I mean... if you start an article with "credentials, look at me" then maybe, just maybe your entire schpiel is crap??
(Then again, authors don't pick headlines so perhaps we should just blame the editors at NYT...)
Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing. At Williams College, where I am a professor, writing skills are among the very few general education requirements. It’s no surprise, then, that universities see artificial intelligence as an existential threat,
So far, so predictable.
"what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought?"
he evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.
In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates offers a startling criticism of writing. Written words, he claims, are not the true children of knowledge, because writing cannot speak, answer questions or come to its own defense. Only through conversation among minds, he suggests, does reason yield real insight.
"But perhaps Socrates was right, and we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas."
I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another. I want to make new connections in the immediacy of our back-and-forth.
Writing assignments serve practical needs of colleges and universities. When we receive a batch of 10-page essays, we can take them home, read a few, put them aside and grade the rest when the opportunity arises. If our minds wander, we can reread the prose before us. If we need to justify a grade, we can cite the record. Writing is a portable, compact trace of mind that is more manageable in a bureaucracy than is a conversation. But none of these conveniences is about developing the best thought.
Instead, this prof lets his students use AI for written assignments as much as they want... and then quiz them in verbal/oral examinations, Socratic style, later.
The students were all too sharp on the ideas, too deft in reconfiguring their thoughts and extending them dynamically. Moreover, at least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers. I believe colleges can permit the use of A.I. writing tools without undermining the next generation of thinkers.
"Pursuing an alternative path where we think aloud together, vigorously and sharply, won’t yield a world in which nothing is written."
Consider what we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another. We may end up spending less time isolated, gain more practice resolving disagreement and find ourselves a clearer sense of what we believe. This is the moment to claim critical thought back.
provocative... buuuuut, what if it is, though?!
archive:
https://archive.li/kqtQj
I vibed with that pretty hard. I regularly told my students that the HW assignments were for them to make sure they were understanding the material and the tests were my way of assessing whether they understood the material.
I do think the main reason writing is relied on so heavily is the bureaucratic logistics mentioned in the piece. Oral exams would probably be far more prevalent if class sizes permitted them.
scalability of oral exams is the real problem
as well as potential equity issues in regard to non-native speakers, or even just students who know the material but easily intimidated / bad at thinking on their feet.
only seems like a problem in the current mass production schooling, as far as I can tell.
Decentralize and make radically smaller... is it that much worse to examine verbally and in person than late at night, reading and marking up page after page of stuff?
It would be for me because I radically streamlined my grading system. No late nights for @Undisciplined.
That doesn't count as an iniquity because it's one of the valuable skills being tested. Ultimately, my preference is to have a variety of assessment methods, so that too much weight isn't put on irrelevant skills.
I have mixed feelings. Defending your ideas interactively, socratic style, is a better skill than writing. But losing the skill of writing is dangerous, not just for society but for the individual. You aren't always given the opportunity to defend your ideas in person, and if you only know how to write like f'cking Claude, you won't be able to convey your ideas effectively.
...and writing is a slow-motion deliberate consideration of ideas, not the fast-paced, rhetorically powerful practice of speaking. It's easier to get away with nonsense verbally than in writing. eloquence etc.
true, good points
Noted 🤔🤫🤔🤫
https://twiiit.com/BobMurphyEcon/status/2105089084825686190