Serving as an Instructional Technology Leader for the Murrieta Valley Unified School District in my previous career, I attended many educational technology conferences over the years. One of the many lessons learned in attending those conferences was how technology, when combined with pedagogy and content knowledge, could allow educators to positively impact student engagement and, inevitably, achievement. The amount of web-based tools and strategies I was able to share with like-minded educators in the public schools truly transformed the way our students learned, helped many teachers become more efficient, and spawned a movement to bring classrooms into the 21st century.
The last annual tech conference I attended in Palm Springs, Computer-Using Educators (CUE), has grown exponentially and, to be quite honest, has gotten a bit too large and impacted. After recently accepting a position here at United Nursing College as the Dean of Curriculum and Instruction, I sought something a little further away as a reentry into the educational technology world. The Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) conference is an annual conference held in Washington, and it just so happens that Seattle is one of my favorite spots to visit. (And the seafood there is fantastic!)
I packed my bags, my laptop, and headed to NCCE with very high expectations. Surely there would be new technologies that I could pass on to the faculty at UNC, and I was incredibly excited to jump back into the world of ed tech. I inherently knew much of what I would see would be related to AI (ChatGPT, anyone?), and after reading descriptions of the workshops and sessions for the three day event, I was actually a bit alarmed. There were more sessions and workshops than I could possibly attend, but I managed to sift through the offerings and picked a few that seemed applicable.
Three days was enough to come to this conclusion: AI is an astonishing tool that is changing the way we communicate. In fact, we will likely discover all we really have to do is understand how to create specific instructions and AI will communicate or create things for us; this is known as Prompt Engineering. Google it. Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce incredibly impressive text strings and, for a lot of people, can do the difficult work for them. I attended a workshop in which attendees used Gemini (Google’s AI) to create a children’s book with pictures; I prompted the software to create a bedtime story about an old man who lost his tooth and later discovered it in a strange place. But who really wrote it? I sure didn’t, but you can read it here. As a novelist myself, I felt cheated. It actually took me an entire year to write my first novel; AI wrote a pretty solid story and included illustrations in five seconds.
I attended another workshop aimed at using AI features in Canva (yes, Canva!). Curious, I prompted Canva to create a picture of nursing students in UNC peacock-colored scrubs learning in a classroom lab. While the photo looked incredibly realistic, some of those “nursing students” had three hands. It took me a minute to actually see what are termed “hallucinations” in the AI world (see the photo on the left), but I was blown away how quickly it was produced.
As a former English teacher with over two decades of experience, I simply cannot wrap my head around how these tools can be justified. I have already discovered a few student submissions that I am fairly certain were produced, mainly, using AI. Be forewarned that your instructors know your writing skills could not possibly have improved overnight and without rigorous instruction in grammar and conventions. After recently writing my five chapter doctoral dissertation, I have become a bit of an expert at formatting citations and including legitimate references. Those previously mentioned hallucinations extend to references, by the way, so it may be best, if you plan to let AI do your work for you, to check those citations prior to submitting your paper!
What will we gain by allowing a machine to communicate for us? Have you seen the TikTok reel of the person applying for a job using AI? While AI can do quite a bit for us, how much is too much? At what point do we realize the image we have asked AI to produce isn’t really our own? We save time, for sure, but we lose a little bit of ourselves in the process. The beauty of creation is allowing others to see your reflection in the work you produce, and a satisfying byproduct of doing the work yourself is claiming credit for doing so. Like this blog post, for example--I can unequivocally claim it as my own!