I will update this topic when we have created some of the additional resources, and once we see how the inquiry goes. In the meantime, huge thanks to the teacher who kindly allowed me to post this exchange here – and very graciously said she had had a look around the forums for something that would help with this particular inquiry and not found it, so would be happy to provide a thread that might be useful to others in the same boat.
[Teacher’s reply]
Hi Jenny,
You are an absolute life saver. Thank you so much for taking the time to think this through and come up with YouTube links etc. Sometimes it is very difficult to think outside the box when you have been teaching the same content for a number of years. The sequence of teaching you have suggested sounds perfect. I didn’t realise that the ‘connect’ part involves taught content, so that will work well. The children don’t need to learn about each one in detail. A mapping activity to locate them is all that is needed. I have some fact file sheets (p46 – 50 in the Volcano resource pack) I usually use for a scavenger hunt activity. I could print those off with some other photographs and information sheets. We do have access to the ICT room for both lessons, but as you say it can take them longer due to distractions. As far as a sheet to gather their ideas goes, it would be great to have a simple one to use. I’ll leave you in peace now. At least I now have a plan of action! Enjoy the rest of the holiday.
[My reply]
Hi,
You could – but it would be a shame to separate the last little bit from the rest of the topic. An inquiry will often involve a taught element as part of Connect, so there is no need to separate your taught element out from the rest of the inquiry, and the degree to which you provide curated resources for them to work from is up to you. Do they all need to know each volcano in the same detail? Could small groups each do one and then report back to the rest of the class? How about something like this? You could build 10 minutes into the end of each lesson for them to think about what they are going to report back and who is going to do it.Week 1:
Week 2:
Week 3: (or could do as part of week 2 if you’re really pushed?)
Week 4:
Week 5:
It may be that you don’t think that will work – it would require some books or fact sheets each lesson on each volcano for them to work from as I’m assuming you aren’t going to be in the IT room (and at this age that would probably be a distraction anyway). If you want help designing some simple FOSIL sheets for them to gather their ideas on at each Investigate stage I could probably help with that. Do you already have some case study material on the different volcanoes (maybe even in their textbooks?) that you were planning to work with? Hope that helps. Ignore me if I am overcomplicating things!
[Email from primary Geography teacher]
Hi Jenny,
Hope you are enjoying half term and so sorry to e-mail in a holiday. I am stumbling a bit with the masses of information for a Year 5 FOSIL Inquiry. We spoke about the initial question and I have taken time to look through the resources on the website, …[and this is] where I am so far….We have covered about 3 lessons as the first couple of lessons are atlas based.
I am aware that there are very few lessons left before Christmas and the following still needs to be covered.
My question to you is, if I teach for another couple of weeks and cover number 1 – 3, could number 4 be a mini inquiry of just two weeks. After finding out about a range of famous volcanos I could ask the question ‘If you had to choose a volcano to live by, which would it be?’ They would only be able to choose from the ones tudies: Mauna Loa, Etna, St Helens, Vesuvius, Popocatepetyl. I was thinking they could feed back their findings verbally as this will save time. I’m still not convinced there will be enough time to do it properly. I think next year I will have to start the topic at the start of term and give it longer than the usual 6 weeks. Any thoughts or suggestions will be gratefully received.
I’m working on these inquiries over the weekend because the week has been very busy, with Monday’s Bank Holiday, running whole staff INSET on Tuesday (as well as EPQ supervisor training), an assembly promoting our new HPQ course to Y9 (as they make choices for Y10) on Thursday, finishing preparation for a Y7 English inquiry and meeting the Y1 teacher to discuss and develop her fantastic interdisciplinary inquiry on “Who would enjoy a holiday on Guernsey?” – alongside more day-to-day Library things like starting to prepare for the Y6-7 transition days and hosting some internal exams in the Library…
The maths teacher has been working on developing the ‘numerals and counting systems circus’ for Y8 while he has been off-island this week and I’m excited to see what he produces. The books he lent me are:
Definite overkill for a Y8 inquiry (although they take me back to my own university days – my first degree was in maths) but a very interesting foundation, and they serve as a reminder that this is actually a very important area of study in maths and maths education which doesn’t often appear directly on school curricula. This isn’t just a dinky opportunity to play around after exams – it could really open up the whole area of ethnomathematics for some of these students, and rekindle an interest in maths as they begin to understand the social and cultural importance of the subject.
I also had additional inspiration for the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry because, as a direct result of our INSET presentation, we were contacted on Friday by one of our Biology teachers about developing an ecology based inquiry for all of Y7 for this time next year using the school nature trail. Seredipitously this could link directly to the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry, creating another interdisciplinary opportunity.
