Speech Title: Generative AI: Opportunities and Challenges for Education

Abstract: This talk will discuss the promise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Existing debates about its implications often take several perspectives. Some argue that generative AI can profoundly enhance education and enable personalized learning. Others note significant disruptions to existing assessment practices and call for innovative approaches. Some even articulate great ethical concerns about the implications of using generative AI in education. This talk will address all of these perspectives. It will first discuss promising directions for the use of generative AI in education. It will then outline some major concerns associated with technology that underpins generative AI. Finally, the talk will outline directions for future research. The talk will draw upon a growing body of research knowledge and evidence derived from several empirical studies to provide insights into these important questions.

Speech Title: Exploring the Efficacy of ChatGPT in Analyzing Student Teamwork Feedback with an Existing Taxonomy

Abstract: Teamwork is a critical component of many academic and professional settings. In those contexts, feedback between team members is an important element to facilitate successful and sustainable teamwork. However, in the classroom, as the number of teams and team members and frequency of evaluation increase, the volume of comments can become overwhelming for an instructor to read and track, making it difficult to identify patterns and areas for student improvement. To address this challenge, we explored the use of generative AI models, specifically ChatGPT, to analyze student comments in team based learning contexts. Our study aimed to evaluate ChatGPT's ability to accurately identify topics in student comments based on an existing framework consisting of positive and negative comments. Our results suggest that ChatGPT can achieve over 90% accuracy in labeling student comments, providing a potentially valuable tool for analyzing feedback in team projects. This study contributes to the growing body of research on the use of AI models in educational contexts and highlights the potential of ChatGPT for facilitating analysis of student comments. This presentation shares the collaborative work of Andrew Katz of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Siqing Wei, Gaurav Nanda, Chris Brinton all of Purdue University – West Lafayette, Indiana, along with the speaker. A paper by the same title has been pre-published at the arXiv repository and is being submitted for journal publication.

Speech Title: Constructionist Tools for Computational Thinking

Abstract: One of the first ideas on how to use digital media for learning was a kind of a wake-up call to what learning actually could be from an epistemological and a pedagogical point of view. The elements that the education community was jolted into seriously considering was that of a) meaning-making versus routine learning and b) agency and creativity versus response to controlled questions which can be objectively assessed. But this was a long time ago. Since then, technology has been used for everything under the sun spanning from conservationist to administrative to transformative approaches to what it means to educate. In the education community the interest in transformative approaches has led research to progress from adopting a misconceptions approach to learning to a meaning-making approach and the to the idea of skills and in the past decade to competences. Meanwhile new technologies are always emerging providing excitement but at the same time not much chance for educational added value to properly integrate into education systems. In my talk I will use three examples of digital expressive tools less known than MIT-scratch, but equally designed to enable engagement and to integrate computational thinking into the adoption of competences. I will take the case of mathematics education but broadly, asking 'what mathematics is good for cultivating mathematical competences' and 'what is mathematical about real life socio-scientific issues relevant to youth today'. In my talk I will show examples of these three tools - authoring systems in fact - which are available freely for anyone to use or to design things with. The first, MaLT2, is a programmable modeller for animated 3D graphical figures, the second, ChoiCo, is a game designer for games based on the 'choices with consequences' paradigm and the third, SoRBET, is a tetris-like game designer based on the notion of classification. I will suggest some theoretical tools which have been useful to us in our 30-year long research at ETL to study learning processes and professional development.