As AI threatens to impose itself on the very nature of human productivity in all forms, it’s good to be able to step back from the noise and hysteria and seek clarity as it pertains to our own individual contexts. One thread of clarity for me is to see AI as a tool that can create new approaches and opportunities to further embed the principles of good teaching and learning – namely, constructivist and inquiry-based.
A great way to think about AI is that it acts as An acceleration tool for learning that can jumpstart personal productivity, and this all begins with the prompt! I recently experienced this using Chat GPT as a personal assistant to help me prepare for a presentation on personalised approaches to learning English for university students in China. What I found most effective was the ability to verify and break down my ideas and content by iterating the prompts.
The importance of the prompt cannot be underestimated, in fact, it is so valued that prompt engineers can command a salary of up to @335K by doing things like training chatbots to improve their responses. If you want to bag that kind of fat salary you must be able to think, communicate and know your stuff. Essentially, the prompt engineer needs to almost know what they are looking for before they start. This requires an adept ability to iterate a prompt until the output matches the objective, after all – garbage in = garbage out!
Using the lens of the prompt engineer for learning provides us with many possibilities to develop critical thinking, where we can see through the window into what students already know and what they think they know. Thus prompting can act as a leverage point for personalising learning.
Prompting can offer a meaningful starting point to develop an understanding of AI in authentic and creative ways. As teachers, it is our responsibility to foster effective habits of learning that are holistic and intentional, so it makes sense to dig in where the rubber hits the road. In a constructivist classroom, we want to emphasize the active role of learners in constructing their own understanding of the world and encourage them through active engagement in the learning process, rather than being passive recipients of the information. For a deep dive into up-leveling your prompt craft, Tom Barrett provides a great framework called CREATE to communicate best practices and critical guidelines for educators. As a takeaway here are 5 things that convey how to develop an effective prompt…
Tips for prompting
- Be specific about what you want, and avoid ambiguity.
- Avoid politeness and unnecessary details – focus on key information.
- Use examples.
- Iterate and refine.
- Evaluate the outcome.
No doubt, AI has the potential to transform the way we teach and learn with its’ ability to analyze vast amounts of data and make complex decisions. This is clearly evident through LLM (language learning models) like Chat GPT, as it continues its journey to ubiquity – it is now possible to integrate GPT through Chrome extensions and Microsoft’s Bing has even built it into their search engine.
As often happens with technological advances, we want to run before we can walk. There is already a growing influence of YouTubers stacking up a myriad of ways to use Chat GPT in the classroom, but I see less of a critical emphasis on the fallibility and opaqueness of this new technology, like exploring the concept of bias. Therefore it’s important to maintain a critical and reflective stance as we prepare and educate learners through this new technology. I believe taking time to unpack the concept of prompting rather than brushing over it or taking cookie-cutter prompts off the shelf is one way to build meaningful engagement.
