#261 – Has ChatGPT Done Education a Favour?

Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn,  Google Podcasts, Amazon Music

What’s in this episode?

Karine and Rose meet this week to discuss the Online Safety Bill, school absences, and ChatGPT, the latter of which has produced huge public debate, from teacher anxieties to developer felicitations, questions from parents, and columnist thinkpieces all around the presence of AI in the classroom.  With all of these concerns, however, is it possible that ChatGPT has done education a favour?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the third and latest version of their text-generating AI technology, and it’s been trained on over 45 terrabytes of data.  If that seems like a lot, it is: the entirety of English-language Wikipedia accounts for just 1% of that volume in comparison.  The talk of Twitter and intrigued educationalists in schools around the anglosphere, much of the discussion has been around its use as a replacement for human cognition: will students use it to cheat in essays and assessments?  Does its information retrieval dumb-down student opportunities for learning when material is simply parroted, rather than interrogated and the learning then applied in novel contexts?  In this week’s episode, Karine and Rose discuss practical uses for this incredibly powerful tool, and explain why human and machine intelligence can work together successfully to improve teaching and learning, and our understanding of AI.

Material discussed in this episode includes:

• • Square Peg’s new book by Fran Morgan and Ellie Costello, with Ian Gilbert:
    • Square Pegs: Inclusivity, Compassion, and Fitting In – a Guide for Schools, available here
  • EVR and Cambridge Partnership for Education’s Covid-19 report:
    • Shock to the System: Lessons from Covid-19, available here

Rose Luckin – Professor of Learner Centred Design, UCL, Founder, EDUCATE Ventures Research 

 

Rosemary (Rose) Luckin is Professor of Learner Centred Design at UCL Knowledge Lab.  She was named one of the 20 most influential people in education in the Seldon List, 2017.  Rose is Founder of EDUCATE Ventures Research Ltd., a London hub for start-ups, researchers and educators developing evidence-based educational technology.  She is past president and current treasurer of the International Society for AI in Education and co-founder of the Institute for Ethical AI in Education.   

•  Social Media – Twitter, LinkedIn 

Karine George – Former Headteacher, Chief Education Advisor, EDUCATE Ventures Research

An award-winning, future reimagining educationalist, Karine spent more than 20 years as headteacher in an ‘Outstanding’ Oftsed-rated school,  She is an active research practitioner and ties research, business and education together to transform leadership and pedagogy.  An advocate for technology’s support of 21st century teaching and learning, she has reported on its use to the DfE, penned numerous articles on educational issues and was a contributing author for ‘Sustainable School Transformation: an inside-out school-led approach’.

• Social Media – Twitter, LinkedIn

We would love to hear from you

• Post your thoughts or follow-on links via Twitter @podcastedtech or via The Edtech Podcast Facebook page or Instagram

Rate and Review

• Drop us a rate or review or share this episode.  By doing so, you help other new listeners find our material. Thank you and happy listening!

Tell us where you are listening in from

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Record a quick free voicemail via speakpipe for inclusion in the next episode. Or you can post your thoughts or follow-on links via twitter @podcastedtech or via The Edtech Podcast LinkedIn page or Instagram.