Honest Studies
2. Timeline of AI
3. AI Platforms
4. Resources
5. Pedagogical Strategies

I’ll explore each of these in a sub-thread and include sources and links.

I’m looking forward to learning with and from you all on this important topic.

Cheers,

Nate

[Nate Walker]

1. Honesty Studies. I’m curious whether educators’ initial assumptions about artificial intelligence would benefit from evidence-based examinations of why people lie and cheat. The evidence reveals that no one type of person (gender, race, nationality, age) lies more than another but its the social and organizational conditions that permit certain kinds of behavior.

In this context, I start many of my courses having students watch clip 1:11 to 1:19 of the following documentary, (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies (2015).

Overall, behavioral economist Dan Ariely at MIT classify lies in five ways:

1. Self-deception

2. Social norms

3. Distance from money

4. Lying for the benefit of others

5. Conflicts of interest

These may be helpful for educators to think through the assumptions we have about students motivations and identities (e.g., the false ideas that some people lie more than others) and focus more on creating the conditions for ethical behavior that is socially rewarded.

I’ll next explore a timeline of AI to put the recent developments of ChatGPT into context.

Cheers,

Nate

[Nate Walker]

2. Timeline. Huston Smith wrote in his best selling textbook on the world’s religions, “The century’s technological advances must be matched by comparable advances in human relations.” — Huston Smith

How might we consider the following technical advancements as the means by which we can cultivate humanity? How might these developments enrich education and better support the complex ways that people make meaning of our lives.

• 1991 World Wide Web introduced to the public
• 1994-5 Launch of Amazon, Netscape, Yahoo, AOL, Internet Explorer
• 1995 ALICE chatbot born
• 1998 Google launches search engine
• 2001 Wikipedia launches. Napster closes after losing a copyright case.
• 2002 LinkedIn and Moodle launch
• 2003 WordPress blog publishing launches
• 2004 Facebook and Mozilla launch. Blackboard goes public.
• SCORM learning technology introduced to public.
• 2005 YouTube launches. Amazon Prime launches.
• 2006 Twitter launches
• 2007 Apple introduces iPhone
• 2009 Grammarly launches.
• 2010 Instagram launches. Kindle books outsell hardcover books.
• 2011 Zoom founded. Apple introduces Siri. Canvas launches. IBM’s Watson, natural language computer competes on Jeopardy
• 2014 Amazon introduces Alexa, virtual assistant technology
• 2016 3.6 billion Smartphones worldwide. Microsoft acquires LinkedIn.
• Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beats Go champion Lee Sedol
• 2017 TickTok launches and the age of Artificial Intelligence begins.
• Amazon acquires Whole Foods.
• 2018 Google’s open course BERT
• Christie’s sells artificial intelligence created portrait for $432K
• 2020 Private release of OpenAI’s GPT-3
• 2020-2021 COVID-19 global lockdowns
• 2022 Elon Musk acquires Twitter.
• 6.6 billion Smartphone users worldwide.
• 4.7 social media users worldwide.
• November 2022 OpenAI’s GPT-3 gains global prominence with Microsoft’s $1B investment.
• GPTZero was founded by Yale student to detect AI-generated text.
• 2023 GPTZero and K16 Solutions to bring GPTZero to Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, and Schoology.

Sources: WikiPedia, Speechify

In the next thread, I’ll provide links to new artificial intelligence platforms.

Cheers,

Nate

gptzero.me

GPTZero | The Trusted AI Detector for ChatGPT, GPT-4, & More

Covered by >100 media outlets, GPTZero is the most advanced AI detector for ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard. Check up to 50000 characters for AI plagiarism in seconds.

[Nate Walker]

3. Sampling of Artificial Intelligence Platforms. In the context of these historic developments, I’m curious about the impact any of these new technical platforms will have on humanity.

1. OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4
2. DALL-E 2
3. Google BERT

4. Pathways Language Model (PaLM)

5. Meta’s OPT-175B

6. BLOOM BigScience Initiative

7. LaMDA, Google technology

8. AI Tools compiled by Medium.com: Audio and Video: VoicePen AI audio to blog post; Krisp AI speaking assistant, background voice, noise, echo cancellation; Beatoven.ai generate royalty-free custom music. Design AI: Flair, brand products; Illustroke, create images from text prompts; and Copy and Content: Puzzle Labs, import glossary to highlight text on website.

These are some of the platforms that have caught my attention. I’m curious about what other resources folks are following.

In the next post, I’ll share some resources that have inspired me in exploring these developments.

Cheers,

Nate

openai.com

OpenAI

Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity

[Nate Walker]

4. Resources for Educators. What resources are you all using to help you make sense of these technological advancements and how might these resources inspire us to help make comparable advances in human relations, starting in our classrooms?