Now I just need to get on with planning the details…
Thanks Kay. I absolutely agree with you that school librarians are ideally placed to be at the centre of this discussion – and hopefully that that is happening in Australia. In the UK (where school librarians are not regarded as specialist teachers, there is no consensus on the qualifications they should have and in many schools they are regarded as support staff not teaching staff) it is certainly far from the case at the moment and is something we need to fight for. While I am sure there are many challenges facing of the profession in Australia too, as an international community we are so much stronger because we can learn from (and point to) best practice all over the world.
Hi Kay, thank you for your thoughtful contribution. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you to the FOSIL Group community. Please do subscribe to our all forums to receive notifications of new posts. We also look forward to meeting you in Rome.
Thanks Kay and Elizabeth for flagging Barbara Fister and Alison J. Head’s excellent article on ChatGPT.
I found myself largely in agreement with most of what they said but it did remind me of something that has been in the back of my mind for a while. In all the comparisons with Wikipedia, we need to be very careful of statements like “Even the most strident critics eventually came around. Wikipedia gained recognition in campus libraries as a tertiary source”, which imply that Wikipdedia was always fine and once we all stopped being so hysterical about it and looked at what it actually was, we realised it was actually pretty good and started to integrate it into teaching and learning. That does ignore the fact that Wikipedia got a lot better over the years.
It’s worth winding back through the ‘history’ of some of the early articles to remind ourselves of this. Even in 2008 there were long articles on important topics with just a few references – as an example, I looked through the President of the United States article history (one of the Wikipedia features I do really like):
As Fister and Head acknowledge, at a certain point scientists and academics also started to actively engage with Wikipedia to help to improve the articles.
My point is that Wikipedia has got a lot better (perhaps closer to the more traditional encyclopaedia), which is why we can now – with caveats and reservations – include it in teaching and learning to an extent that would not have been sensible for about the first ten years. It does still have serious limitations as anything other than a tertiary source. As its founder Jimmy Wales famously said in 2006 “For God [sic] sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”. For younger students (for whom citing an encyclopaedia might be appropriate) the content is just not written at an age appropriate level. In making this guide to Britannica School for a Year 7 (11-12 year olds) group this week I was reminded just how flexible and accessible it is for different age groups (click the arrows to scroll through the slides). Wikipedia does have its place, but I’m not sure how often it is actually a student’s most useful first port of call – and never their last.
I agree with Kay 100%. There is little point handwringing about how awful AI is and that it should be banned in educational settings based on how it manifests right now. It is bound to change and get better and objections based purely on how often it is wrong (which at the moment seems to be quite a lot!) will fall away. Equally it would be crazy to jump in and embrace it fully and enthusiastically without criticism, and not just because in its current incarnation it is flawed.
Kay is right that our focus needs to be on the big questions. Under the surface, the rapid evolution and adoption of AI has very serious ethical, moral, social and legal issues (and some particular ones related to largely being a proprietary technology, where corporate vested interests are always going to be an issue) which we as Librarians are ideally equipped to wrestle with. It is also likely to change the educational landscape hugely, just as the growth of the internet did. I left school just as the internet was really getting started in the mid 1990s, and my experience of education was quite different from students’ experiences today – and changes have generally been for the better I think.
I do think that discussions of Wikipedia are a distraction here (and Fister and Head point out that social media was arguably a much bigger influence in society than Wikipedia was). Wikipedia did not cause massive educational shifts because the information it carried was already ‘out there’ on the internet, it was just an (arguably for some) more convenient package. AI has the potential to cause seismic shifts because, while it is still working with information which is publicly available (as far as we know) it has the ability to endlessly synthesise and repackage that information to suit different agendas and voices. It is designed to give us what we want, even if that involves making stuff up. And what we want is not always what we need.
The challenge is going to be that this shift is likely to happen very rapidly. Almost certainly more rapidly than the original impact of the internet on education, in part because the connectivity is already there. Most people have internet enabled devices, and the vast majority of schools in the developed world certainly do. AI is, on the surface, fairly intuitive so everyone can have a go – and children are notoriously good and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies but, as any Librarian teaching search skills and source evaluation will tell you, they are generally not nearly as good as they think they are.
So if we have big questions to address about how AI will impact education and how we need to adapt to prepare children for an increasingly AI integrated world (with all the many complex issues that brings), then we need to act quickly. This is a debate about education and society, not about one particular technology or manifestation of that, and Librarians need to push to get a seat at the table, both as educational leaders plan for the future of education, and as leaders more broadly plan and legislate for the future of society. We absolutely need to be part of those conversations in our schools, with leaders, teachers and students (neither as doomsayers or cheerleaders but as voices of reason!). But we need to think beyond that as well.
I was powerfully reminded of that this morning when I woke up to an article in The Times entitled “AI ‘is clear and present danger to education’: School leaders announce joint response to tech“, which announced that a group of educational leaders led by Dr Anthony Seldon (historian and author, currently head of Epsom College, and formerly Brighton and Wellington Colleges) wrote a letter to The Times stating that:
“AI is moving far too quickly for the government or parliament alone to provide the real-time advice schools need. We are thus announcing today our own cross-sector body composed of leading teachers in our schools, guided by a panel of independent digital and AI experts. The group will create a website led by heads of science or digital at 15 state and private schools. It will offer guidance on the latest developments in AI and what schools should use and avoid.”
