Topic 5 – My Digital Education Future (Part 1)

Experience

My experience as an educator has predominantly been for the last two and a half years, and during this time, I have mainly engaged in two areas:

Teaching middle-school mathematics
Teaching creative writing to children between the ages of 8 to 13

Interestingly, both these engagements have been possible only due to digital technology as they have all been remote classes. In a sense then, I am extremely indebted to the digital domain, as without it, I would not have pursued this direction of education or career. The video below covers the organization I worked with, where digital technology plays a key role in rural education.

Yet, having taught extensively through this medium, I am also much aware of its shortcomings and challenges. To not be able to move amongst students or hear in on small-group discussions was a significant pitfall.

In this essay, I want to reflect on what the fast-changing digital landscape could mean to my future practice. For the sake of depth, I will focus on generative AI and the teaching of creative writing.

Let’s Chat with ChatGPT

I will always remember my lecturer saying that we are the batch who walked into university without ChatGPT and will walk out of it in its presence. Indeed Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, as I write this essay, is the buzzword within education and outside.

ChatGPT was developed by OpenAl, an American company, that came up with its current version in November 2022. It is a generative AI program that was trained on large language models and can mimic human writing. Today, ChatGPT can write essays, research summaries, write medical examination, and even produce code (Rudolph et al., 2023).

As I began to familiarize myself with the program, there was a feeling of anxiety. The questions on my mind predominantly were: “Would children want to invest time in learning to write anymore?” and “Would the skill of being able to write well not be a huge asset any longer?”

*To the left is a poem written by a 8-year-old student of mine over the course of a class; to the right is a similarly themed poem written by AI in a few seconds.*

Professional concerns aside, there was a feeling of defeat initially. Whatever becomes now the worth of the earnest penner of thoughts, typing away draft after draft, hearing the rhythm of the sentence, the tone of the paragraph, the impact of the content?

(To be contd in Part 2)

Sinduja Ragunathan