1. A Guide to Generative AI Tools Use In Higher Education. This is one of the most comprehensive resources that I’ve discovered to date. It’s a living document worthy of following over time.

2. The Sentient Syllabus: Charting a course for the academy in an era of synthesized thought. Principles: Quality, Truth, Collaboration. Syllabus Resources. Understanding AI Issues. Course Activities.

3. GPTZero Educators Facebook Group. This is an excellent way to learn of the most up-todate developments.

4. Plagiarism Software. In addition to GPTZerod, here are some other counter-AI tools: Turnitin, Quetext, PlagiarismCheck.org, Unicheck, ProWritingAid, Noplag, Cite4me.org, Crossplay, Copyleaks Plagiarism Checker, and CopySaf

What resources are you all using to enrich your classroom?

Cheers,

Nate

[Nate Walker]

5. Pedagogical Strategies. Ultimately, I’ve come to interpret these technological developments and related resources as invitations for us to be better educators. We have a renewed opportunity to think through how the content of what we teach can be enriched by how we teach it. For me, it comes down to finding varied ways to engage and assess learners.

• Making Explicit How I Learn. I have three learning disabilities. I make this explicit in my classes to emphasize that I don’t like and I’m not good at many classroom exercises. For instance, I don’t like and I’m not good at writing but I write because I have something to say. I’m about to publish my sixth book. I want them to know that struggling with learning does not pre-determine success.
• Attendance and Participation. Of course, showing up is the highest priority. It’s the best way to ensure the authenticity of the learners voice, to get to know them, and be in a genuine collegial relationship with them in one of the most formative times in their lives.
• Outlining Essays in Person. I invite my students to draft outlines while we are in class together. In small groups, their peers and I can see how they are making sense of the arguments and structuring their thoughts.
• Structured Analytical Essays. Whether it’s teaching the IRAC briefing method (issue, rule, analysis, conclusion), or a five-point analytical essay (intro/thesis, point 1, 2, 3, and conclusion), I find that much of my time is spent teaching learners how to structure their communication. Structure gives them freedom and self-confidence.
• In-Class Pre-Tests, Post-Tests, Quizzes. As a First Amendment educators, all I do is teach about freedom. For me, the content of this subject must match the form. As a result, I don’t feel good about using tests to perpetuate “gotcha teaching,” where we expect students to mirror our spoken or unspoken assumptions on the topic. For this reason, I don’t use tests or quizzes to measure learning. Instead, I use a dialogic approach.
• Socratic Seminars. I’m finding myself most often inviting a few students into the middle of a room to each take one the role of one or more characters in the case we are studying, while the rest of the class watches. For me, this is a more organic, relational, playful, and entertaining way to engage learners. As an educators, I can see in real-time the growth students are making by embodying what would otherwise be theoretical, disembodied knowledge. It’s a great way for them to verbally demonstrate mastery of subject matter, giving me a receipt on my teaching.
• Rubric-Based Grading. I’m drawn to providing students with rubrics for them to measure their self-learning.
• Self-Assessments. I try to change the power dynamics in the course by inviting learners to set their own goals and reflect on their progress. More often than not, learners are harder on themselves than I would be on them.
• Capstone Projects & Praxis Pedagogy. In field-education seminars, I coach students through doing work in the community and then reflecting on the impact they had with their self-crafted project.
• Gamified Assessment. I love to find ways to introduce play as the primary pedagogy. Turning learning into games transforms the mood in the room and motivates students (and me) to return. If I’m not having fun, how can they?
• Mixing Social Learning with Verified Engagement. During the pandemic, I built the social learning community ReligionAndPublicLife.org. We have forty certifying organizations and over two hundred content creators. We’ve found that online learning is best done when introducing social comments. We use the technology to measure basic things like whether they viewed the entire videos, completed the pop-up questions, and other games.
• Teaching Assistants. Some of my most successful students involved inviting honors college students to serve as my teaching assistants. We have weekly discussions about what is working and not working and plan for future lessons. We take turns following-up with the students, demonstrating care for their well-being, which motivates them to succeed. Overall, I find this kind of team teaching to generate the most authentic learning community.
• Discussion Boards. Like this activity here, I appreciate having the opportunity to engage one another with discussion boards. On our own time, we can come in and out of conversations. There’s something meaningful about having the chance to self-reflect while being in dialogue with others (as compared to only writing papers for the single-audience of a professor).
• Emphasizing self-worth, self-efficacy, self-confidence. Overall, I see myself as not as a keeper of knowledge that students have to access and return back to me in it’s most purest form. I see myself as a guide, a coach to invite them to transforming their thoughts of self-doubt into a script based on hard-earned self-confidence. For me, how the learner leaves the course feeling about themselves is the highest pedagogical priority.

I hope this five-part reflection is helpful to our new Section on Teaching Education Law.

Cheers,
Nate