Parents in rural, low-income households who maintained strong family routines reported fewer behavior problems and ADHD symptoms in their children. Starting elementary school is an important step for children, but the shift can be challenging. Some children experience separation anxiety, while others have difficulty adjusting to classroom rules and daily school structure. A Penn State-led [...]
Angry parents aren’t the only ones railing against the proliferation of AI in schools. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher’s union in the United States, has now launched a major campaign calling on schools to keep AI and hardware like iPads out of elementary classrooms.
In a buzzy speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, AFT president Randi Weingarten unveiled ten demands centered around reaffirming human-led instruction. One of the key requests: an immediate ban on AI systems in elementary school classrooms.
The AFT’s action points also included a screen ban for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, as well as a prohibition on companion chatbots for students under 16, which schools have adopted at an alarming rate.
“If we don’t find a way to call this out from an education perspective, I fear that we will lose a generation of kids,” Weingarten told the New York Times in an interview. “The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without AI.”
In her speech, Weingarten caveated that the AFT’s campaign isn’t some fanatical Butlerian Jihad. She is “not calling for a total ban on AI or a Chromebook bonfire,” but for “getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms.”
Whether the AFT is successful at achieving its demands could make a crucial difference in millions of kids’ educational journey. As tech giants push schools to adopt all kinds of AI systems, a growing body of research is showing that the risks far outweigh any benefits.
As one year-long study conducted by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education found, AI in education comes with major risk of harm to children’s cognitive and social development — a horrifying thought as an ever-growing number of kids substitute real-life friends with AI chatbots.
More on AI in education: Parents Explode in Fury at School’s Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI
The post Major Teachers Union Pleads With Elementary Schools to Stop Giving Young Kids AI appeared first on Futurism.
When it comes to AI’s place in the classroom — and its role in education broadly — some professors are at the end of their rope. The not quite all-knowing but incredibly adept at bullsh*tting chatbots let lazy students churn out entire essays, solve math problems, and cobble together passable answers for most questions. Needless to say, none of that leaves much room for actual learning.
Such desperate times call for Draconian measures. In a roundup of instructor testimonials on the AI’s impact on their profession from The New Yorker, one pedagogue is taking no prisoners when it comes to punishing pupils who surrender their brains to the tech.
“I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used — and, potentially, for the entire course, if we go through a formal appeals process,” Neal Hebert, a theatre professor at Grambling State University, wrote to the magazine.
Hebert has an even more merciless warning for theater majors.
“I tell my theatre majors, ‘I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,'” he wrote. “‘But what you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.'”
Tough love is not something Hebert undertakes with glee, but the overwhelming tide of AI cheating in his introductory classes has left him no choice, he feels.
“I’ve stopped being a collaborator in these intro courses and started being a plagiarism cop, and I do resent that a bit,” he lamented. “I wanted to be the kind of professor my professors were for me.”
Some professors try a different tack, allowing moderate experimentation with AI, and more forgiving forms of chastisement. Daniel Silver, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, framed it as a learning opportunity — for the instructors.
“AI has fundamentally changed how I teach, and it demands basic reflection about what we are trying to accomplish,” Silver told The New Yorker.
Silver said he spent a lot of time this academic year coming up with new types of assignments that call for more creative uses of AI, such as creating and experimenting with AI agents that represent famous thinkers like Adam Smith.
“Beyond that, students still would use AI in a thoughtless way, as a replacement for their thought and judgment,” Silver wrote in his testimonial. “So I made a point to just call them on it, and make them meet with me personally.”
After talking with the students, Silver would give them a zero on the offending assignment but also a chance to redo it. “They usually improved, but not always,” he said. To drive the point home, he would show them AI-generated assignments to demonstrate how the “they all kind of look the same.”
AI caused him a lot of “emotional upheaval,” Silver admitted, “but I do feel we all, including the students, are learning how to live with it, and we’ll come out better on the other side.”
Hebert is less optimistic. Whatever ounce of good-feeling he still possessed was shot down when he read his student’s papers on “Fences,” a Pulitzer-winning 1985 play by August Wilson.
“Out of forty students, the vast majority chose similar words, phrasing, and concepts, and most papers were written in that inimitable ChatGPT style: ‘This isn’t a simple story about injustice — it’s a clarion call for a positive understanding of justice,'” he wrote, comparing LLM’s prose to “elevator muzak, but in words.”
Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.
“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine.
Still, this hasn’t completely discouraged AI cheating, even in Hebert’s upper level courses. And it’s causing him to have nightmares of what the tech’s long term implications for theater as an artform will be, if students “can’t be bothered to read and think about the plays they are performing in.”
“Can you imagine AI Performing Arts Slop? The theatrical equivalent of the images ChatGPT and its competitors spit out, soulless and inert, arriving on stage stillborn?” he asked. “I can.”
More on education: Parents Explode in Fury at School’s Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI
The post Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI appeared first on Futurism.
In this competitive market, gen Z has started to turn to untraditional ways to land a job – including dating apps
Sibusisiwe Khupe, 26, entered the job market once again in September after a wave of unexpected layoffs at London marketing agency Wieden+Kennedy.
She knew landing her next full-time role was not going to be easy. Young workers have been hit hard by the weakening UK job market as vacancies fall and unemployment climbs to a five-year high.
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© Photograph: Reka Olga/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: Reka Olga/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: Reka Olga/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects
When Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State University this spring, predictions about artificial intelligence already had him questioning the value of his degree. Then a music executive started preaching about AI’s transformative power during a commencement speech.
“This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the last 10 years than in the 50 years prior … AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” said Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine. After a few stray boos from graduates, he doubled down: “Deal with it.”
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© Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
© Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
© Photograph: Steven Senne/AP
As intelligence itself becomes privatised by big tech, allowing your intellectual faculties to wither in service of inane bots seems a dangerous move
Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way.
It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.
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© Photograph: Ink Drop/Alamy
© Photograph: Ink Drop/Alamy
© Photograph: Ink Drop/Alamy
Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory
© FG Trade/Getty Images
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