It really struck me that Librarians are not mentioned at all here (school librarians in the UK are not viewed as specialist teachers, so would not be included in the phrase ‘leading teachers’ as they might be overseas), and we need to be pushing for a voice in projects like this. This is the task, and we need to set our sights high. We absolutely need to be part of those conversations in our schools, and I’ve heard some wonderful stories of school librarians using the opportunities provided by a new technology that has unsettled some in their schools to get out into classrooms to offer their expertise. But that is not enough. AI has some serious and disturbing implications (as well as exciting opportunities) for education and for society and we need to explore these fully, take an informed position and make our voices heard as educators AND information professionals before others shape the future for us, and we are left on the sidelines, trying to justify our place in the new educational landscape rather than being part of shaping it.
The Campaigns
Note that in this and following posts I will share some photos of students and examples of their work. I do have permission from their parents for this. Please do not share such images on this forum without parental permission.
The final unit of this inquiry, after the Science experiments and the water bottle covers, was for Year 6 to design and run campaigns within the school, either to reduce the use of single-use plastics or to promote the drinking of healthy amounts of water (both original aims of the inquiry, tying in with the water bottle covers). When I first proposed this unit (which wasn’t part of the original plan) it was because I was concerned that the inquiry so far had not met these CREST criteria:
1.3 You have identified a range of approaches to the project
1.4 You have described your plan for the project and why you chose that approach
3.1 You have…explained implications for the wider world
Due to their age and unfamiliarity with the Science equipment, we did not give Y6 as much autonomy in the Science stage of the project as we might have done for Y7 so they needed a further opportunity to display their planning skills and project management skills.
However, what started as an attempt to make sure the criteria were fully met became a key part of the inquiry, and one of the most memorable for the students. We started by getting students into small groups to come up with ideas for different sorts of campaigns they could run. They then needed to consider the pros and cons of each and choose one to go ahead with.
This led to a diverse range of authentic products with authentic audiences, and allowed students to choose products that they were excited about. One teacher commented to me at the end that she had tried getting students to do individual presentations to other classes in her subject, but a few of them found it so stressful that they wouldn’t come to school on the day of the presentations. We had no issues with this (even though some were understandably anxious), in part because the students worked in groups, but also because those who had great anxiety about presentations chose to express themselves in different ways.
In the end we had:
It was amazing how an authentic product and audience really helped the students to take themselves and their work seriously. I spent a number of lunchtimes rehearsing presentations with small groups who were keen to refine and improve them before presenting to their target audience. I think it was probably the first time ever for some of the less able and engaged students that they had volunteered to stay in at lunchtime to get feedback on their work and improve it! The assembly group were even prepared to stay after school to rehearse because it was the only time that we could access the main hall to practise with the microphones.
While the campaigns were a great success, there are three things in particular I would improve for next year.
I will upload editable copies of the graphic organisers shown in this post to the Resources section over the next few days, and link them into this post.
Although I do have improvements I would make next year, I was really pleased with the outcomes of the campaigns unit and felt that the students learnt a fair bit about their topics and about creating authentic products that they were proud of, and also really developed their ICT skills (as we delivered a part of this unit through ICT lessons and focussed on using Office 365 packages collaboratively to create effective presentations and posters).
I was just listening to a fascinating programme on ChatGPT on BBC Radio 4 – Word of mouth: Chatbots. Really interesting conversation between Michael Rosen (multi award winning children’s author, poet, performer, broadcaster and scriptwriter) and “Emily M Bender, Professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of the infamous paper ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots’”. The segment I am listening to right now is on inbuilt bias in AI. Given Jeri’s concerns on Elizabeth’s pocast about Google Bard recommending Reddit as a source, I was startled to hear from Professor Bender that ChatGPT was trained by looking at sites linked by Reddit users (because that was the easiest way to get a lot of data where real humans link to a diverse range of topics). The whole episode is worth listening to, but that fact jumped out at me. I wonder whether that changes anyone’s view of the output of ChatGPT?
[Note that a quick websearch suggests that ChatGPT-2 was largely trained on sites suggested on Reddit, but -3 had significant additions to that training data (including the English Language version of Wikipedia). The training sources for -4 have not been revealed as far as I can tell. I haven’t found a suitably reputable source to link for this information, but have seen it on a number of different websites – if anyone has a good source for this, do post below. I did find this article from the Washington Post about Google’s AI dataset, which didn’t fill me with confidence about that either…]
Professor Bender also says “I like to talk about the output [of AI chatbots] as ‘non-information’. It is not truth and not lie….but even ‘non-information’ pollutes our information ecosystem.”
