Systems of education and its discontents

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She sounds awesome. :fist:

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Iā€™m pretty sure our graduation speaker will never be invited back. I thought it was great, but grad speakers usually mouth a bunch of platitudes and are done.

This guy encouraged students to use their education to resist ignorance. He called out political leaders who intentionally misled citizenry about vaccines, causing millions of deaths. He quoted Voltaire as a warning about trusting political leaders so much youā€™ll engage in sedition, ā€œAnyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.ā€ And he urged the grads to use the Tennessee Three as inspiration for fighting against people who would have them mistrust and hate others for who they are.

His only low point was quoting MLK. Itā€™s a running joke that every single white grad speaker will throw in an MLK quote. Always. It could be a drinking game.

But on balance, it was amazing. I was pretty sure the faces of the dais party were going to get stuck in a rictus blank stare from the strain of not reacting.

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Hopefully, at least it was not one of the usual ones?

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Right? I actually like it when a white speaker or writer uses one of the good ones.

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Esh.

ā€œThe ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

But ā€œperson.ā€

Boring. Two drinks cause itā€™s that one.

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A good quote, but still less radical than what @anon15383236 posted for sureā€¦

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Yeah. To be fair, in the context of mastering your fear (resist political leaders ignorance, etc) it made sense.

But meh.

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This seems interestingā€¦

Although I donā€™t think Iā€™ll be able to view the livestreamā€¦

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Chelsea Peretti Eye Roll GIF by Brooklyn Nine-Nine

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By an undergrad at Columbia.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/im-a-student-you-have-no-idea-how-much-were-using-chatgpt

No wall: https://archive.md/Kelhm

We donā€™t fully lean into AI and teach how to best use it, and we donā€™t fully prohibit it to keep it from interfering with exercises in critical thinking. Weā€™re at an awkward middle ground where nobody knows what to do, where very few people in power even understand that something is wrong. At any given time, I can look around my classroom and find multiple people doing homework with the help of ChatGPT. Weā€™re not being forced to think anymore.

People worry that ChatGPT might ā€œeventuallyā€ start rendering major institutions obsolete. It seems to me that it already has.

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Shame Facepalm GIF by MOODMAN

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For once Iā€™m not sure what your gif means. :confused:

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I donā€™t knowā€¦ maybe that itā€™s just frustration as it feels like another nail in the coffin of humanities having any real support in our educational system?

Honestly, Iā€™m just highly demoralized and frustrated, over all, but especially in seeing academia find a way to pull out of the tailspin its inā€¦

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No surprise, to be honest. The key is going to be teaching students how to engage it. So faculty will have to do things like ā€œengage Chatbot in a historical debate about X, where you take the side of Y, using evidence from the following readingsā€ type stuff.

It wonā€™t be easy, for sure.

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I guess if youā€™re happy with at best a C, thatā€™s fine. But Iā€™ve seen a fair amount of text generated by ChatGPT andā€¦itā€™s mediocre at best.

Iā€™ve said it before; I think it could bail a student out who is facing a deadline to produce a draft but a lot of polishing would be necessary to turn that into A or even B work. IMO.

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Yesā€¦so far. But itā€™s ā€œlearning,ā€ or at any rate, getting better. And itā€™s already producing a lot of rough drafts that students polish and turn in, and that they incorporate in other ways into ā€œtheirā€ writing. It can also revise drafts that it produces with further prompts.

As the studentā€™s piece I linked points out, there are a lot of ways to use it, already, that have long been considered unwthical student conduct. And those grading their papers often canā€™t tell, and when they can, they often canā€™t prove it.

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Lots of people are, if it gets them out of a class and on to the rest of their livesā€¦

And weā€™re not paid nearly enough to spend hours trying to figure out if it is cheatingā€¦

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