Beyond the Classroom: How AI is Transforming Teaching and Our World

Beyond the Classroom: How AI is Transforming Teaching and Our World

By Huntington Lyman

Hunt Lyman

When I started teaching at Hill School in 1984, I had just completed a college degree in which my primary tools were pens and typewriters. I wrote lesson plans by hand, my students all wrote compositions with pencils, and I commented with red ink and wrote summary report card comments on mimeograph paper.

Today, my lesson plans and calendars are all online, and I hardly ever handwrite anything. I research my lessons on the internet, prepare Google Slides presentations, and frequently show short videos. I can go weeks without touching student papers because their work is typically submitted on Google Classroom, where I can check revisions, make comments, provide suggestions, and embed audio feedback. My grade book is electronic, and my comments for parents are shared digitally, not even printed out.

In 1984, I never would have predicted how dramatically my job as a teacher would be changed by technology, but this is only a small part of the massive shifts in all our lives over the last forty years. Who would have imagined then that the internet would make paper encyclopedias obsolete, that we would be doing much of our shopping online, that social media would capture the attention of a generation, or that we would rarely consult a map because we all carry multipurpose computers with us that can navigate anywhere, as well as running hundreds of other applications?

The personal computer, the cell phone, and the internet might be the three most significant inventions of the past half-century in terms of how we conduct our daily lives, and in the scope of human history, the cultural changes caused by these devices have been unusually rapid. However, I believe we are now entering a new era of technological change that is going to evolve even more quickly, and we need to prepare ourselves for the spread of artificial intelligence (AI).

Most people have heard something about ChatGPT, but that is only one example of AI; another is Google Bard, and we will likely see many more very soon. These technologies are essentially chatbots incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs), which are trained on an unfathomably vast amount of data and programmed to be self-educating. While LLMs are not sentient, they do give the appearance of consciousness in their use of human language, often producing conversational and human-like writing.

AI programs have well-documented problems, including errors and what programmers call “hallucinations.” However, they are expected to evolve and improve rapidly, and even at this relatively early stage, they often are remarkably astute and persuasive. As AI becomes better and more widespread, our best approach will be to understand it, establish safeguards, and take advantage of the many possibilities and opportunities on the horizon.

AI has the potential to reshape various aspects of our lives, from how we gather information and communicate to how we work and interact with one another. In the next column, I’ll delve into the specific changes I foresee and discuss the importance of understanding the potential and pitfalls of this new technology before we start adopting it. The changes will be dramatic, and they are just around the corner.

Note: Hunt Lyman is academic dean at The Hill School. This column was written without the use of ChatGPT, but he did accept some AI editing of the draft and a suggested headline.