Technolandy

Day 39 (of 2024/25) suing for grades… a blockbuster future…?

https://apple.news/AckcMyn0zTdeAEl7-Uua9Uw

I have mentioned before that I think the cell phone and its embedded tools is the disruptor that many of us have anticipated (at one point thinking it may be computers… then laptops… then tablets…but the “toolkit that fits in a pocket” sure feels like the ‘Netflix offering itself to Blockbuster moment’ that many educators are treating much as Blockbuster Video did – ignore it and hope it goes away…

One key part is the tools enabled by the cell phone evolution and how people use their tools to enhance their learning. When we focus on letter grades and %s, the story is ‘reporting achievement’ (usually compared to others) where as encapsulating student work over time and how it ends up as an artifact of learning, the focus is on the journey more than the completion – and if people are using AI… that becomes part of the story…

Or we can debate nuances and sue teachers and school about old fashioned (always unreliable and inaccurate) we think letter grades and %s worked in the “good old days” (that weren’t) and let courts decide. 

Is it plagiarism? Then we are taking the “A” away from AI… and need to reconsider our allowance of calculators in most math courses – even graphing and ‘those’ subjects… cuz it ain’t the brain doing the calculations…

I hope the family wins this case. And we rethink how we teach effective and affective use of these powerful learning tools. 

Cuz “AI detection tools” aren’t reliable; and a friend just shared how after four iterations of a document, only using AI, the detection tools saw it as human written…

One of my experiments has been to create an assignment where students can only is AI tools, and I was surprised that they rebelled – they didn’t like it because it didn’t feel like it actually represented their thoughts/voice. Mind you we tend to focus on descriptive feedback over task tabulation to reach a final grade…

Concerns over cheating ain’t new – and as long as there is a contest to reach the “high score” compared to others… it’ll happen on tests and tasks that focus on scores over learning… 

Time to edu-volve and focus on the learning rather than scores – the shift from reporting achievement to communicating learning!