Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
Well, Rob, it's time for a Coffee Drop.
Rob:Sounds like a deep subject.
Jared:You can just listen for this one if you want. But I was curious about doing some comparisons between the adoption of generative AI and other educational innovations. So I was like, is this because we know that generative AI has created some anxiety. Oh yeah. In higher education, academic integrity, professionalism, uncertainty, originality, accuracy, all that stuff.
Jared:Yeah. But I was curious if the reactions or those responses to generative AI are specific to it or if it has appeared elsewhere in the literature. With other technological adaptations. So I decided let's look at the calculator and let's look at the internet. What I found was incredibly surprising.
Jared:And it made me realize that maybe generative AI is not necessarily an unprecedented crisis. Maybe it's just the newest version of a challenge that keeps coming up in education. So let me start with the calculator and I've got plenty of sources with this and
Rob:Oh, we have these have these in the notes. Yeah. Okay.
Jared:For sure. So there's a study from weights and demana. I'm sure I'm butchering all these names from 2,001 where they traced educational calculator use and controversy back to the seventies.
Rob:Their historical review seventies?
Jared:No. The nineteen seventies.
Rob:Nineteen seventies. Just needed to be clear.
Jared:The nineteen seventies. They did a historical review, and it discussed both research on calculator use and the need to balance technology with paper and pencil techniques. The question that surfaced was less, should calculators exist? But actually it was more, when should students use them? And what should they still be able to do independently?
Rob:Wow. So that That's very
Jared:similar to familiar.
Rob:Those are the same questions that we're hearing about, large language models.
Jared:Yeah. And then another recent synthesis by Willie twenty twenty six placed calculator resistance within a wider pattern that's shaped by perceived usefulness, self efficacy, fears of skill displacement, organizational culture, and institutional conditions.
Rob:So I have I have a further question. I mean, I'm I'm gonna go. And you probably don't have any information on this. When the abacus got on the scene, were there people within the Chinese empire that were like, are times when you should use the abacus and times The when you
Jared:abacus is ruining education. But I think, I mean, I wonder about that with that because I didn't cover that in this study but I do wonder if there's some sort of connection between things like the overhead projector. Is it going to ruin students' ability to think as a lecturer speaks on what to write down? Is the overhead projector, which is showing students what to write down, what happened to the chalkboard or what happened to this and that, know, stuff like that. I do wonder about that.
Rob:Can you imagine moving from also just to go back a step further, can you imagine from moving from a oral culture to a writing culture? I wonder at some point did proponents for oral culture say, well, if you start writing everything down, you're gonna forget things because you haven't forced yourself to memorize scripture or this isn't good.
Jared:Going from the oral tradition to the written tradition. Yeah.
Rob:I mean, writing is a technology.
Jared:It is. Yeah. But really the calculator comparison really boiled down to it required educators to clarify which skills mattered and how the tool should relate to them. So it went back to the roots and said, okay, what is it that we need to have students to know to do before we introduce this Now it's not just the calculator. Let's go to good old web 2.0.
Rob:Not even web 1.0.
Jared:Not even one, we're skipping over 1.0 and going straight
Rob:to 2.0.
Jared:I do wonder like going back into that because it was web 2.0, web technologies and online learning is what I looked at. Ajan and Hartshorn from 2008 studied faculty decisions about using web 2.0 tools. Some recognized potential benefits for learning and interaction, yet relatively few use the tools in their classrooms. Sounds a little bit familiar. Yeah.
Jared:So far faculty attitudes and perceived control helped predict their intention to adopt the technology. Another study Mitchell et al from 2015 examined resistance to online education and framed adoption as movement from resistance towards support and active participation. So we see these little like seeds here of is this technology going to be useful or not? And then we can I have a whole section here on Wikipedia? Would you like to hear about that too?
Jared:Wikipedia in the online space.
Rob:Oh, you're drilling down.
Jared:Drilling way A study from LEM 2009 studied 134 college students found that students often use Wikipedia to check facts quickly and find background info even though their confidence in its quality was limited. When we've seen the change in Wikipedia usefulness, I know when I was, oh, wait, when did Wikipedia start? 2001, 2002?
Rob:Yeah, it's been early.
Jared:So it was early in my higher education, but even then it was like, you can't use Wikipedia for this. Then there was like a shift. Can't trust it. But now there's been like a bit of a shift in there. At least when I was teaching back in 2010, 2011, there was a shift where it was like, no, you can use it if you use it in a certain way.
Jared:And some would say it's even more accurate than most encyclopedias and research at that time because of how quickly it can be. Now there's a double edged sword to that. It can be quickly updated and refined, but also can have misinformation and stuff on it as well.
Rob:Yeah. I haven't looked into Wikipedia in a long time to find out how they're curating those materials or how they allow them to be curated because I do remember early on it was real easy to change those. You could come in and see something someone had written and you could modify it, but I think that changed pretty quickly, and then they had this system. If somebody wrote something and you had other people come in and and either verify
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:Or bulk against it
Jared:Yeah.
Rob:Those notes would show up Mhmm. Which I thought, well, that's actually kinda cool. Yeah. It's become a very popular aggregation of world knowledge, generally speaking.
Jared:But you see the connection there between how it's perceived, but the how the change in perception was as as first it was like no don't use it because it's gonna cheapen the research process and now it's like oh look it's actually pretty good now.
Rob:I thought it was better than the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was. Which I remember my mom spent a whole lot of money.
Jared:Show of hands for our listeners who has a set of Britannica. Fast forward now to AI resistance. We look at a study from ChatGPT in 2025 surveyed two ninety four full time faculty at two mid sized US public universities. More than a third of them had opted out of generative AI use. Their reasons clustered into five themes: not ready or not now, no perceived value, identity, intention, threat to human intelligence, future fears and present risks.
Jared:And we see these same ideas that have gone throughout this recurring pattern that we see this idea of there's like this technology threatens an important skill or established We need to restrict or control its use. The technology becomes increasingly available and useful despite institutional hesitation. We saw that with a calculator, we saw that with online and then educators have to pivot and teach when, why, and how to use the technology. And then eventually the last step is redesign. Institutions reconsider what people should learn and what counts as evidence of that learning.
Rob:Which sounds an awful lot like backward design. Like, you look at the tenants of backward design, you start with the end and you work backwards. Mhmm. And one of the main tenants is evidence. Right?
Rob:What are you going to choose that evidence is what you believe students should know, think, or even become or do? Mhmm. Right? And so what are those enduring practices? What are those enduring attitudes?
Rob:What are those enduring pieces of knowledge? And it hasn't changed. Nope. Backward design, I think, you start with that first, then you use the tools. Then you say, okay.
Rob:Well, how can I use LLMs, or how can I use the calculator? Mhmm. How can I use the abacus? How can I use Wikipedia or not use Wikipedia? Where does it belong?
Rob:Where does it not belong based on what we've said through our backward design process.
Jared:Yeah. It's interesting. You know, if you feel the stress and anxiety over generative AI making its way into education, unfortunately, you're not unique. A lot of people have done it now and are have experienced it throughout education as new innovations show their rear their heads as they say.
Rob:Well, and like Solomon said, there's nothing new under the sun. That is correct. It's interesting to to go over this, but at the same time, you're like, yeah. He wasn't he wasn't wrong. Mhmm.
Rob:Yep.