Following on from my previous two blogs on this subject I want to report on a conversation my wife and I had that got me thinking about the issue of writing in a different way. The implications of her question for collaborative project work are as important as anything I’ve been thinking about up to this point.
Let’s set the scene. My wife’s native language isn’t English. She has a Masters degree in Adult Education and Training from a New Zealand university, with all work being completed in English.
When I explained some of my thinking around how ChatGPT might be a useful collaborative project team member, she listened attentively – and then stopped me in my tracks with something that went a bit like this: “If the software could write my content for me, how would I learn to write? One of the most important things I learned from my studies was how to write in English at a high level.”
While she had used available learning support services, this was to help polish her writing, and to deal with the inevitable spelling and grammatical issues. She wanted to do the bulk of the work herself – as was expected by the university – because she would learn more about how to write effectively by doing than having things done for her. In her view, something like ChatGPT producing the content for her – even with her having to prompt it – would not have taught her to write because she would not have known how to effectively critique what it was producing.
Perhaps her response is a generational thing. Perhaps it’s typical of people who think natively in one language but have to operate in another. Either way, I think it’s a valid concern based on her lived experience, and probably for many people working across multiple languages.
With some training on both sides, there’s no doubt that ChatGPT could produce some quite reasonable content. Would this mean that a non-native speaker would learn less about effective writing in what is a second or third language for them if the software did more of the basic writing work? Would it mean they learned the same, or maybe more about effective writing, not by doing so much of the writing but by doing more in-depth critiquing of what Chat GPT produced? Would the answer depend on how they had prompted ChatGPT to do the work in the first place?
How would we cope with a team member who relied on another (ChatGPT, in this case) to produce their work for them? Would we trust that work – or that member – as much as we trust ourselves (assuming we didn’t use ChatGPT to produce our own content)? Perhaps it’s time for us to fundamentally reassess what “learning” and “help” really mean…
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I know we should be thinking about them as much as we are thinking about any of the other issues the emergence of ChatGPT has raised for us.
I’m interested in learning about your thinking on this topic because it’s through collaborative conversations that we can create even more valuable learning and development experiences. Please do respond with a comment and let me know what you think.
In my next blog on Thursday 20 April, I will build on my thoughts here and share my (delayed) thinking about active and passive reflection, together with why I think collaborative reflection might just be more valuable than secret reflection.
Rob Nelson Education 