The Teach-a-Thon
A possible way to use chatbots in education
I am optimistic that chatbots can prove to be the most important innovation in education in my lifetime. But nobody, including me, knows how to use them yet!
Here is one random idea. I think that it would be useful for someone in college to learn American financial history. Here are a few prompts that I came up with to get started:
I want to learn about American financial history. At various points in history, what did people use for money? How were banks regulated? How did the government fund itself? I will ask questions, and I would like a one-paragraph answer followed by bullet points. First, how was the American Revolutionary War financed?
Using 10 to 20 bullet points, list what economic historians think were the important events and issues concerning money, banking, and government finance in the United States between 1775 and 1825.
Suppose you were writing a book on the role of land speculation in U.S. financial history, including events like the purchase of Manhattan, the Land Office, the free banking era, the northwest ordinance, the Homestead Act, the Florida land boom, and the 2008 financial crisis. Provide a list of suggested chapter titles.
The answers that ChatGPT-3 gave to these prompts were all useful starting points. I then delved deeper into topics like the Panic of 1837. When it gave me a brief description of the Panic of 1837, I asked for a list of sources, and it came back with a set that ranged from Murray Rothbard to Arthur Schlesinger. These could provide a basis for further probing into the event.
How to use this in a classroom? I could sit in front of students, give Chatbots prompts, and show everyone my screen. But that seems silly.
Better to have students do the prompting. Why not a teach-a-thon? Sort of like a hack-a-thon.
Put 50 students in a room, with big screens on all of the walls. Have the students work in teams of 3 or 4. At the end of eight hours, each team is to produce a document that covers American financial history.
Each group would have a private screen, in which to compose their document. Each group also would have a chatbot connection, but each of those screens would be public, projected onto the walls of the room, so that every group can see all of the groups’ chatbot conversations.
The public chatbot conversations would enable teams to pick up ideas from one another. Historical events that they might have overlooked. Or techniques for writing prompts that work better.
My hypothesis is that after such an 8-hour teach-a-thon, the students would know and remember more about U.S. financial history than they would after an entire semester of an ordinary class. In addition, they would learn a great deal about how to learn. They would develop skills that would be useful for pursuing other topics.
I think that we were already in a technological environment that favors autodidacts over traditional classroom learning. Chatbots take that to the next level.
'Autodidact' is doing some heavy lifting here. Autodidact means self-teaching, but actually, everybody is self-teaching when they actually care about learning something. Practically everyone has gone on youtube to watch an instructional video on how to do something.
Autodidacts are more self-motivatatng than self teaching ("auto-proponits" maybe), and so will tend to figure out how to make best use of whatever tools become available to accomplish their learning goals.
But for most students (at any level of cognitive ability) it's motivation, not tools or techniques, that is the key issue. The problem is not lack of tools, access, or resources, which have been around for a long time in powerful forms and at low prices which would have astounded preceding generations. The problem is shaping situations and incentives to nudge the marginally un-motivated student to *want* to learn.
My hunch is that at this point we run into issues of hard-wired social psychology that make it difficult to substitute those social influences with computer tools. For example, it is instinctively easier for a member of 'the audience' to pay attention to some focal 'performance' when that member subconsciously picks up the subtle cues that the people around him are also paying close attention. It is easier to do what one imagines a teacher or professor or mentor wants (or what would impress them as an opportunity to show off) when one subconsciously calculates that affilitating with an authority figure or high-status individual would likely have personal benefits down the line.
Chatbots don't have status, can't do anything for you, don't make you cool or sexy when you tell people you use them. Interacting with a chatbot - in what is bound to be a typically solitary fashion - doesn't provide those social cues or incentives, and thus, doesn't help coach or motivate (at least, not yet, maybe soon!)
So, the autodidacts / autoproponits will indeed derive a lot of advantage from this new powerful tool, just like they did with all the previous powerful tools. But the other students will just use it like a search engine as an even faster way to get the answers to the homework or test or lines for the essay.
Perversely, I suspect that being even more able to outsource research, learning, and now even impressive composition to the chatbots will actually undermine the retention of actual skills or knowledge, just like people who were once able to use paper maps to navigate around a city found that they couldn't do it anymore after years of relying on smartphone GPS apps.
"I could sit in front of students, give Chatbots prompts, and show everyone my screen. But that seems silly.
Better to have students do the prompting. "
Are you implying we don't need teachers anymore?