AI education

I’ve often gone on about how we should stop agonizing about AI use in colleges, and take the sensible course of making students handwrite their essays — you kind of know they’re going to use AI, but if they have to write the results out by hand at least they may think a little about what they are doing. Ethan Mollick, practical as ever, reports on research into learning with and without AI. Turns out that a well designed AI-assisted learning plan will actually boost performance. It’s early days, and instructors haven’t yet worked out how best to use AI in the classroom. “AI need not undermine your ability to think, but it can do so if used badly and badly is often the default.” Part of the problem is that AI just does too good a job: as someone pointed out on the radio the other day, the point of a school project on the history of printing is not to be able to generate a perfect, almost publishable dissertation. It’s to think about it, find out about it, locate sources, make a…