I have a stack of books about artificial intelligence waiting to be read. The field is emerging quickly, so my reading focuses on how AI has and can affect work, life, and society.
Madhumita Murgia’s 2024 book Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI was the most recent book of this genre I have been reading. In the first few chapters, I had decided I would review it for my blog, but one chapter, “Your Health,” deserves this post. I will comment on the entirety of the book later, but the theme for this chapter, and my connection with it, comes from the final sentence in the chapter. It is a quote from Ashita Singh, a physician whose work is described in the chapter. Ashita says “When… human beings are absent… I think technology comes a close second. It would just revolutionize the care we are able to give.”
“When… human beings are absent….”
To my mind, education and health care are related fields. We deal with human brains in all of the varieties and variations; we deal with all varieties and variations. In most business if you are unsatisfied with the local resources, you close up shop and move to places with better resources. Our work is affected by local circumstances; poverty and culture are especially important factors in determining how people interact with health care and education professionals. In many situations (especially the one’s described in this chapter), health care workers are working in isolation.
Isolation is a surprising reality of an educator’s life. This seems strange. We interact with students all day. We have colleagues and specialists and instructional coaches and curriculum coordinators and principals who arrive in classrooms, but we work in isolation nonetheless. (Most of those people from the previous sentence who arrive in classrooms have theiown motivations, and despite being there “to help” are really there to tell the teachers what to do.)
It would be fantastic of those folks were there to really help, and on rare occasion they do, but when we are faced with a challenging problem educators are left to our own to solve it. In “Your Health” we see how AI can be a colleague for physicians working in isolation. In my experience, AI can also be a colleague for educators working in isolation.
Consider a simple situation: You are a science teacher who has taught a unit on photosynthesis. You are preparing the test you will give your students. There are several options for educators in this situation:
- Write the questions yourself
- “Steal” them from a colleague
- Use those provided by the textbook publisher
Of these, this best one is definitely, creating them with a colleague. You each share questions, make sure to clarify each other’s vocabulary, and bring a level of nuance to the entire set that is not there when you write them alone. In all cases, each educator chooses the questions that will be posed to their students. The problem, of course, is that educators rarely have the time to collaborate to write questions. (Perhaps if we had fewer specialists coming in to tell teacher what to do, there would be more time for meaningful collaboration, but I won’t write that.)
It is also important to realize that writing questions can and is a very time-consuming task.
Now, of course, we have AI. The same educator who once were faced with the task of writing questions alone can go to AI and ask for “50 multiple choice questions on photosynthesis for high school students” (for example) and see the results in seconds. (We can even have them formatted for easy import into the learning management system.)
The responsible educator will review the questions to make sure the answers are correct and that the are appropriate for their students. We are still the agents making the decisions about the evaluation of our students.
In this case, AI—in the absence of a trusted colleague—has helped us fill a teaching need. There is a part of me that also wants to celebrate this. Writing 50 questions on photosynthesis would take hours (especially of there were going to be prepared for use in the learning management system). This saved time and also provided more teaching tools. As a teacher, I’d probably give my students 30 questions on the test. AI generated 20 more than I need, and I can give those to my students as additional practice. When I am faced with writing the test myself, I can’t afford the time to generate extra questions.
AI can be a resource for teaching; it can be a resource for learning. The more we treat AI like a colleague and interact with it in the same way we would interact with a colleague, then better is serves teaching and learning.
Approaching AI in this manner does require we change our attitude towards it. We hear (and with good reason) about the cheating that happens with AI. Educators whose response it to avoid it and ban students from using it (they will use it anyways) and spend their energy trying to police it are hurting themselves and their students. AI is here, so we must learn to integrate it into our academic lives. AI is here, so we must help our students integrate it into the skills they develop in our classroom.
Who knows? We may find it is useful in the same way it helped the physicians we read about in Code Dependent. I have hope it will.