Two apologies – first that it has taken me a while to post because I have been unwell, and second that because it has taken me so long I have done an awful lot of thinking, so this has become a very long post!
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about this topic recently – thanks Elizabeth for the interesting podcast link[i] (I’ve listened to that twice now!), and Darryl for the rather disturbing articles. I must preface my thoughts by making it clear that I am not a Luddite. I left school at the point the world wide web was really taking off – email was a flashy new technology that I first encountered at university (which makes me seem very old to the children I teach – maybe I am!). But this has changed education for the better. Children (and adults) now are free to pursue their interests and teach themselves about topics that fascinate them to a level that was just impossible for previous generations. That very freedom brings a dizzying array of choices, some of which are more productive and some more ethical than others. Our role as librarians has changed subtly over the years from gatekeeper and curator of scarce resources to expert guide to overabundant resources – but is still just as important as it was, if not more so. I should also mention that although I refer to ChatGPT explicitly because a lot has already been written about it, much of my thinking applies to other AIs such as Google Bard and Bing’s AI.
I was fascinated by Elizabeth Hutchison, John Royce, Jeri Hurd, Susan Merrick and Sabrina Cox’s discussion. It was helpful to hear five information professionals who have been actively exploring this area reflecting on their experiences. I must confess that while I have been following the story carefully, I have not yet signed up to ChatGPT – largely because I have real data privacy concerns about giving my personal phone number to a company that has already used personal data is a way that is so ethically questionable that a few countries are banning it outright[ii] (although Italy has revised that decision[iii] now that Open AI has put some extra privacy features in place). I can see why they might want my email address. I cannot fathom an ethical reason why they need my phone number, and until I understand that I don’t want to give it to them. I will also not be setting any assignments that require my students to sign up. This interesting article highlights some of these concerns: ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you’ve ever posted online, you ought to be concerned[iv].
Beyond that, I think there are educational opportunities and also very serious educational concerns (beyond the obvious one of children getting chat GPT to do their homework for them).
In-built racism (and other forms of discrimination)
Jeri raised the important point in the podcast that the plagiarism checkers that have sprung up to spot AI generated work are much more likely to produce false positives for second language learners because their writing is less ‘natural’ and more like an AI. Unlike with previous plagiarism checkers (where you could often compare the work and the original sources side by side if necessary), it is impossible to prove either way whether a piece of work is AI generated because the answers are ephemeral. This seems to stack the odds against non-native speakers. There are also plenty of issues with the secrecy around the training material. It is already widely recognised that there the training sets used for facial recognition software led to inherent racism in the products and their use[v], without some scrutiny of the training material for AI systems, there is a strong likelihood and a fair amount of evidence already of inherent bias (see, for example the answer to Steven T. Piantadosi’s question[vi] about how to decide whether someone would make a good scientist).
None of this would matter so much if it was just an interesting ‘toy’, but early indications as far as I can see are that it is being adopted unquestioningly and enthusiastically in a wide range of areas at an alarming rate.[vii]. We absolutely need to be educating our students about the moral and ethical issues involved and explaining the potential real world consequences – this is NOT just about them cheating in homework assignments or even coursework. The challenge is that it is hugely attractive in a wide range of applications because it offers easy but deeply flawed solutions.
Source credibility and downright lies!
In the podcast Susan describes asking ChatGPT and Google Bard to recommend fantasy series for a children aged 11-18 from 2015 –202 and to produce book blurbs for a display. It was astonishing to hear that ChatGPT made every single one of the book recommendations up (less astonishing to hear that the book summaries were poor). But how did Susan know this? Because she is an experienced Librarian who explored the book recommendations and quickly discovered they were fake, and who had read the books so knew the summaries/ recommendations were poor. She was starting from a position of knowledge. Our children are usually starting from a position of relative ignorance about their topic and are much less likely to spot the blatant lies (sorry – I believe technical specialists prefer the term ‘hallucinations’).
Even the CEO of Open AI said on Twitter[viii] in December 2022 that “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
As EPQ co-ordinator (as well as further down the school) an important part of my job is teaching students to evaluate their sources – to look at where their information has come from, whether the sources are trustworthy for factual accuracy and what their bias is likely to be.
Chat GPT blows this out of the water.
It does not reveal it’s sources (and even if you ask it to, it is likely to make them up[ix]). So a student (or anyone else) getting information from ChatGPT cannot evaluate their sources for accuracy and bias because they have no idea what they are. Even worse, ChatGPT is very plausible but often just plain wrong. You cannot actually rely on anything that it tells you. If you need to verify everything it says (which I am not sure many students would do in reality) then I don’t see how it saves any time at all. It is a great deal worse than Wikipedia (which can – sometimes – be a helpful starting point, if only because it directs you to external sources which you might then be able to visit and use).
