I just gave a #GenerativeAI workshop for some 300 high-school students in a program of Toronto's Lifelong Leadership Institute. The LLI serves the Candian Jamaican, Carribean and Black community with #education opportunities. We opened with the most meaningful #LandAcknowledgement I have ever heard (by a participant), and I got to have a spirited conversation with a group of wonderful, well informed, smart, and curious students.

Some take-aways:

We polled uptake:
- About 1/3 of students have not used #ChatGPT so far;
- About 1/3 have used it only a few times overall;
- About 1/3 use it regularly. Interesting: of those who use it regularly, the majority are frequent users, i.e. either you have not used it for some reason, or you use it a lot. Not much middle ground.

During the workshop, we focussed on the Sentient Syllabus - Three Principles for AI use in academia...

https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/just-the-basics

... and one question stood out: how can we implement the new thinking around generative AI in classroom practice? Indeed, how. We need to grow practice. I always look for a win-win angle - coercion is the wrong way, but on this topic it is particularly easy: figuring out solutions is absolutely a topic that learners and lecturers must approach shoulder to shoulder. In this case it means: "Better learning support for students, deeper questions for educators".

Of course, the question of #academicMisconduct always comes up: my mantra is "Have the AI think with you, not for you". From that perspective we can avoid making this the next battleground. Liberalize - and teach how the AI's level of performance can no longer be a passing grade. Because that quality is what your future employer gets for free.

#Plagiarism? Open it up. #Alignment? Stop thinking about controls and democratize it instead. #Bing? Yes, that psychotic episode created a foundational piece of writing. Jobs? That's on us: to educate society the value of the human touch. #Sentience? No. But #emergence! It does more than what it was trained for. The future? IDK. I really don't. But stay in control. Learn what it can do, and then determine what it should do for us (always good advice).

:-)

#SentientSyllabus #BlackEducation #HigherED

I'd like to pair this with Chalkdust's - Black Inventions. He sings about black contributions, inventions, improvements to existing inventions, firsts.

It's important that black folks see ourselves and our contributions to the world.

This performance is from 1993, but the song is from the tail end of the 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7siO1uW8690

#Trinidad #Kaiso #Calypso #Caribbean #BlackMusic #Music #Education #BlackEducation #History #BlackHistory #BlackMastodon #BlackTwitter