BY EDISON MARTE SICAD
SHOULD teachers normalize the use of Grammarly, ChatGPT, and other related apps?
Obviously, students are already using these apps — and teachers as well. But not all. Why not?
The ceaseless compounding improvement of these apps — labeled as “educational” — is something that no teacher can compete against with. And students — even those with high grades — are smart enough to use such apps to augment their performance. Why not? Just like any other online resources, lecture videos the likes of Khan Academy, and proliferating personal tutor services, the use of these apps is arguably a modern-day learning experience.
But some educators and parents are apprehensive as to where this experience may lead us. Dependence-laziness is the first pair of worry in the entourage towards the union of human knowledge and artificial intelligence (AI). And such union — or celebration — will surely change the status of people involved. It is not about becoming useless for being dispensable; it is more about becoming dispensable for lack of innovation.
Although there are parents who abhor the intrusion of AI in the academic or learning process, same parents tolerate the excessive exposure of their children to social media platforms. Family homes have confused parental guidance with parental involvement.
Such an impasse leads to the second home: the school. The issue now is not just about “Are we teaching the students the right thing?” The pedagogy may already be in a dilemma: “Are we teaching the students in the right way?”
Using the responsibility of giving grades as the weapon of demanding obedience, teachers can rationalize the prohibition of using AI in doing school assignments. But as the saying goes, “Some things can be legal but not legitimate.”
The writer of this column makes a stand that the real problem is not the use of AI as a learning tool; it is the normalizing of social media (socmed) interactions as an authentic real-life experience: to be valuable is to be viral.
We have to stop feeding the impression that something is only worth doing if it can be converted into a socmed post. Don’t get me wrong. It is called “social” media in the first place because of the apparent societal impact of an act. And some actions do need to be broadcasted because of inherent social value/s.
But we have defined “social” as “personal.” The source of an individual’s self-worth is now measured on the reactions on the actions. The act has lost its inherent worth. Privacy becomes taboo and voyeurism our daily dose of data—or drama.
A colleague of mine says that FB no longer means Facebook; it means Filter-body.
“The reward is in the doing.” as advocated by one Filipino teacher. Not anymore. Don’t get me wrong. Of course, there are still those who know how to manage their socmed activities. But the cumulative destructive effect is all around us. Some people get depressed because they got used to being praised for the good things that they have done. And if they do something good but not known to others, they belittle such action. They have magnified the need to be praised and lost the ability to appreciate in private the value of their deeds.
For it has to be known to be worth it. For it has to be viral to be valued. For it has to be popular to be rewarding. But this cannot happen all the time. And so, lacking in social approval, we created a crisis of abundance: having a thousand friends has never been this lonely and frustrating. Maybe one more friend request will suffice./PN
