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Contarini's avatar

I would be interested to see a version of this suited to a private middle and high school.

Possibly easier to introduce at a smaller scale, and starting with students who are just entering academic life.

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Rob Nelson's avatar

I am a fan of Hollis Robbins's heterodoxy when it comes to AI and higher education, not because I agree with her, but because Anectotal Value offers ideas that challenge the usual terms of what Henry Farrell calls AI Fight Club, which pits those who see AI-based educational tools as our inevitable future against those who resist AI in large or small ways.

In proposing that CSU automate general education through a microservices architecture consisting of AI applications, Robbins offers a concrete alternative (a genuinely awful one) to the already existing structure of gen-ed (also genuinely awful). Actually existing systematic general education is no longer viable because OpenAI built Shel Silverstein's "Homework Machine" and offers it to college students at no cost. AI, it seems, is the future of the modern state university system when it comes to providing the breadth of knowledge that a liberal arts education is supposed to provide. I appreciate the way the proposal presents a version of that future unflinchingly.

My primary objection is to Step 4: Develop the Project-Based Learning System and Step 6: Integrate Human Mentorship and Collaboration, because they are based on the increasingly dubious notion that credentialing and learning are meaningfully related. We have before us the opportunity to abandon this fiction by automating the former and leaving the latter up to the student to figure out, maybe with a few mentors around to help. Why muddy the waters by attempting to automate what remains of learning?

Far better, I say, to create loose structures of in-person connections where students who are interested pursue their interests via projects under the mentorship of experts. Let the machinery do the credentialing as efficiently and effectively as AI can using digital platforms. Let the faculty and students figure out the learning without all the bureaucratic apparatus, standardization, and government control. So, I say CSU should optimize all the other steps Robbins lays out, but give the faculty and the students steps 4 and 6.

I'll try to do justice to this response with a longer piece soon. But again, I appreciate the willingness to think systematically about what CSU's embrace of AI could do for general education.

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