I just completed reading (listening in my car) the book, Coddling of the American Mind. If I were physically reading it, I would have said that it was “hard to put down”. This book has grand implications about our youth and the future of our society. The authors of this book argue that uninviting and not including controversial speakers on many college campuses is causing long-term harm to young adults. This is not the only focus of this book, but it is a big one. 

This book argues for a screentime limit for youth to be less than two hours a day. According to research, two hours or less of screentime does not seem to have any negative implications for mental health. This book discusses other things that may be causing mental health issues in our youth. The book does touch on the effects of social media, the mental health of girls and how suicide rates have increased. Social media is not the focus of this blog post. 

According to research, “over-parenting” is not allowing children to make as many real-world mistakes as parents who raise their children as “free range” kids. The idea of parents protecting their kids has been around forever and is very well intentioned. The authors introduce the concept of “Safetyism,” which is the opposite of “free range parenting”. "Safetyism" is used to describe an approach to parenting that prioritizes protecting children from any potential harm or discomfort, often resulting in over-protectiveness and avoidance of challenging or risky experiences. The authors argue that this approach, while well-intentioned, may have unintended consequences, such as inhibiting the development of resilience and autonomy in children.

Have you ever heard of Lenore Skenazy? She is the mother who lives in New York City and in 2008, after her son begged her for days, to let him take the city subway and bus home from Bloomingdales. When he got home, he was “ecstatic with independence”. He was 11 years old at the time. Lenore goes on to say that crime is down to 1963 levels and protecting a child from an abduction is like trying to protect them from getting struck by lightning. She goes on to say that parents are so wrapped with anxiety that, “we become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.” Skenazy goes on to say that raising children has gone from “Laissez Faire” to over-parenting to the point of, "keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”

What can we do as educators? We must do what is right for children. We need to be thoughtful about our use of technology. If research shows that two hours or less of screen time has no mental health effects on students, then we must be thoughtful about how we use technology in schools, and we should not go over 2 hours of screentime a day.

            The authors of Coddling of the American Mind go on to suggest that students need less supervision, not more. Some schools in Scandinavia allow students to have unsupervised recess. If I look back to my previous teaching experience, less than a year ago, the idea of unsupervised recess scares the crap out of me, especially if I was the administrator recommending it for the betterment of our students’ mental health.

 Our schools may not be ready for unsupervised recess, but we should work hard to instruct students in inter and intra respect for one another. If these lessons are learned, the concept of unsupervised recess could be a reality and another step in helping students foster personal growth and resilience. If we keep telling kids (by our over-supervision) that they cannot do anything on their own, they will believe it and not be able to accomplish even the simplest tasks that society requires.

Citations

Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.

Skenazy, L. (2008, April 6). Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone. Free-Range Kids. https://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-the-subway-alone/

The SAMR model by Dr. Rubin Puentedura is one of the latest Tech Hierarchy models. It has been around since 2010 and I may have written about this before on my blog. I’ll have to check. SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. Watching this video or reading this article will give you the gist on the SAMR model.

Teachers can use this model to question their technology practices in the classroom. If a teacher is overly reliant on substitution a few things could be happening. The teacher may does not have much technology at the fingertips of their students. Or most of the teacher’s lessons are very traditional. Or the teacher does not have a lot of time to conjure up creative ways to use technology. It could be a combination of all three of the previous issues.

The article linked above tries to emphasize that the SAMR model is not a “ladder to be climbed,” but to match the right level/tool for the job. If teachers are having trouble getting their students engaged, then trying to apply some “modification” or “redefinition” technologies to your classroom might help.

Gary and I may agree when it comes to “Redefinition.” The idea of redefinition has to do with “using technology to create things that were previously inconceivable. The above video talks about the idea of writing and audience. Going from writing on paper to writing in Office 365 is substitution. With things like predictive text and spell check turned on, writing in Microsoft Word or Google Drive “augmenting” that writing experience. Once the student starts to write to a larger audience by posting their writing to a blog so the world can see it is “modification.” These are examples from the video above. The idea of “Redefinition” from the video concerns me. It does not reach high enough. Not in today’s world.

Redefinition is the idea that technology is being used for something previously inconceivable. How about building a model of a human heart that biology students built and print on a 3D printer? What if students created a human heart that people could walk through and learn about? How about a student who want to be an immunologist study the spread of “viruses” in a virtual world like World of Warcraft. How about students working together to build their own AI (Artificial Intelligence) Chatbot? The source code is open source. And then publish the student created Chatbot to the school’s website.

