showyourwork's recent activity

  1. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    I agree that you at least had to do some further modification (paraphrasing at the very least), but I do think that it still has the same long term result (no real memory retention) even if you...

    I agree that you at least had to do some further modification (paraphrasing at the very least), but I do think that it still has the same long term result (no real memory retention) even if you may remember it better in the short term.

    That last stat is actually something I am hoping that LLM's and other tools will actually help with in the long-run, though I wonder if there is going to be a change in how people write paper's to make them more accessible to AI agents. I wonder if there will be some sort of SEO-style optimization to get your research discovered by them.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    I wouldn't call it that damning. All the paper really shows is that that using ChatGPT for short-form, time-constrained writing tasks appears to reduce cognitive engagement, lower short-term...

    I wouldn't call it that damning. All the paper really shows is that that using ChatGPT for short-form, time-constrained writing tasks appears to reduce cognitive engagement, lower short-term memory recall, and diminish participants' sense of ownership over their writing. These effects were most evident when users transitioned away from AI and continued to show diminished neural activity, suggesting potential dependency on external tools.

    Which is like, no really? Anyone going through current era education industrial machines has been trained to focus on syntax and external revision giving higher scores—so banking on the tool to quickly get that done in 20 minutes makes sense. To hang a lot of this on EEG scans, which doesn't have any evidence afaik to tying to higher quality writing, seems more like someone wanted to run a cool EEG study and then picked something trendy to talk about (AI is making us more dumb!) than anything else.

    Hell, I can barely remember 90% of the essays I have ever written and that was before LLM tools became widely available. I likely wouldn't have been able to quote from any of mine in these situations either.

    I do agree that we shouldn't be introducing these tools without intentional thought and at an inappropriate time in a childs development—but the reality is that schools only see kids for 6-8 hours a day and they are going to be introduced to them anyways. I also agree that blindly copy-pasting from tools isn't going to prompt any memory retention, but neither would copy-pasting from any tool.

    I write more about it here.

  3. Comment on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task in ~tech

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    There's a lot of odd stuff about the methodology. The design of the study really gives the groups different tasks—the LLM based group more about creating and editing an essay and the other groups...

    There's a lot of odd stuff about the methodology. The design of the study really gives the groups different tasks—the LLM based group more about creating and editing an essay and the other groups more given a writing assignment due to a tool removal if anything.

    Honestly the entire idea that we can tell there is cognitive debt from assigning an SAT prompt in 20 minutes, to people who have been trained to focus on external revision in these tasks over internal, and then being surprised there were differences is a bit of a stretch. I find the paper constrains itself in its conclusions, but the rhetoric online surrounding it has misinterpreted it wildly.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on On writing, and an MIT study in ~tech

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    Can't believe I missed that, thanks.

    Can't believe I missed that, thanks.

  5. Comment on On writing, and an MIT study in ~tech

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    Last time I posted one of my articles here, I was really happy with the response and ability to engage with people through my writing. It ended with a brief comment exchange here, but I did end up...

    Last time I posted one of my articles here, I was really happy with the response and ability to engage with people through my writing. It ended with a brief comment exchange here, but I did end up getting some emails, which was nice. While I don’t post much with this account, and haven’t written in a while, I am back with some ramblings on writing and then some thoughts on the most recent MIT study about chatGPT usage and essay writing.

    In short, I did find the rhetoric around the released paper to be a bit misplaced, but have issues with the study design itself (EEG usage, task suitability, reported ownership and memory, and human consistency and bias). I am happy that they released everything so publicly, and wanted to share my thoughts.

    As always, just looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring to others.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on Some thoughts on emergent technology and the future of education in ~tech

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    Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on. The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old...

    Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on.

    The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old models in education that were already broken but were exposed. The in-class or take home essay has been a broken assessment practice for...at least two decades now. The practice ended up being more of an assessment of syntax and external revision rather than actual idea generation, evaluation, and synthesis. Teachers also all suddenly seemed to care about cheating, which has been pretty amusing overall, considering 60-70% of students were cheating before anyways and there has been no significant change since. Complete misunderstanding on why cheating happens in the first place, and a shift of blame again to try and cling to our old models.

    Your point on a "real human" selling point I do think will hold true, for now. One thing I never ended up writing in this article, as I haven't had time to really dig deep into the thought, is how much value that we place on human interaction is unique to our generations experiences? We see people moving towards AI models for companionship and therapy more and more. In 30-40 years, once people grow up with AI integrated much more closely in their lives, is the "real human" selling point still going to hold up? We may value in person interactions as I grew up in between a large technological change, but still had a childhood where technology was a specific place in my household I interacted with and could get away from. Hard to tell, but was a thought that popped in my head as I was writing.

    Thanks for engaging with the piece, and writing back.

  8. Comment on Some thoughts on emergent technology and the future of education in ~tech

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    I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account. Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more...

    I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account.

    Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more publicly. I have been trying to share my thoughts on whatever crosses my mind for tech and education on my website.

    While some of my colleagues are my readers, I have been trying to get a wider diversity of perspectives on things I write about (building an audience can be hard). I find I gain a lot of value from perspectives and fields outside of education. For example, Stronger By Science led me to a paper titled Learning vs. Performance: An Integrative Review, which led me to reading much more current research on learning than has been presented in my field at any professional development conference.

    When it comes to any emergent technology (and this piece definitely leans more to the generative AI side of things) I find that most schools are not being bold enough in how different society may look, nor are they bold enough in their usage. Most conversations simply stop at...how to use generative AI to write report card comments, change a word problem, or level a text. There is a lot more potential that I find is being left on the table, that could be genuine industry use cases such as entire VFX productions.

    I have some previous pieces that I hope people find interesting. When o1 Pro Mode was released, I took a look at it's use for Mathematics to try and find where the actual frontier of it's use was for my use case (and found it lacking for a lot in Mathematics). When I first started the website, I wrote a personal piece on AI (and I was trying to get used to writing again as I have not done so in a while).

    My next piece is likely to be focused on OpenAI's Deep Research, or talking about a responsibility to provide equity of access to AI models in schools.

    Looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring in my writing to others.

    4 votes