A Double-Edged Sword in Education: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 


Greetings everyone! I am back with another post. In our ICT course this week we were required to complete an artificial intelligence (AI) task which involves talking to dead people. It is spooky, isn't it? Once again I have paired up with, you guessed it, Ahmet Alper Aydoğdu (feel free to check out his page as well!) for the completion of the assignment. But don't be alarmed before I talk about the task.


General Information About The Task:

This week we were required to use an AI tool named "magicschool.ai" which I did not know of. In the website, there are many AI tools that can be used for specific purposes. In the assignment we were required to use a feature that allows us to communicate with an AI that can act and talk as a character (historical figures, scientists, celebrities, and so on). We were supposed to conduct an interview which consists of ten questions. For our character, we have chosen Stefan Zweig to conduct our interview project. Then, as asked, we have written a report that summarizes and evaluates the interview. Lastly, we have sent our report to a writing feedback bot, which is again an affordance of magicschool.ai, to recieve feedback in terms of coherence, correction, word usage, and so on. At the end of task procedure section, you can find our two versions of reports one of which is revised version, and also the whole transcription of the conducted interview.

Task Procedure:

Overall, we had fun using different types of AI tools that are for different purposes. However, it is also important to talk about the problems we have encountered during the task. The main problem was prompting the AI because if not prompted, this AI tool produces answers that are unreasonably long. Thus, our inital testings were resulted in failure. At the end we have managed to pull it off.


Here is the feedback that were given to our first draft of our report:

Here are our reports and the transcribed interview:


P.S. The documents above are too long to include in the post :(


Artificial Intelligence in A Pedagogical Perspective:

In the recent years, AI has emerged and its progress has been remarkably fast. Artificial intelligence, apart from other technologies, can produce human-like responses in the blink of an eye for almost any purpose. While it sounds amazing for education, it can be also very dangerous, if not utilized correctly.

Teachers' Point Of View:

As a future English teacher, I think implementation of AI in classrooms are inevitable in 21st century education. AI can be quite beneficial for language teaching especially for time-saving and individual learning. However, I think teachers must be careful to not entirely depend on AI becuase it can contain deceptive information as its data is acquired from the internet which is a place where everyone has a saying. Overall, I defend that as teachers, we must always be critical about everything in our teaching.

Students' Point Of View:

As a student, I think that AI is remarkably useful in language learning because of it's ease of use and accessability. It can provide learning oppurtunities outside of classroom for the purposes of revision and practice. However, I think that as students, we have a tendency to search for the easy way out. Therefore, if not observed carefully, students can be over-reliant on artificial intelligence, which can reduce productivity and thus, development of students.

Concluding Marks:

Overall, as a student and future English teacher, I think that the foundation of 21st century learning will be artificial intelligence in the recent years. If implemented carefully, AI can improve language learning and teaching tremendously. I also crave your opinions about our interview and the place of artificial intelligence in language teaching in general. Feel free to share your opinions in comments section down bellow. I hope you have an amazing day, and until next time!

-EA out.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Corpus-based Lesson: Authentic Language Oppurtunity!

A new way of teaching: Flipped language classroom approach!

Virtual/Augmented Reality Has A Place in Language Classrooms!