I just do not feel that differentiating the product of a traditional assignment is enough to be called redefinition. Educators should aim high.

Above is a video of Stephen Wolfram discussing ChatGPT. He talks in great length about how ChatGPT works. This is an informative video that gives the “soup to nuts” view of ChatGPT. 

To understand how chat GPT works, one must understand the concept of a neural network. I read a book that was published in 2009 on neural networks and the title was “Wired for Thought: How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet” by Jeffrey Stibel. This was the first book to expose me to the idea that both computer networks and brains are similar in how they function. Stibel goes on to argue that both systems, the brain, and the Internet, operate based on the principles of networking, feedback, and scalability. He goes on to say that the way the brain rewires itself is very much like the way the Internet handles digital congestion by rerouting traffic to less congested areas of the Internet. 

What is a neural network? Imagine you have a big puzzle to solve, and you have a bunch of friends who can help. Each friend is good at solving one part of the puzzle, and together they can figure out the whole thing. 

For example, let us say you want to teach a computer to recognize pictures of cats. You would show the computer lots of pictures of cats and non-cats, and the neural network would try to figure out what features are common to all the cat pictures (like pointy ears and whiskers) and what features are different from the non-cat pictures. 

It is like a big game of "spot the difference" - the neural network looks for little details that are unique to the cat pictures and uses those details to make a guess about whether a new picture is a cat or not. 

That is the basic idea of a neural network - a bunch of little helpers working together to solve a problem by looking for patterns in the data they are given. 

In the book, “Wired for Thought,” Stibel’s goes on to mention how technology and neural networks are going to impact future society. Stibel implies that as technology advances, society may have greater cognitive abilities and the possibility of a “new type of hybrid intelligence.”

What does a neural network have to do with ChatGPT? When one first interacts with ChatGPT, the text is turned into numbers and fed into ChatGPT neural network. ChatGPT neural network processes this input and makes a “best guess” about what word comes next by examining large data sets about things that are written on the Internet by people and machines. As we know, everything on the Internet is true, so ChatGPT can only be as reliable as its data. 

With the advent of the Internet, teachers had to realize they were no longer the smartest thing in the room. This was a wide awakening for some teachers. With the possibility of hybrid intelligence not only is the teacher not the smartest thing in the room, very shortly, we may not be the smartest person in the room. But this is ok. Educators must give up the notion that we are teachers because we are "smart." Further gone are the ideas that people got into teaching to be in control. Have you been in a highly functioning classroom lately. It should be controlled chaos and most of them are.

During my time on this earth, I have witnessed some watershed moments in educational technology. One of those moments was when I first discovered a computer. I was in high school. This computer ran from reel-to-reel magnetic tape. There was a lunar landing program, and every time you wanted to play the game and land the lunar vehicle, you had to reload the tape. This became very annoying. I remember only playing the game a few times. This was my first exposure to computers. Eventually, this computer evolved to take cassette tapes.

When I was a kid, my dad bought us an odyssey game console. He bought us this because he felt it was more educational than Atari. Of course, I felt left out. All my friends had Ataris. 

For my first master's degree at Boise State University, my whole Internet connection was through dial-up. It was a degree in educational technology, and it was entirely online. I have never been to Boise, Idaho.

I remember when Alexa first came out. I know Principals and Teachers who wanted to put Alexa in their classrooms so that Teachers would have an auditory connection with the outside world. My argument was that the classroom should be “controlled chaos” and be the type of environment where Alexa does not work very well. Plus, there are all kinds of security concerns with devices that are always listening. 

Another watershed moment was when Twitter was first invented. It was now possible to have instant communication with someone around the world about any topic you wanted to. It was limited to 140 characters at first. This was before hashtags were even invented.  

Another watershed moment was when the education world found out about ChatGPT. With the creation of ChatGPT the idea of artificial intelligence and machine learning became available on a website. The idea of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) became less abstract to those of us in the education world. We knew previously that artificial intelligence and machine learning were important, but we did not have a tangible way of seeing how AI and machine learning could affect our craft. Now we do.

When students have access to these things, the teacher is no longer the smartest thing in the room. If you know how to ask the right questions, information is even closer than our fingertips. 

Is this really a watershed moment? Or just a natural outcome of progress in educational technology or just technology in general? Are we preparing students to work in AI and ML? How should teachers change what they are doing knowing that an AI and ML future exists? 

You get out of education what you put into it. There will always be students who cheat. And we know eventually they are only cheating themselves. And that is the way we should treat ChatGPT. Blocking ChatGPT is not the answer. Below is a teacher who is using ChatGPT in her classroom.