It plagiarises pretty much all its content
There has been a lot of talk about plagiarism by students and plagiarism detection (an arms race that I am not sure we can win), but rather less about plagiarism by ChatGPT itself. Noam Chomsky got a fair amount of press attention recently when he said that ChatGPT is “basically high-tech plagiarism”[x]. Now, although Professor Chomsky is an exceptionally experienced and highly respected educational thinker and linguist, a 94 year old may not be the first person you would turn to for opinions on emerging technologies. He is, however, spot on. ChatGPT takes information from unknown sources and presents it as its own work. And even when asked it is often unable to cite all (or even any) of its sources with any accuracy. How is that not plagiarism? How can we direct students to use a source that is itself so unethical? While I am a big fan of the IBO in many areas, I did find it hugely depressing that they are suggesting that ChatGPT should be a citable source in coursework[xi]. Of course, if you use a source you must cite it, but I think it is important to provide context (such as they might with Wikipedia) about what circumstances (if any) might make this an appropriate source to cite (e.g., if you were writing an essay ABOUT ChatGTP, perhaps).
To me citing an AI such as ChatGPT feels like citing ‘Google’ as a source. It isn’t a source. It is essentially a highly sophisticated search engine. You might as well cite ‘the Library’ or ‘Amazon’ as your source. It doesn’t tell your reader anything about the actual provenance of the information which, surely, is the main point of source citation. Having read the actual statement from the IB[xii] (and associated blog post[xiii]) on this, however, I understand the sentiment behind it. Better to find a legitimate way to allow students to acknowledge use of a new technology than to ban it, which is likely to mean they will just use it without acknowledgement.
Note that even where AI’s do cite actual sources, their lack of ability to actually understand them means that it is easy to cite them out of context – as in this hilariously depressing example[xiv] where Bing’s AI cited Google’s Bard as it erroneously claimed it had itself already been shut down.
It stunts thinking
Our SLS recently produced a very interesting infographic on ChatGPT based on Jeri Hurd’s work. I’m very grateful to them and her for the effort – I haven’t had time to produce anything similar – but I don’t feel I can use it because it is so overwhelmingly positive about ChatGPT and (as you can tell) I don’t feel that way. One of the suggestions is to ask it to produce an essay plan/ outline for you. Now, it may depend exactly what is meant by that, but as a bare statement I find it very uncomfortable. An essay plan, produced at the Construct stage, is a very personal path through your own journey from information to knowledge. It is your chance to pull together all the ideas you have discovered into something that is meaningful and coherent to you and to others. It is, in many ways, more important than the essay (or other product) itself.
If you outsource this thinking, you might as well not bother. As an educator I don’t want to know what ChatGTP ‘thinks’, I want to know what YOU think. There many other subtle and not so subtle ways in which AI tempts students because it will do their thinking for them (I was shown an ad on my Duolinguo app the other day, proudly telling me that I never needed to write an essay again if I downloaded a particular AI app). In Chomsky’s interview with EduKitchen[xv] he says that he does not feel that he would have had a problem with ChatGPT plagiarism with his students at MIT because they wanted the LEARN so they wouldn’t have touched it – he describes AI systems like ChatGPT as “a way of avoiding learning”.
It potentially ‘blocks the way of inquiry’
Many have suggested that the rise of AI such as ChatGTP will spell the end for coursework and make exams paramount again[xvi]. Now it is important to make it VERY clear that inquiry is not all about coursework – some of the richest experience I have had with inquiry have been preparing students for A-level exams. The potential demise of coursework would not reduce the importance of inquiry as an educational tool, but it would make it harder for it to get a foothold in an educational system already biased towards instructionist methods. At the moment skills lessons for coursework are a helpful way in for many librarians to forge new relationships with curricular colleagues and demonstrate what they can offer. With this avenue potentially closing, we as a profession will need to get more creative!
The other suggestion from the podcast that filled me with dismay was the suggestion that essays (including perhaps something like the Extended Essay) could be replaced by being given the draft of an essay and being asked to write the prompt to fix what was wrong with it. As one teaching tool among many, I can see how that could be useful, alongside comparing AI written sources with human written ones, but not to replace essay writing and inquiry themselves. The EE can be a life-changing experience of inquiry for some students, allowing them (often for the first time) to immerse themselves in pursuing their own lines of inquiry on a topic important to them over an extended period of time to produce something new and original. The magic of this would be completely lost if it was only about writing good questions or only about evaluating and improving AI answers to someone else’s question. Extended inquiry definitely still has a vital place – but we do have to work out how AI changes the landscape and how to work with new technologies without destroying what we had. One possible option is robust vivas (or presentations as is the case in the EPQ) accompanying all coursework submissions to make it clear which students actually understand their topics and which do not. But this is very staff and time intensive so I can’t see it catching on wholesale beyond the EE and EPQ.
