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As a child, I loved fingerpainting and anxiously awaited the weekly, colorful in-class activity.
The entire process felt like an exploration, and through it, I discovered my creativity.
It was messy, chaotic, and crucial, I think, for my development.
Thenew idea with fingerpaintingis to separate a child’s fingers from the paint.
You splash some of the squishy colors onto a canvas, then seal the goop under plastic.
The child then basically pushes the colors around without actually touching them.
AI offers a valuable shortcut.
It also cuts out the messiness of bad ideas.
AI’s job is not to come up with answers randomly.
I often describe this as AI’s knowing better than us “what comes next.”
That works in reading, writing, coding, and art.
It’s not always a clean process, though.
Interestingly, we seem quite comfortable with AI’s learning through their own messy mistakes.
Educators struggle with this and AI has arrived as a handy tool for navigating around many of these issues.
Students are also engaging in more back-and-forth with AI for research.
They learned how to search onGoogleand, through trial and error, find the details they needed.
There is no error or assumption of error, and mistakes could easily be hidden in AI hallucinations.
Again, the engagement with a teacher and even other students is lost.
Ideas no longer float in the ether.
Questions are not shared among a group.
Asking “dumb” questions was how we learned.
Students using AI are shielded from that moment.
They just jot down in the prompt and the AI responds.
Experimental investigations indicate that errorful learning followed by corrective feedback is beneficial to learning."
Outside the classroom, students teach themselves how to useChatGPTto produce essays and get the best results and grades.
At least educators are hip to these efforts.
In theUSA Todaystory, one educator who discovered them began running all the essays through AI checkers.
Those are, of course,not fool proof.