The Successful Embrace of Technology to Date
Secondary schools have embraced technology since the early days of personal computers in a way that is pedagogically sound and grounded in ethical behaviors. Secondary school curricula have evolved along with these technologies to encompass educational best practices on conducting research, evaluating the quality of sources, and developing the critical thinking required to parse masses of information and disinformation.
Only a decade ago, with the advent of “term-paper mills,” many in our midst predicted that student research and writing would fall by the wayside, as responses to assignments could no longer be trusted. Websites like turnitin.com quickly sprang up, allowing educators to feed term papers into a database that would determine whether a paper was the student’s work or “borrowed” from another source. These sites have become increasingly sophisticated. Importantly, because students know that their teachers use these systems, most avoid falling into that trap. Plagiarism today isn’t any more prevalent than when students lifted pages from encyclopedias and National Geographic magazines in the 1950s.
Today’s Challenge
The situation today is not appreciably different from when any new technology emerged. Let us not be like the learned minds at Western Union who, in an internal memo in 1876, declared, “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
We can say that students must be encouraged to unplug and encouraged to avoid using ChatGPT and other large language models, but that’s a fool’s errand. Instead, as educational leaders, it is our job to find ways of incorporating this technology into our lessons as well as teaching the ethics, values and morals of how to best use the technology. As Carl Sagan noted, “The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.”
The best example of the impact of technology on education in Sagan’s time was the invention and introduction of the calculator. The response was quick and definitive. We could no longer “see the work,” so all of a sudden, the impetus to learn multiplication tables and formulas had to take a back seat to learning to use these new contraptions. At first, teachers bristled at the use of the calculator, but over time, they learned how to incorporate the tool so that their students could have a deeper and broader understanding of mathematics. Today, the calculator’s successor, the Excel spreadsheet, is the primary teaching tool in business schools.
Sagan was writing late in the last century, but his observation is even more true with today’s technologies. We seem to have resolved the challenge of search engines and plagiarism, but AI poses even greater challenges. ChatGPT can create writings in mere seconds—writing that often seems, on the surface, quite human and well-researched. It truly is a great leap, and it poses serious ethical and educational questions. But instead of trying to reject, ban or block access to this and other emerging AI technologies (which our “digital native” students will quickly learn to circumvent), we need to learn how to use them not only for instructional purposes but to better prepare students for the world and workplaces they eventually will inherit.
