Learning about “Teaching with AI”
William Paine/Patriot Publishing
Dr. C. Edward Watson and his new book
By WILLIAM PAINE
Patriot Publishing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest world-changing technology to burst into 21st Century civilization. According to one definition, AI makes it possible for computer systems to learn from experience to simulate human intelligence and problem-solving capabilities.
To what extent AI will integrate into modern society is an open question, particularly as it concerns education.
Dr. C. Edward (Eddie) Watson, a native son of Pulaski County, has recently co-authored a book on the subject entitled Teaching with AI – A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. The book is currently one of the best-selling nonfiction books on Amazon.
“We’re kind of neutral in the book about whether or not AI is a good thing or a bad thing,” said Watson. “There’s definitely opportunities and challenges for higher ed and for K through 12 education as well. It’s a challenge that’s going to force us to rethink what our curriculum contains. Do we keep technology out of the classroom entirely or do we embrace it and then help develop competencies within a specific discipline or a specific career path to be able to use it?”
Eddie Watson grew up in Fairlawn, attended local schools and graduated from Pulaski County High School in 1987. His mother Glenna is from the Hiwassee/Allisonia area and his dad Bill is from Fairlawn. His parents first met at the old Dublin High School
Eddie Watson graduated from Virginia Tech with a master’s degree in English and taught for a couple of years in the D.C. area before returning to Virginia Tech to work as an Instructional Designer at the College of Arts and Sciences. He married his wife Joan in 1995.
Watson earned his Doctorate at Virginia Tech and remained there for 15 years before landing a job as the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia, where he spent the next 5 years.
“My PhD is in Instructional Design and Technology, but I sort of moved more and more into classroom practice around how to make sure that students learn more and that they learn the things that we’re trying to teach them.” said Watson. “Then as my career path took me into leadership roles, I was then charged with how I improve the teaching practice of the entire faculty at University of Georgia.”
Watson currently serves as the Vice President for the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which is based in Washington D.C.
“The main focus of my work is to identify the key challenges in higher education and then find what the Association might do in terms of programming to be able to help higher-Ed meet those challenges.”
Lately, Watson has been touring the country giving lectures relating to his new book: Teaching with AI – A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning.
“There’s a lot of excitement about the book,” said Watson. “I’ve been pretty much on the road for the last three weeks straight and the feedback has been astonishing. I was at the Medical University of South Carolina yesterday and then the day before that, I was at the College of New Jersey. I’m speaking at Virginia Tech on Friday. So, it’s kind of a blur. I’m going to Wayne State on Monday in Detroit to talk about the book there.”
Though thoroughly well versed in the subject today, it was Dr. Watson’s son Carter, who brought the new technology to his attention on Thanksgiving break in 2022.
“Carter said, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s this thing called Chat GPT. I think you really want to see this,’” Watson related.
Carter asked his father what kind of assignment he might give to a college student. Watson answered that he might assign a student to write an essay and on his son’s prompting, typed some specific subjects to be covered in the essay.
“So, I’m typing that in and hit return and it writes a 1000-word paper on the topic,” Watson continued. “I’m reading the quality of the text and apparently the first words out of my mouth were, Oh, No … because I saw this is highly problematic for higher education if AI can produce quality work.”
Watson’s response to AI’s capabilities was not uncommon among educators.
“The initial response for really all of higher education, as well as K through 12, was we have to keep this out of the classroom,” Watson continued. “We have to keep it out of the hands of the students and I think that that was a natural response. But then there’s a companion challenge that’s emerged, that if you look at the world of work, employers have rapidly moved to adopting generative AI as a tool within the work world.”
According to Watson, a recent survey showed that 93% of employers said that they expect to be using generative AI if they’re not already doing so. These same companies are having difficulty finding employees with the skills to efficiently use AI.
