Category: Discipline

The Other A.I.

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The academic community – a community to which I have belonged for decades – trades in ideas, and thinking is our currency-in-trade.

Throughout my teaching career, as I’ve offered elsewhere, I’ve devoted my practice to helping people make thinking a habit:

Thinking is the value in our ideas, and since we’re accountable by means of personal responsibility to defend these, there’s our incentive for thinking to be informed by knowledge, practised with discipline, and weighed by healthy scepticism. Discussing and testing ideas is the purview of thinking, and as such, thinking’s an invaluable skill.

Along the way, as our thinking skills mature, we yet retain at our core something personalised and uniquely individual: let’s call this integrity, which literally derives from roots that combine to mean something “untouched,” i.e. something “pure.” As puzzle pieces integrate to form a whole picture, so we might imagine all the pieces that form 'ourselves'. Full integrity finds every piece contributing, no piece erroneous or superfluous although, unlike puzzle pieces, ours we are able to enhance and improve. Distinct from “integrity the buzzword,” integrity is the character and experience to cope, or else not cope, with real consequences. Integrity is how we spot adversity, and it fuels our will to leave comfort zones in order to measure how much we’ve grown.

As a coach since 1990 and a teacher since 1999, I’ve long felt my responsibility, on behalf of people, to help players and students find ways to grow and contribute in accordance with their own integrity.

Fuel for this growth includes the earnest effort we expend in the academic setting to develop and explore imaginative, inventive, even original ideas, and then to properly credit the earlier thinkers who provided our source material. Citation is a formal way to indicate where other thinkers’ ideas ended and our ideas began. But such ‘academic integrity’ goes beyond formal citation.

Academic work is an investment – rigour now for pay-off later. Investing in the development and expression of ideas now, out of what came before, not only works the thinker’s valuable skill, it also advances the growth and maturity of broader confidence and social esteem into the future. This is one reason, from my experience, for tying student success directly to engagement with others in a classroom… p.s. that’s hardly some revelation, but it remains important enough to justify reiteration.

When I teach, I need to hear from students too, particularly in person, although whatever the case, in their own words. Of course, I also appreciate the utility of a Zoom call. But in-person contact time between students and teachers is such a precious commodity that face-to-face teaching-and-learning – for me, anyway, not sure for you – is simply irreplaceable and will never be going away… not unless we so utterly lose our broader social integrity that we just stop being human.

That said, we do manage to prove, now and again, that the pieces comprising our integrity seem to contain at least a few impurities. For instance, you may be surprised to learn how, even before the Digital Age, we found ourselves facing opportunities and enticements not only to draw upon others’ ideas, words, images, and videos but also to risk presenting these irresponsibly as our own.

These days, as we have access to scads of text and media literally in the palm of our hands, legitimate schools are left to counter our worser nature by emphasising quaint abstractions like honesty, fairness, and respect. Such schools expect students and teachers to behave as honest and responsible members of an academic community by complying with policies, regulations, and prohibitions that uphold that academic integrity thing.

One common prohibition is plagiarism, which means submitting the oral or written ideas, words, images, or videos of another person as one’s own without giving that other person proper credit or acknowledgement. Plagiarism is intellectual theft though, more simply put, plagiarism is cheating, by which I mean falsifying anything that is subject to formal evaluation or peer review. And again in my experience, I’ve found plagiarism is far more common than most students ever realise. But whether it is or isn’t tantamount to stealing or cheating, plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that we absolutely must not tolerate, much less accept. Why?

Plagiarism is a serious academic obstacle that poses significant, permanent consequences, whether detected or not. Ideas that are not one’s own must be given credit at all times – perhaps this is the fundamental precept of academics – because, without respecting this credit, any pursuit or growth or refinement of existing knowledge is fruitless, and any working of the skill of thinking utterly ceases for having no available fuel… well, apart from ‘How can I steal and get away with it?’ or maybe ‘How can I justify being lazy?’ or how about ‘How can I excel at being an ‘Enter’ button presser?’ Presenting the same or substantially the same work more than once, in the longer-term, gains us nothing beyond the muddled growth of thinking about ‘how to cheat and prosper at the same time’.

How about the uncredited use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, as in ‘Gen A.I.’ – the other A.I.… is this also plagiarism? Honestly, how can it not be? In order to draw upon what’s available, Gen A.I. scours and indexes all available ideas, words, images, and videos, and these not just from some other person but from most everybody out there who’s accessibly published on-line.