Of course, there are some amazing inquiry opportunities investigating the technology itself, looking at what it can and can’t do, ethics and potential future uses and, as Jeri found, real opportunities for librarians to take a lead in the schools in terms of how to deal with this new reality. As long as ‘taking the lead’ doesn’t equate to cheerleading for it. I’m also quite interested in the idea of encouraging older students to ask it their inquiry questions and to critique the answers it gives – although I would rather they did that towards the end of their inquiries than at the beginning because I think this is best done from a position of knowledge than relative ignorance. I’d also have to choose an AI that I had fewer data privacy concerns about than ChatGPT, and use it as an opportunity to explore my other ethical concerns with students.
Digital divide
Alongside issues of inherent bias in the systems themselves, I do worry about overenthusiastic adoption of AI in education exacerbating the current digital divide. If AI becomes part of assessment (e.g., students being assessed on how well the write prompts, being allowed or even encouraged to use it in coursework etc.) then it does cause issues for those with less ready access to technology at home who have less opportunity to practice. In one sense this is an argument for using and teaching with AI in school to make sure everyone has some degree of access, but making it an inherent part of assessment has issues. Particularly also because there are already early steps to monetise access[xvii], which is not unreasonable because it is very costly to produce and run, but will create a two tier system. Perhaps it won’t be long before we start seeing ‘institutional access’ options for AI, alongside our existing databases…
So what can it and can’t helpfully do?
One of the most balanced analyses I have come across – neither enthusiastically pro or rabidly anti – is from Duke University in North Carolina. The full article[xviii] is definitely worth reading, but the summary of their suggestions is that ChatGPT could be good for:
They suggest that it is NOT appropriate for:
So what do WE do?
Inquiry should be a journey of discovery towards an answer that is personally important and meaningful. I also wholeheartedly agree with Noam Chomsky when he says ‘That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is “a sign that the educational system is failing.” If it “has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,”[xx]‘. If our inquiries are engaging and personal enough then students won’t want ChatGTP’s answers, they will want their own. But once again the bar has been raised for us – the fact that students have this option doesn’t mean we need to find better ways to catch them using it, or encourage them to use it because we know we can’t stop them, but that we need to raise our game again and make learning experiences increasingly meaningful to our students. It is also an opportunity for us as librarians, who are actively wrestling with these issues, to earn ourselves a position at the centre of this debate in our schools, as Jeri discussed doing so successfully on the podcast.
Bibliography
[i] Hutchinson E., Cox, S. (hosts). (2023, March 8). Empowering Learning Through ChatGPT and AI: Insights from School Librarians. [Audio podcast episode]. In School Library Podcast. https://ehutchinson44.podbean.com/
[ii] Pollina, E. & Mukherjee, S. (2023, March 3) Italy curbs ChatGPT, starts probe over privacy concerns. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-data-protection-agency-opens-chatgpt-probe-privacy-concerns-2023-03-31/
[iii] McCallum, S. (2023, April 29) ChatGPT accessible again in Italy. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65431914
[iv] The Conversation. (2023, February 18). ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you’ve ever posted online, you ought to be concerned. https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-is-a-data-privacy-nightmare-if-youve-ever-posted-online-you-ought-to-be-concerned-199283
[v] Najibi, A. (2020, October 24). Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology. Science in the News. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/
[vi] Vock, I. (2022, December 9). ChatGPT proves that AI still has a racism problem. The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/12/chatgpt-shows-ai-racism-problem
[vii] Jimenez, K. (2023, March 1). ChatGPT in the classroom: Here’s what teachers and students are saying. USA Today. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/03/01/what-teachers-students-saying-ai-chatgpt-use-classrooms/11340040002/
[viii] Pitt, S. (2022, December 15). Google vs. ChatGPT: Here’s what happened when I swapped services for a day. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/15/google-vs-chatgpt-what-happened-when-i-swapped-services-for-a-day.html
[ix] Welborn, A. (2023, March 9). ChatGPT and Fake Citations. Duke University Libraries. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/03/09/chatgpt-and-fake-citations/
[x] Open Culture. (2023, February 10). Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s “Basically High-Tech Plagiarism” and “a Way of Avoiding Learning”. https://www.openculture.com/2023/02/noam-chomsky-on-chatgpt.html
[xi] Milmo, D. (2023, February 27). ChatGPT allowed in International Baccalaureate essays . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/chatgpt-allowed-international-baccalaureate-essays-chatbot
[xii] International Baccalaureate Organisation. (2023, March 1). Statement from the IB about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence in assessment and education. https://www.ibo.org/news/news-about-the-ib/statement-from-the-ib-about-chatgpt-and-artificial-intelligence-in-assessment-and-education/
