AI and I

What is your personal relationship to AI? How do the arguments of Ferlazzo or Galland & Rettinger feel to you?  Do they resonate with you? Alienate you? Scare you? Excite you? 

NOTE: I used ChatGPT (purely for irony) to create these memes. I asked ChatGPT to "Make a meme based on this:" and then I copied in both the questions that were asked and my entire response. It gave me many memes all on the same photo, I then took snipits of the smaller memes to post into my post. Look at the full conversation (and the full mega-meme) here 

My personal relationship to AI feels like a Boomer trying to use the internet for the first time, typically saying the word "please" in what prompts I give it "please help me look over this email", asking AI for help with things I could have used other resources for "how long should I put my sweet potato in the air fryer for" and some things that I probably shouldn't be asking it at all *inserting a screenshot of a text exchange between me and my boyfriend* "What do you think his intentions were when he said this? Who is in the right?" (If there's one thing about AI though is that YOU are the product, it answers appeal to YOU, meaning when I ask it who is in the wrong... it's never me [but I could have told you that lol😂 ]). I use AI to help with academic tasks, especially when I can't think of a specific word-- using it to circumnavigate the word 

Me:"it starts with an n" " it means to disagree with"

AI: "negate" 

Me: "yes!"

AI also helped me A LOT with planning a science curriculum when we were given NO CURRICULUM AND NO MATERIALS. I've used the generative picture part of AI to design a living room space with specific furniture given specific dimensions, to help my sister decide if she wanted to get her nose pierced or not and more. I've used AI to help find academic peer reviewed sources (shout out Perplexity) and rebrand an entire document when TFA decided to change their branding (shout out Claude).

Despite my personal use, I also see the other side-- the robots are going to take over the world, I'm wrecking the Earth because of how much water ChatGPT needs to cool down its servers after each question, it takes away the thinking job of people, etc. perspective of the debate. One thing that really stuck out to me was Feriazzo said about AI being a modern tool: "

        “Ethically,” he said, “I just don’t think I ever could use it. It doesn’t seem fair.”

        I sighed. “Picture yourself when everyone is switching from the wooden plow to the steel.

        You say, ‘I just don’t think I can use this new tool that will save me hours of grunt work. It

        doesn’t seem fair.’”

I've heard a lot that AI is coming our way, whether or not we want it to, and that it'll simply be easier for us to be with it than against it (sounds a lot like a zombie apocalypse if you ask me) but I've been playing around with /using AI as both a toy and a tool. 

As an educator, I also have to think about AI and my students, I'd rather teach them responsible ways to use AI rather than them being unsafe with it. This leads me to important arguments by Galland and Rettinger, especially regarding motivation and the story of the student named John who retook a class that he previously did not so well on. The authors describe that John had a lot of intrinsic motivation, motivational orientation, mastery goals, that pushed him to want to take the class. The piece itself talks a lot about "cheating", why students would do it and what the implications of it are. One thing that I'm wondering is how the use and normalization of AI subtracts from productive struggle, therefore also reducing the satisfaction of working through it, working through the learning pit. I worry about how the use of AI, especially with young people, give students an "out" to be able to not just reduce but eliminate all struggle. When we don't have the dopamine hit of working something out, I can see that directly relating to the decrease of intrinsic motivation for students. How do I negotiate the space between understanding and knowing students have AI at their fingertips and also feeling very passionately that they need to be able to do it alone first (the same reason that we need to know how to do basic arithmetic before we are able to use calculators) ? I'm nervous about what AI means for us both as a humanity and as educators... 

Shout out to Stella (yes, the one in our class) for being on TFA's billboard !

Digital Native? ... Problems with Pan-Generational Labels

 What do you make of the (divergent) positions of Spiegel and Prensky?  What do you hear each of them saying about who youth are?  Where do you stand on the “digital native” terminology?

I hear and understand what Spiegel and Prensky both argue, however, I think both fall into a pattern of attaching a specific label to a pan-generational "group" (pan-generational derived from the idea of pan-ethnic, as in, it can be dangerous to apply specific labels to pan-ethnic "groups"). It's a natural human condition to look for patterns and try to group things, people, etc. so I can't necessarily blame Spiegel and Prensky and in regards to who I agree with more, Spiegel's argument resonates with me more because it speaks more to the way that teachers and students would both be considered "digital natives". This is why I bring up the point of the problem with giving groups pan-generational labels, all generations will have differences as the world changes, technology modernizes, etc.

Granted, Spiegel tries to fragment the label with micro-labels of "creator", "socialite", "gamer" and "worker" however she does retain the assumption that all youth still fall under a digital native category.

The generation of women working in Massachusetts as Lowell girls were different than a generation of young women who stayed in their houses and it would not only be unfair, but also inaccurate to label every woman in her early twenties who could be a Lowell girl a "factory native" (nevermind the danger with using the terms "native" and "immigrant" but I digress). Young women in states or places within the United States that didn't have access to working in factories would not be able to match the conditions described by being a "factory native". The same is true for "digital natives", how do we account for young people in a digital native generation who either do not have access to or are not allowed to use technology (I had a friend who was not allowed to use technology and in 5th grade, didn't know how to put a cell phone on speaker). My friend, Amy, is still among the generation of digital natives, however, she's not a digital native by experience, but she is by birth year. This is a problem that comes up in Spiegel's argument as well, an assertion that digital natives ( who need to be explicitly taught how to use technology nonetheless) populate classrooms period. The truth is much more complicated and nuanced than that.

In addition, Spiegel describes the classroom being a microcosm for the real world and uses this as evidence to support why she should increase technology use (like games for example) in her classroom. I think there should be a different argument used to support increasing tech use in the classroom-- like supporting all learners or UDL. If the classroom is a microcosm for the real world, which in many ways it is, it also is not because in the real world, there isn't so much attention to detail in regards to what technology isn't being used. I can name more careers that have minimal of technology (or would fall into the techno-traditionalist category) than careers where increasing technological game use or the specific analysis of videos would be more beneficial than being able to analyze a source for reliability and writing an essay (especially because most peer reviewed, "reliable" sources are in fact written -- and however, we should still consider funding and bias when analyzing these texts)-- which may go to show what I know about the modern career field but anyway...

What I hear in both Spiegel and Prensky's argument is an idea that youth are either similar or dissimilar to their teachers and that teachers need to approach teaching youth in specific ways. What my argument has in place of theirs, is it considers the nuance and issues with a pan-generational label.

Intro!

 

Hi! My name is Lexi and I work at Achievement First Iluminar. Last year I was a third grade reading teacher but this coming school year I'll be second grade teacher focusing mostly on math. I recently started pottery classes (about 2-3 months ago) and I'm really excited for the summer because I'm very much a beach lover. The calico cat is my little teeny tiny baby (Callie) and she's almost one (!!!), the tortie is Willow and both Callie and Willow love each other very much and play all the time.