“So, in higher ed, the inclination is that we have to keep this out of the classroom because we want to ensure the academic integrity of what’s going on,” said Watson. “Then we’re also supposed to be preparing students for the real world and the real world already has an expectation that they do have skills. So, I think that this is the grand challenge. How do you ensure that students continue to learn the things that you’re teaching them, but then how do you also prepare them with those literacies around AI to be able to do the work that’s going to be expected of them upon graduation?”
When asked how AI can be a productive tool in a secondary school setting, Watson replied that teachers could use AI to produce “differentiated instruction.”
“It’s a real challenge to have a classroom of 20 or 30 students and you’ve got them at different levels,” said Watson. “AI is really good at coming up with examples and assignments and instructional paths that can help a teacher teach better to students with different levels of preparedness for whatever the content domain might be. So, you can say something like, give me 10 examples of how this historical concept is at play today. And so, it’ll give you an example from ecology and an example from politics and an example from the world of literature. So then, having this variety of examples will help you brainstorm about what you might do in the classroom.”
“The title of the book says “Teaching with AI” and it’s not that you’re using it like you might build a house with a hammer but rather you’re collaborating with it,” Watson continued. “As a teacher, you make the final decision about what you do in your classroom, but as a brainstorming partner, AI is fantastic because it can instantly give you lots of great ideas to choose from.”
Should high school students use AI in their studies?
“There’s a number of different thoughts on this,” Watson responded. “Certainly, there’s times when we want the technology out of the classroom because we don’t want students to have the technology to do the work for them, but there are an array of tools that are actually designed to help students learn.”
Watson went on to describe one particular AI tool that will record and transcribe a lecture, summarize the notes on that lecture and then create a quiz on that lecture for the student.
“So maybe there’s a quiz and you get 22 questions right and 8 questions wrong,” Watson explained. “What that tells you as a student is I know what I need to study. I missed those eight questions. I’m going to study that content and then ask it to create a new quiz for me. This can help students get to mastery of the content far quicker than just reading through the notes. I don’t think any teacher would say that’s cheating or that’s plagiarism. That’s just a good tool that helps the students learn the content.”
Watson concedes that bias is a major concern when using AI and stresses the need for “AI Literacy.”
“It’s not just about having the technical skills to be able to use the technology or know which tool to use when, but AI literacy is also being able to think through and look for issues of bias or ethical concerns,” said Watson. “Our task of writing will actually be evaluating the quality of the content looking for bias and factual errors. Because AI does have a tendency to hallucinate some things. It’s not a good critical thinker. You can ask it, ‘Why should Barbie be the mayor of Radford?’ and it’ll give you a good argument for why Barbie should be the mayor of Radford rather than saying ‘Barbie is a fictional character.’ AI is not a good critical thinker.”
Watson argues that the act of writing itself is due to change with the influence of AI.
“Some are suggesting that the way that we currently write is going to change, and that the task of writing will no longer begin with a blank page,” he said. “I think the window is moving for many of us from writing content to editing, revising, and improving content. I think we still need to teach students to write because it’s hard to be a good editor if you’re not a good writer, but certainly, I think both skill sets are what’s now going to be needed going forward.”
“This is the first thing in my 30-year career that I feel like this is going to change things within the DNA of how we do teaching in K-12 and higher education,” said Watson. “If education wants to remain relevant, it really has to figure out how to address this challenge in important ways because really, if we don’t, private service providers like Microsoft and Amazon and Google, they’re already ginning up competitors in the education space to fill the gap if higher ed can’t.”
Dr. C. Edward Watson co-wrote Teaching with AI – a Practical Guide To A New Era Of Human Learning with President of Gaucher College, Jose Antonio Bowen. This is Watson’s fourth full length book.
Eddie Watson has two sons. Liam Watson, 24, who was recently elected to the Blacksburg Town Council and Carter Watson, 23, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Georgia. His wife, Joan, works as Director of Administrative Operations in the Department of Computer Sciences at Virginia Tech. Both currently reside in Blacksburg.