[xiii] International Baccalaureate Organisation. (2023, February 27). Artificial intelligence in IB assessment and education: a crisis or an opportunity? https://blogs.ibo.org/2023/02/27/artificial-intelligence-ai-in-ib-assessment-and-education-a-crisis-or-an-opportunity/
[xiv] Vincent, J. (2023, March 22). Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23651564/google-microsoft-bard-bing-chatbots-misinformation
[xv] Chomsky, N. (2023, January 20). Chomsky on ChatGPT, Education, Russia and the unvaccinated. Edukitchen . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgxzcOugvEI
[xvi] Acres, T. (2023, April 21). ChatGPT will make marking coursework ‘virtually impossible’ and shows exams ‘more important than ever’. Sky News. https://news.sky.com/story/chatgpt-will-make-marking-coursework-virtually-impossible-and-shows-exams-more-important-than-ever-12861767
[xvii] Nolan, B. (2023, March 16). OpenAI’s new GPT-4 is available for ChatGPT Plus users to try out. Here are the differences between the free and paid versions of ChatGPT. Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-plus-free-openai-paid-version-chatbot-2023-2?op=1
[xviii] Welborn, A. (2023, March 9). ChatGPT and Fake Citations. Duke University Libraries. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/03/09/chatgpt-and-fake-citations/
[xix] Miller, M. (n.d.). How to define “cheating” and “plagiarism” with AI. DitchThatTextBook. https://ditchthattextbook.com/ai/#tve-jump-18606008967
[xx] Open Culture. (2023, February 10). Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s “Basically High-Tech Plagiarism” and “a Way of Avoiding Learning”. https://www.openculture.com/2023/02/noam-chomsky-on-chatgpt.html
So, what does that look like in practice? This year, alongside our ‘full inquiry’ work, I have been invited in to teach Year 13 English students about citing and referencing, and to help Year 13 French students understand how to locate sources to prepare for their research based A-level speaking assessment. Last year we also offered two sessions for Year 13 History students on finding resources for their historical investigation Non Examined Assessment, and on citing and referencing – the only reason we haven’t done that this year is that the student concerned was one of my EPQ students, so having completed that she did not need extra ‘skills’ instruction.
To give you an idea what that looks like in practice, here are the presentations I used:
The English groups are taught this year by our Director of Studies, who is an astonishingly talented teacher and manager. As far as I am aware, she began her own journey with inquiry eighteen months ago when she joined Blanchelande at the same time that we moved here. Although my only involvement with the Year 13 English coursework this year was this one session, I am hopeful that we might have more involvement next year. However, out of the relationship that we have built with her over the last two years, two weeks ago she suddenly presented me with an inquiry she had designed by herself for her Year 10 students and asked for my input. She had done an amazing job, but was also very happy to accept my advice for changes that would make it better. She then ran the inquiry entirely by herself – although I saw much of it in progress and she was very happy for me to attend the final presentations. I will post on this separately elsewhere because the inquiry is worth its own thread.
My point, however, is for us not to despise the day of small beginnings as we never know where they will lead.
[Aside: I could feel threatened that this teacher can now design and run an excellent inquiry all by herself, with minimal support from me. I’m actually delighted because it shows that what we are doing is working, and that it has a future that does not depend on us. It also gives me more time to work with other teachers who may need my help more, and to support her on other occasions when she may not have the time or the expertise she needs.]
Hi Elizabeth and Ruth. Darryl has provided an excellent response on both a theoretical, developmental level and a broad ‘big picture’ view, which I don’t need to add to. I wanted to provide a social/emotional angle and a practical example. You have both been on this journey for a long time and are very good at what you do, so I am sure you already know much of what I am going to say below, so I am in part speaking to other readers who have less experience.
On this forum we all tend to share the very best of what we do. Our time is limited, so if we only have time for one post we tend to go for the whole inquiries that really move things forward in our schools. It is important to note that this isn’t all we do though – and even more important not to feel guilty about that or to feel that those times when we are invited in to deliver one isolated session, perhaps for students conducting a coursework inquiry, are somehow less important.
What differentiates a librarian with a concern for inquiry from one whose main focus is on the stuff that they do, whether that be information literacy, reading for pleasure, or any of our other very important functions in isolation, is stance. An inquiry librarian adopts, promotes and facilitates “a stance of wonder and puzzlement that gives rise to a dynamic process of coming to know and understand the world and ourselves in it as the basis of responsible participation in community” Stripling and Toerien (2021), enlarged from the GEN definition. This pervades all that we do – whether that is full inquiries, isolated ‘information literacy skills’ sessions, reading lessons, schemes and promotions, displays or lunchtime activities. Inquiry is not just something we do, it is fundamentally about who we are, how we view the world and what we regard our educational mission to be.
