What about AI?

I think AI can be a bit overwhelming.  That is why I started this blog.  I also think I have pretty average tech skills.  The parts I know, I know really well, but mostly I know what can be done, not necessarily how to do it. I am also really good at watching YouTube tutorials.  A lot of us fall into that category.  

Well, AI is another tool in that toolbox.  The general, generative AIs, like Gemini or ChatGPT, are super easy to use and the responses are almost conversational.  When you are struggling to get Google to understand what you are asking for, try an AI.  Small bites are always good.  Instead of doing a bunch of research for my Heritage Trail windows, I asked it to name two fun things to do in every county in the Pecos Trail region.  It did exactly that.  If you want to know what they were, read VP Arca's weekly newsletter for my More than Just Books articles. 

These little things are a great way to familiarize yourself with using AI and learning all the ways they can help, without making you feel like you are cheating.

Regular readers know that I think Consensus is a great tool for college students to be guided to for research.  Recently, they added a search history page for those who are logged in when they do their searches.  I don’t know how organized you are, but I find myself doing the same searches multiple times when I am working on a big project.

For our Allied Health department, Consensus searches now support MeSh synonyms to improve the accuracy of medical queries.  Remember, all of PubMed is included in Consensus, plus many other related resources.  Now you can get it all in one place.

As most of my regular readers know, I read widely on AI subjects and very often find things I want to share.  This week's post comes from David Moldawer’s blog, The Maven Game, and his post, The Power of a Blue Book.  Very much of what he said is what I wish I had thought of myself, but like the cheating mentioned in his post, I am letting someone else do my thinking for me here. 

What we have to recognize is that students are going to use AI, they are going to use it to cheat, and the detectors we use provide so many false positives that they are almost useless. The battle against LLM abuse by students is already lost.  So what can we do instead? 

First, acknowledge the long-known fact that writing is a significant part of learning.  Creating a sentence is hard work and creating multiple sentences that go together coherently is really hard.  If we let LLMs do the writing, we are doing a disservice to them and us. 

Second, we have to acknowledge that the only solution is to write.  In the classroom, during class time, create assignments that require them to think and put it on paper.  This isn’t easy, I know.  We already have too much to cover and too little time to do it, but we also sacrifice hard assignments for simpler things that can be easily graded by Canvas.  Students need hard assignments to learn and we have to grade them. 

I thought I was doing this for my History 2321/2 classes at Dallas College.  The plan was to spend the first ten minutes of each class having the students write a summary of the readings they were supposed to have done before class.  I was a new teacher and let it go a little awry.  They would come to class with their book, reading for highlights and copying them down. At first, I let them, thinking that at least they were looking at the book.  Soon, though, I had allowed a pattern to be established and I did not know how to break it.  Grading wasn’t much work.  There was never more than half a page.  I could look at it for a few seconds and catch anything wrong.  It was pretty much a matter of ticking off the assignments as complete.  Now, if I had not allowed books, they would have had to think for themselves, they would have gotten in the habit of doing the reading before class, and the grading would not have been any harder.  Yeah, I will do that next time.  You could try it.

Consensus was great when it provided abstract information for relevant journal articles, but they have updated their access, and now you get search results that pull straight from the full text of the papers.  In some ways, this will be great.  We all know abstracts rarely provide the information you want.  With the new full-text access, you won’t have to search through a 120 page article to find the relevant parts.  Consensus does that for you.  Of course, it is only a program and is working from your prompts, so some tweaking will definitely be required.  It is also a good idea to pull the full articles to make sure the AI did not miss anything, but this is another tool that will save you enough time to make it worthwhile.