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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#21

Post by lynx97 »

simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> where all you got was the outline of the island

As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#22

Post by HPsquared »

dotancohen wrote: post #15
carbonguy wrote: post #9

I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrup…

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

The solution has been around a very long time: closed-book tests (verbal or written). Works against LLMs too!

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#23

Post by mantas »

lynx97 wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok.

Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#24

Post by UncleMeat »

Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.

This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for wider reasons than direct application to decision making today. This is even true for military history, which is among the slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#25

Post by dotancohen »

HPsquared wrote: post #22
dotancohen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

The solution has been around a very long time: closed-book tests (verbal or written). Works against LLMs too!

Exactly my point. It sometimes takes time for education to adapt to new tools. Writing, calculators, search engines, etc. I was in the last semester to learn mechanical drawing, the next semester learned CAD. Education adapts.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#26

Post by UncleMeat »

simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked with doing this independently rather than having universities offer training or support with adjusting methods to be more AI resistant. And unfortunately the fast speed of development of these tools is making good ideas obsolete quickly. I know some people who switch to having students make podcasts rather than writing papers as a final assignment and then we started seeing "create your own podcast" tools appear and made it roughly as easy to cheat on this assignment as a traditional paper.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#27

Post by spankibalt »

Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

> Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes.

Amongst other things...

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#28

Post by sdoering »

UncleMeat wrote: post #24
Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for wider reasons than direct application to decision making today. This is even true for military history, which is among the slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history.

I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved history as a subject in school. But that would lead too far out from this thread here.

I can relate to the original piece, because - while I use AI daily for work and in private life - I also see the dangers. Yes, it is a new medium - and I heard roughly the same critique about the internet, when I was at university - but I think it is quite a fundamentally different paradigm shift that we are living through.

I feel (used intentionaly here) it is more like the invention of the printing press (from an societal impact standpoint) than the dissemination of the internet into the wider society. But that is just my current working hypothesis.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#29

Post by simonw »

UncleMeat wrote: post #26
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#30

Post by mootothemax »

mantas wrote: post #23
lynx97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

> It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok.

While there are possibly noble goals behind your suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. I’ll leave to your imagination how much work is often put into supporting these “other” assignments and how up-to-date they’re kept va the mainstream.

> Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part of the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels like too much work, I’d encourage you to explore why it feels that way, what emotions is this bringing up internally?

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