Having said all that, there are many reasons why we should be excited rather than disappointed by an invitation to deliver what we might previously have regarded as an information literacy session. The teacher has invited us into their inquiry, whether they recognise it as such or not, because they believe we have something important to offer the students. This is now an opportunity to:
Hi Lee. It’s a great question, coming as it does from your years of experience of inquiry. It took me a while when I first started with FOSIL to really understand and appreciate the power of the Connect stage. Largely I think because I did not engage as fully as I should have done with the skills and skill sets at the start of my journey with FOSIL, and so did not really appreciate that Connect encompasses the background reading and research that allows that move from general to specific resources and from relevant to pertinent information. Darryl has gone into this in some detail above so I don’t need to revisit it, however I did just want to share some of my journey with the Extended Project Qualification taught course that has a bearing on this. The EPQ is an inquiry-based school leaving qualification equivalent to half an A-level, taken by students in their last two years of school (aged 17-18). It is a 120 hour inquiry project (30 hour taught course plus 90 independent hours) on any topic of the students’ choice. The outcome is either a 5,000 word research report or an artefact accompanied by a research report of at least 1,000 words. More info here. So it is a substantial piece of work.
I think the confusion with Connect comes with much simpler projects with younger students, where the early stages can be a little more truncated if there are time constraints. Where everyone is largely pursuing the same topic from a range of different angles it is possible to connect with a topic through group discussion around simple stimulus resources, gathering keywords and questions together over a relatively short period. For more complex work with older students this is not possible and it is important to give the time and support they need to move from the general to the specific.
There is huge flexibility in the EPQ taught course – although there is guidance, the only firm stipulation is that it should be around thirty hours. In my EPQ taught course we spend six of the thirty teaching hours early in the course working on Connect. You can see my new medium term plan (scheme of work) for this year in this post. The plan both explains what is taught when, and lists the skills being taught and practised at each stage. As you know from your experience with Guided Inquiry, it is so important not to stint on this stage, particularly when students have a great deal of choice and freedom in their topic. Our students sign up for the EPQ in mid October and do not put in their research proposal, with a working question and a few initial resources, until mid January – so Connect and Wonder together last about three months (of a one year course).
Something I have done very intentionally this year, because I felt I was not clear enough last year (in my first year of teaching the EPQ), is to talk explictly with students about the different ways they will use resources in Connect and Investigate, and to introduce them to different types of source at these different stages. This is a slide from one of my lessons early on:
I’m sure this will be very familiar to you and that you did a similar thing in Guided Inquiry, but I just wanted to show that this very much has a place in FOSIL. I am also sure that I could do this better, and appreciate any suggestions!
I have noticed that the extra direction in my lessons at the two different stages has increased my students’ confidence with using resources this year and that they are making a much smoother transition from relevant to pertinent sources.
Finally, I would agree with Darryl that reflection is embedded at all stages of the FOSIL cycle (the resource ‘Inquiry as stance and process‘ from our Resources bank makes that very clear. See image below.). However it is particularly important at the end of an inquiry to spend time looking back holistically at everything you have done (product and process), what you have learnt, where that might take you next and how you will do even better next time. The Reflect stage captures this and (although it is often neglected) is very important and can be very powerful.
Thanks Elizabeth – you’ve got my weekend reading sorted! I’m looking forward to having a look through these resources and listening to your podcasts. I would also direct people to John Royce‘s exceptionally well-researched and thoughtful blog posts on his Honesty, Honestly blog:
I have a huge amount of respect for John Royce (as I do for you) as a very experienced and thoughtful IB Librarian trainer, and he researches his articles incredibly thoroughly. I actually use his article The integrity of integrity as one of my sources when I teach citing and referencing to Year 12 and 13 students in the hope that they will also engage with the content!
Reflecting
We spent some time before half term reflecting on progress. This is another important element of the CREST Award – and it was great to be forced to make time to do this properly. Reflection can often be rushed at the end of a project, whereas here we had the opportunity to reflect at a mid-stage, both on the product and the learning. One of the English teachers commented to me how valuable it was to have spent a whole lesson reflecting on the half-term’s work, as that was not something students usually had much time to do, particularly in such a structured way.
I made a graphic organiser to encourage them to consider how they overcame problems that they came across, what decisions they had made, what they had learnt and what they would change. You can download an editable (PPT) copy here. Note that the pale grey numbers refer to CREST Award criteria.
Over half-term, I reviewed all the work they had produced and made notes (in an Excel spreadsheet) of any gaps that particular students had, or sections they needed to improve. Then I MailMerged this into a single page Word document for each student (see example below). My spreadsheet means that I have a central record of how every student is getting on, but the MailMerge meant that I was then able to give each student their printed feedback. They then spent a lesson, with guidance from me and the English teacher, reviewing their work, filling in the gaps and improving it. The teachers both commented what a valuable exercise this was, as often (particularly at this age) when students have missed something they will just need to move on with the rest of the class. One of the teachers also mentioned how doing it this way really built the students’ independence, because it allowed them to see exactly what they needed to do and to work through it by themselves. Both classes had a very productive lesson, and there was a strong sense of pride in completing this stage of their projects well. This type of marking was very time-consuming (for 44 students), but I feel it was worth it to make sure they all knew what they needed to be working on individually.
Next week we will be moving on to designing the campaign for reducing the use of single use plastics in the school – so back to Connect!