AN INVIGORATING educational experience

For three weeks of January 2023, I was fortunate to participate in the Inge Woolf Memorial Seminar at Yad Vashem –The International School for Holocaust Studies in Israel. I was one of 26 teachers from across New Zealand and a wide range of disciplines to receive the scholarship through the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.

The seminar consisted of a series of intensive lectures, tutorials and workshops with leading Holocaust academics from around the world on Jewish life, the history of Jewish experience, as well as the Holocaust. We worked together as educators sharing ideas about how we would apply this knowledge in our classrooms to make the topic more relevant to New Zealand students and planning to use the interesting resources we were exposed to including music, art and film. Central to our learning was the philosophy of ‘taking students safely in, safely out’ of this contested and confronting topic in order teach it as effectively and sensitively as possible.

For me, the most poignant part of this professional learning opportunity was listening to the testimony of Holocaust survivors in class and spending time with them in their homes. In one of these sessions, I asked 88-year-old Rena Quint, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, what I should tell my students when they ask me why they should learn about the Holocaust. She said that her mother and father are still alive when they are remembered and knowledge of their experience is carried forward. This idea of ‘bearing witness, remembering and acting’ is an important tool for our teaching of the Holocaust in Year 10 social studies and Year 13 history, but it is also highly relevant to the implementation of the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum, which began in social studies in 2022.

We enjoyed a number of learning experiences outside of the classroom, visiting the vast number of significant religious sites in Jerusalem, travelling to the mountain fortress of Masada, the caves of Qumran and visiting a kibbutz in Lohamei HaGeta’ot. Climbing Mt Zion at daybreak was special to me because of its holy significance for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and therefore its demonstration of the cultural diversity in Jerusalem. We had a lot of fun too. We floated in the Dead Sea, ate memorable food in the Arab Shouk, shopped in the Armenian Quarter and spent a day at the beach in Tel Aviv.

The opportunity to experience this seminar with a group of impressive New Zealand educators was a significant part of this journey. We will continue to engage in professional learning together for the next three years and have established networks to share resources and ideas on the teaching of the Holocaust, as well as other contexts and about education in general. The learning I took from them will be as beneficial in my classroom and in my role as Faculty Head Social Sciences, as what I experienced in our formal studies.

“This was an incredible experience personally. The past three years have been particularly challenging as we have worked to do our best for our students despite the changes caused by the pandemic. I was feeling quite depleted. I am grateful to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and the Diocesan Heritage Foundation for this opportunity. The learning and the fun I had in such a fascinating country have reinvigorated me.”

I am very grateful to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and its founders for this opportunity and to the Dio Heritage Foundation fund, which also made it possible for me to participate in this incredible experience.

Lisa Mave, HOF Social Sciences

ICT Director Rob McCrae looks at some of the issues around ChatGPT

The dawning of the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Age

In February this year, EdTech New Zealand and the AI Forum of New Zealand co-hosted a webinar on Artificial Intelligence and the Impact on Education.

The speakers included Prof Ian Watson (professor of AI and machine learning from the University of Auckland), Frances Valintine (CEO academyEX), and Dr Kevin Bell (EdD, Amazon Web Services). While the speakers expressed an element of concern around the potential for cheating in traditional academic assessments, they all agreed that this technology “will disrupt education, no question”. Professor Watson added that ChatGPT was already capable of passing written examinations at the level he teaches. “Not brilliantly, but good enough for a solid pass, and of course it will only get better with time. We haven’t seen anything yet.”

What is ChatGPT and this new realm of ‘generative AI’?

On 30 November 2022, a company called Open AI introduced ChatGPT. By February 2023 it is claimed that

ChatGPT had over 100 million active users. Putting that into perspective, it took TikTok nine months to achieve this rate of growth, and Instagram took over two years. ChatGPT is simply the fastest growing application ever created.

In simple terms, ChatGPT is a chatbot that has been optimised for conversational dialogue. The ChatGPT interface is designed to simulate a human conversation, and this simple interface is a key reason why it is so successful. You can ask it any question, and anyone can use it.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) journey

AI isn’t necessarily new. Back in the 1940s scientists and mathematicians like Alan Turing, John McCarthy and others were exploring AI. Turing, of course, was famous for his role in helping break the Enigma code during the Second World War.

Back then computers were rare. Personal computers hadn’t been invented, and they wouldn’t be for another 20 to 30 years. Since then, it’s taken until now for three key technologies to develop and merge to create the watershed moment we are now seeing in 2023. Those three technologies have been: the advances in personal computer capability, the advances in cloud computing capability and the availability of massive datasets to train the AI algorithms. All three of these components have undergone technological ‘exponential’ growth in recent times.

It is no surprise that where exponential growth and development factors are both at play, we can see massive advancements in a short period of time. And that’s what is happening with AI. We believe that ChatGPT is a breakthrough moment that will spawn a raft of new AI-powered products in the next few years.

How might AI tools be used in schools?

AI has some immediate benefits to both teachers and students when it comes to teaching and learning. Here are a few examples of how some of the current generative tools can be used.

How might a teacher use AI tools?

• To create a course or unit plan. A task often taking hours to complete, can now be done within seconds.

• Having developed the course plan, it’s then a simple task to ask AI to develop a series of lesson plans to achieve the overall course goals.

• Have ChatGPT generate a series of student activities to meet the objectives of each lesson. These could be lesson starters, sentence starters, quiz questions (and answers!). Again, all generated within seconds.

• Use a slide generating AI (such as Tome) to automatically generate a series of slides to introduce a topic or concept.

These are all largely routine tasks that need to be developed by teachers. By using AI tools a teacher could save hours of time that could be spent further enhancing the learning environment, or interacting directly with students.

How might a student use AI tools?

• To summarise a lengthy text, document or even a video – students can ask AI to pick out the key points in bullet format.

• Reword a description of a complex topic so the explanation is easier to understand.

• Create individual learning paths for the student based on their strengths and areas for development.

• Provide writing prompts or idea starters for any project or course.

• Make learning materials more accessible by providing real-time translation or simplification.

• Be a personal tutor to help develop skills in certain areas.

• Provide students with feedback on their work.

Again, these are more planning and administrative tasks where AI can be used to support the student and create more time for the student to invest in critical and creative thinking as they learn.

Are there issues in using these tools?

Absolutely. Apart from the well documented cases of using AI to produce essays for an assessment, there are issues around accuracy, credibility, authenticity, and data security. All schools will have policies and processes in place to handle incidents where authenticity of student work is questioned. But accuracy and credibility require an individual to problem solve. Generative AI ‘makes stuff up’. It is likely to be highly accurate, but it is known to suffer from glitches where it just gets things wrong, or makes up new ‘facts’. Accept what you get at your own risk is the moral of the story.

Any invention can be used for good or bad. The same with AI. The measure of a society is how it responds to major change.

Conclusion

In an interview 20 years ago, Carly Fiorina (former CEO of Hewlett Packard) commented: “Do you recall the IT revolution that the business press has been pushing for the last 25 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the beginning. The last 25 years have just been about the forging and sharpening of the real tools of the IT revolution. What you’ve witnessed over the past 25 years was just the end of the beginning, the warm-up act.”

Now, 20 years after that interview, we have AI available to everyone. Its general adoption and use may be interspersed with setbacks, in a similar way to how the dot.com bubble of 1998 became the dot.com bust of 2002.

While ChatGPT may be having its ‘Netscape moment’ right now, don’t be surprised if other far more powerful tools arrive just as quickly.