Once again a friend passed along an article that's relevant to my study of education tech. This time it's from Wired Magazine.
Pippa Biddle looks into WolframAlpha, an AI system that can complete complex math calculations, and show its work. Some see it as a way to cheat, and others see its power to transform the way we think about math education. Once again, I put the issue in front of my brother. He's just graduated magna cum laude from Robert Morris University with a degree in biology, and he's headed to Ohio State for graduate work. I asked him what he thinks of tools like WolframAlpha, and he did not fail to provide more thought-fodder on the matter:
I can see how some people think this is cheating but i agree that it's probably more of a useful tool. There will always be students who plug their problems into it, copy down the answers, and don't learn anything from it. But I've been in this situation before - having problems I don't understand, a teacher who is unavailable, and a grade to secure. Very often I would run into the issue of having a type of problem that wasn't covered in class at ALL and having no idea how to approach it. This is likely just due to lazy teaching or an ineffective book or maybe I wasn't paying attention in class for a few minutes... but now I have ways to deal with that that not only get the problem done, but help me understand it. I often look up the problems and answers and when I do, I make sure I follow the steps so that I COULD answer the problem if faced with it again. This has helped me out IMMENSELY in my college courses and if it helps me understand the material then... how is that a bad thing again?Kids are smarter than they're given credit for. We find shortcuts and we use them - especially in the age of technology. There have always been students who find ways of cheating and there always will be. And even with these tools - some students, like myself, will use it to improve their education while others will use it to get by without doing any work. That's just how it is. I don't think we can shun the entire concept of getting help from technology because of this. Those students' education will suffer in the end and that will be on them.
Ben makes a strong argument for using these tools. I once watched a TED talk that featured a speaker who believed we should give elementary students calculators to solve problems which would free up more time to really practice application problems. Instead of spending a considerable amount of time teaching them the process of long divisions, they would use a calculator to solve the problem, but teachers would be able to provide a lot of additional time to work on higher level word problems. What do you think about this? How young is too young to offer these tools? I don't know....
ReplyDeleteI think there is a case to be made for giving kids tools to solve problems. I think someone who is on the "pro" side of this argument might approach it this way - do we let people pick up and use iPads without first teaching them about binary coding and the ways microprocessors are used to solve problems? Of course we do, because the technology does the hard work first so that we don't have to do it. I suppose there plenty of real life situations in which a person would still need mental math. There are situations, I guess, when a person might not have access to a calculator, and knowing these basics by heart can allow for more complex calculations to be done more easily. It's probably more important that students know how various problems work, and if they use something like WolframAlpha to see the steps, it could help them to see those steps transposed onto other problems. The bigger question is whether or not students are still learning problem solving. I'd say that in most cases, we are perfectly content to let technology do work for us without much fuss. We've outsourced our memories and knowledge to machines in so many other ways. Put it this way - does everyone learning to drive begin on a stick shift? If you're of a certain age reading this and you think to yourself "no, but they should", ask yourself why you feel that way.
DeleteTools. It takes the right tool to do the job, as an owner of a vintage car I'm sure your sometimes bloodied knuckles can attest to this - so the question is when do we introduce the tools that will help our students do the most efficient job? I agree with your brother's sentiment, those who 'cheat' will suffer more in the long run that a poor grade would hurt them in the short term, not to say that if a teacher has given explicit instructions NOT to use a certain tool and do it the old-fashioned way and they cheat, then yes they should be punished. I think it is a delicate subject that should be breached in the classroom as ethics should be considered as a part of critical thinking. You could have a whole class ethical discussion about such tools as this one, it'd be interesting to see where the students would fall.
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