It's all abstractions to help your brain understand what electrons are doing in impossibly pure sand. Pick the one that frees the most overhead to think about problems that matter
Look up some of Tressie McMillan Cottom's writing, podcast appearances, public lectures, etc etc. She's a McArthur-certified Genius and a full professor at UNC, and she's a spectacular writer and public intellectual.
She wrote "Lower Ed", about for-profit colleges in America and has identified places that more elite schools are copying that playbook.
Only my own two eyes and my own learning experience. The fact is students will use LLMs no matter what you say. So any blanket "it's bad/good" results are not actionable.
But if you told me every student got access to a 1-on-1 tutor, I'd say that was a win (and there are studies to back that up). And that's one thing LLMs can do.
Of course, just asking your tutor to do the work for you is incredibly harmful. And that's something LLMs can do, as well.
Would you like to have someone 24-7 who can give you a code review? Now you can. Hell yeah, that's beneficial.
How about when you're stuck on a coding problem for 30 minutes and you want a hint? You already did a bunch of hard work and it's time to get unstuck.
LLMs can be great. They can also be horrible. The last thing I wrote in Rust I could have learned nothing by using LLMs. It would have take me a lot less time to get the program written! But that's not what I did. I painstakingly used it to explore all the avenues I did not understand and I gained a huge amount of knowledge writing my little 350 line program.
You can no true Scotsman it, but that study is a structured task. It's possible to generate an ever-more structured tutorial, but that's asking ever more more from teachers. And to what end? Why should they do that? Where's the data suggesting it's worth the trouble? And cui bono?
Students have had access to modern LLMs for years now, which is plenty long to spin up and read out a study...
"To be clear, we do not believe the solution to these issues is to avoid using LLMs, especially given the undeniable benefits they offer in many contexts. Rather, our message is that people simply need to become smarter or more strategic users of LLMs – which starts by understanding the domains wherein LLMs are beneficial versus harmful to their goals."
And that is also our goal as instructors.
I agree with that study when using an LLM for search. But there's more to life than search.
The best argument I have to why we should not ban LLMs in school is this: students will use it anyway and they will harm themselves. That is reason enough.
So the question becomes, "What do instructors do with LLMs in school so the LLM's effect is at least neutral?"
And this is where we're still figuring it out.
And in my experience, there are things we can do to get there, and then some.
reply