Not a search engine in sight… no people either
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This being the case, then what of any work completed with Gen A.I. – correctly cited or not… what isn’t plagiarism? Good question, one that evidently poses an inconvenient truth yet to be addressed by the euphoric mania, beyond watery defenses like “pattern matching,” “fair use,” and “non-human agency”… bullshit excuses as evasive and lazy as the humans whose use of Gen A.I. warrants all concern for academic integrity in the first place.

“Always ask when you are unsure…”

Thus far, to students who ask me, I’ve found myself able to suggest that Gen A.I. – like Wikipedia before it – makes for a poor academic resource, which is to say, “An easy place to start is rarely a good place to finish.”

Upon saying this to students, I’ve occasionally faced a reminder that the analogue world of my past experience is something to smirk at. Don’t get me wrong, we did have electricity and computers back then, but I’ll grant it was also a time when TVs received broadcast signals, telephones had a dial tone, the Commodore Amiga was cutting-edge technology, and everyone wore Lacoste. More to the point, though… back then, when the encyclopædia on your shelf was all you had, it was also your motive to visit the library, or a magazine stand, or your friendly neighbourhood teacher, who’d also done those same things.

As for those students who smirk at me today, I gather that somebody they’ve never met must have laid my past to rest on their behalf, and therefore nothing – repeat, nothing – from that past had better even try holding threat upon their attention, especially not when it can’t be accessed via smart phone.

By the same turn, I hold what seems to me a reasonable expectation on behalf of these Students of the Digital Age, namely that they appreciate their responsibility to…

  1. understand how ‘academic integrity’ applies to each activity across a program of study
  2. clarify not merely what constitutes ‘academic misconduct’ but also why its consequences threaten our whole endeavour
    • p.s. while you’re at it, also take note whether your school has any kind of “Student Declaration of Responsibility” to which you may have assented upon registration – and then, whether you find one or not, respect it anyway

I should say, I never smirk when I expect all this because, at its core, academics is about broader growth and human progress. It’s about human lives and our livelihoods underway. It’s about how well we expect to be doing once we pass things on… things like ideas and how to think them through.

And hey, if you don’t feel like this endeavour requires work compelled by sincerity and integrity, then maybe it’s time to re-think your involvement. Or maybe just get out of the business altogether because it’s every scholar’s responsibility on everyone else’s behalf to respect the principles of academic integrity, foremost by applying those principles in your own practice.

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Tech Trade-Off: III. Thinking Differently about Learning

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Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

III. Thinking Differently about Learning

Learning, the singular thing, is generally considered an accumulation of acquired knowledge. We also call it ‘information’, ‘content’, even ‘skill’ – think ‘learning’ as something contained, the only thing left but to bottle and sell it.

Sometimes, you’ll also hear the insipid head-shaker “learnings,” with that plural ‘s’ tacked on the end, which I gather means “lessons” or “wisdom.” I’ve also heard “teachings” used the same way. By this usages, we’re back to a gerunds being the-verbs-that-is-a-nouns, where “students can share their learning(s)” as they might share a refreshing cases of Pepsi-Cola.

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As for being a misconstrued process, someone might attribute to learning a ‘start’ and a ‘finish’, as if sitting down to learn were like sitting down to dine. On the grammar front, I’d simply note how this conception of learning likens the noun to another verb form: the infinitive, i.e. to learn.

Altogether, such a singular concept of learning differs from my own concept of learning… a bit like how apprehension differs from comprehension, where the one is a sense that something is the case while the other is some fuller knowledge about whatever we’re sensing. As the one is more immediate and discrete, at my fingertips, the other transcends and perdures, by contemplation.

For me, learning means something continual, if not continuous – and maybe this is just idiosyncratic to English, somebody let me know. My own conception of learning suggests dynamism, neither the stuff getting bottled nor the bottles themselves, nor even the process of getting stuff into bottles; indeed, the image of filling learners’ minds is a big no-no in education, as is delivering a lesson the way Amazon delivers packages.

How about this… after delivering my daughter to piano lessons, I enjoy a coffee at Tim Horton’s while she and her teacher share 52 keys for sixty minutes. Later on, at home, I enjoy listening while my daughter practises apart from her teacher. During all that time, though, my daughter is learning, each situation helping comprise her whole underway experience of ‘learning piano’.

