Technology: Good or Evil?

I love technology. Technology allows us to quickly move along from the more mundane tasks and frees up more time to focus on things that we find more important. Vehicles made it possible to go multiple places during the day and still have enough time to complete other tasks. The printing press made it so texts can be mass produced without needing to rewrite every page for each copy. Dry erase boards made it easy to jot down your thoughts or images and erase it just as quickly without a dusty chalk cloud entering your lungs. Technology’s purpose is to take the load off of our shoulders when it comes to things we find trivial or annoying, but it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure whether it’s doing more harm than good.

As a teacher, I like to spend my creative time coming up with out-of-the-box lessons and innovative ways to approach concepts. I don’t like having to come up with a list of problems to go along with it. Recently, however, with the rise of AI such as ChatGPT, I’m able to spend more time fleshing out the intricacies of my instructions and rely on artificial intelligence to create the artifacts to go along with it. Additionally, I’m able to quickly “target specific areas of weakness, allowing students to focus their efforts where they need the most help (Smith, 2023).” Things like scaffolding, differentiation, and stations can be introduced to any assignment with a quick prompt into the service, leaving more time for me to analyze my data and plan the best course of action for my students.

On the other hand, however, is the fact that this technology is available to the students in my classroom as well. In some of their eyes, this tool is not a supplemental resource, but a get out of jail free card. They no longer have to type a question into Google and search through countless links to find any answer, but only have to type it into ChatGPT and receive a summarized response containing everything they want to know. In the context of mathematics, it has gotten to where I’m more worried about ChatGPT or Photomath completing their assignments at home than their parents doing it for them. Technology has become so advanced that it’s become faster to look something up than remembering it.

As Boluk and LeMieux state, “In an era of social media, cloud computing, algorithmic trading, networked surveillance, and drone warfare, the events determining the experience of quotidian life are increasingly automated and operate at speeds and scales beyond the domain of human phenomenology (2017, p.4).” As day-to-day life becomes more automated, how do we motivate our students to put in the time and effort to rely on themselves instead? All of this centers around the idea that technology is not inherently good or evil, but is given its purpose by those who wield it.

References:

Boluk, S. & LeMieux, P. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, competing, speculating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking video games. University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, G. (2023, March 23). Transform assessment with AI and GPT: A positive approach for teachers. This is Graeme.

Wix. Computer class [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_3653aca691154d2b818d016405233fe0~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_395,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_3653aca691154d2b818d016405233fe0~mv2.jpg

Wix. Highschool children [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_67f9dbcec8b8466fb27e7df2b6686284~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_525,h_296,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_67f9dbcec8b8466fb27e7df2b6686284~mv2.jpeg

Wix. Schoolboy using tablet [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/11062b_2d80485b7c774c9e8af3b2eb0c99fb56~mv2.jpeg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/11062b_2d80485b7c774c9e8af3b2eb0c99fb56~mv2.jpeg