In her case, that process continued over several years, and I could even imagine it might have ‘begun’, as it were, well before she ever actually sat down next to her teacher – some earlier moment when she felt that inner stirring about even ‘getting to take’ piano lessons. By contrast, once she had begun, at no point did some single ‘part-of-the-whole’ cap off ‘all-that-it-was’. That occurring dynamic, that underway-ness – that process – that, for me, is the gerund of learning.

Image Credits: Taken on Pixabay (Edited)
and Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

The gerund, please remember, is the verb-that-is-a-noun, e.g. “Learning takes time and patience.” Yet the gerund can also be part of a predicate verb construction: “I’m still learning to play golf.” This is why Martin Hall keeps devising new and inventive props and drills for practising your golf swing… although, granted, it’s a poor example for those who’ve mastered all 18 holes.

Apart from mastery, the only way I can see to curb any learning process would be some intentional notion to cease learning that particular thing, like when my daughter decided to lift no-longer-willing fingers from the keyboard. Not long after no longer apprehending 52 keys, her comprehension was finding new things to contemplate. Yet, since then, as she’s decided to play piano a little more now and again, so also has her ‘learning piano’ experience re-commenced, albeit in a less formal way.

How about this… a teacher in a classroom steps away from these students over here to visit those students over there. Unlike the piano example, where a student visits the piano teacher, a classroom teacher is the one who circulates, doing their part before stepping away to another table. Yet each time I step away from these students over here to visit those students over there, I must admit, I tend to think I’m simply closing Part I’s laundry door: sure enough, after I step away, the students over here are still chugging along, now learning in my absence, as they were earlier learning in my presence, as they were learning before I arrived.

And in a class of two or three dozen students, plus me – one teacher – I must admit that I depend on learning to be a continuous process. At my best, what I’m really doing is shepherding a process. At my worst, students are left shepherding themselves… which is totally fine if you just want to enjoy playing, but not necessarily if you want to be learning, piano.

How about this… the Solar System is a singular thing, but as a dynamic ‘system’ underway, it has many components, all moving by way of their inter-action: the Sun, each planet, all those moons, all the asteroids and comets, cosmic dust, and even people – everything with mass affecting everything else with mass, all relating continuously, endlessly, while revolving around shared centres of gravity. What better analogy for a classroom full of students and their teacher?

Now you see why teachers bargain for smaller class sizes…
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The misleading conception of learning as a singular event is as if to say, “This is Learning. He’s a gerund.” I just don’t think learning is like this. You can’t save Learning a seat, you can’t buy Learning a green fee, you can’t play Learning a nocturne, and Learning won’t be pouring you a cup of coffee tomorrow morning. Learning isn’t born to live and die because learning isn’t singular or quantifiable or determinate. More importantly, the singular notion of learning as a thing is not only misleading, it’s contrary to education and any possible meaning we might ascribe to ‘the learning process’. Yet how often does any utterance of the word denote this nuance?

Recap:

(a) In apprehending surplus time, I fear we’ve misconstrued the significance of committed time, and I think the resultant surplus mind-set owes at least some debt of thanks to our tendency for shorthanding. And I fear we’re mistaken to dismiss old-man grousing about the way things used to be. The time that has passed, where we’ve come from – going back generations, lifetimes, centuries ago – has left us readied to continue with a frame-of-mind for reduction and abstraction. Even while it’s something we’re learning, I fear it’s something we’ve learned.

(b) As a picture is worth a thousand words, so a word is worth a thousand details, and if words really do matter, so actions are apparently louder still, even when that action is underway up between our ears. As we think, so we do.

So, with a pedantic hat tip to Parts of Speech, let me suggest that we curb our shorthanding and take greater care for ourselves, by way of our thinking. Let’s curb the shorthand notion of learning as a finite event and start recalling learning – like thinking – as an underway process.

And, to be fair, if process can even approach anything like a singular thing, maybe let’s imagine it as time-lapse photography, or those Cracker Jack holograms, where you had to tip the cardboard back-and-forth to move the picture – like CGI, just way more interactive.

As for anyone still arrogant enough to say, “I’m doing the laundry” – go beat your clothes in the creek with a rock.

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