Tag: AI

ChatPDF as tutor

Educators concerned about AI and unable to generate productive ways their students could use AI tools need to check this out. The tool is called ChatPDF and is available using a browser or an iPad. At this point, it is free and available without an account.

Once connected you upload a pdf.  I wanted to give it a significant challenge and something I could evaluate easily for accuracy so I took a chapter I had written (the chapter on learning as applied to technology from the textbook I wrote with my wife (Integrating technology for meaningful learning) and uploaded it as a pdf file. I then began to ask for explanations, examples, and questions relevant to that chapter. I responded to the questions the AI tool generated and had my answers evaluated. What I have long thought potentially valuable AI was the role AI might play in functioning as a tutor. How can learners get flexible assistance when studying that they can shape to their needs? How can students discover what their needs are and then have their challenges addressed? 

While the system did require that I restart a couple of times, perhaps because I was working from a coffee shop with a sketchy connection, I was very impressed with the quality of the system. By quality, I was primarily interested in the accuracy of the content. Were the explanations accurate and different enough from the wording in the chapter to offer a reasonable opportunity for a learner to achieve a better understanding? Were the questions posed more than simplistic keyword vocabulary checks? Was the system flexible enough to understand me even when I got a little sloppy? 

Any educator should evaluate similar issues for themselves using material they might assign. I understand that content they might like to evaluate may not be available in pdf format, but as I understand the developers there is already a Google docs version and soon to be a Word version. 

There are a few differences between the browser and app versions I observed. The app version references short segments following its replies and the browser version gives a page number. I guess my preference would be the page number as I see value in a learner being able to go back and forth between the book (PDF) and the AI tool. As I have read about this tool there was a warning about the difficulty of the system making connections across different sections of a document and this must apply to transfer/applications external to the document as well. I make no claim that using this AI tool as a tutor is the equivalent of being able to work with a knowledgeable human tutor, but I would argue few students have the advantage of a knowledgeable human tutor at all times.

Take a look. Some example questions and responses the system generated are included in the following images.

The following image may be a little difficult to read, but I was trying to show the text segments the system tells you it primarily used to generate the content it displayed.

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Evaluating AI Tools

Like so many other educators, I am trying to decide what I think of AI tools. Granted, the tools produce some reasonable prose. However, how accurate is the content generated? Here is an example.

I recently generated a post focused on the addition of an AI article summarization capability added to MEMEX Garden. The summarization I offered as my example was based on this article describing the new AI capabilities being added to Kahn Academy resources. I understand there are several references here to AI, but the focus should be on the summary of the article. The summary appears below.

Khan Academy has launched a limited pilot of a new learning guide called Khanmigo for educators, powered by GPT-4, the next generation of OpenAI’s large language model technology. GPT-4 is the successor to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, which ChatGPT is built upon. It can accept images as input, handle up to 25,000 words of text at once, and is designed with more safety and alignment features, among other changes.

Khanmigo is designed to help teachers create personalized learning plans for their students. It uses GPT-4 to analyze student data and provide recommendations for activities and resources that will help them learn more effectively. The tool also includes features like progress tracking and assessment tools to help teachers monitor student progress.

The pilot program is currently limited to a small group of educators, but Khan Academy plans to expand it in the future. The company believes that Khanmigo has the potential to revolutionize education by providing teachers with powerful tools to help them personalize learning for each student.

The summary sounds great, but after reading the article I realized I had a very different interpretation of the focus of the article. By my interpretation, the key capability of the new AI capability of Kahn’s Khanmigo was to engage interactively with students as tutor. Asking about their understanding and then attempting to guide their thinking by asking questions that would encourage them to think in a different way about what they were trying to understand. My interpretation would have suggested that the most important capability was to serve as a tutor to the students more than providing guidance to the teachers.

So, compare my interpretation with the second paragraph I have bolded in the summary provided by the AI. I would encourage your attention to the original article to see if you agree with my assessment.

I copied a few of the statements from the original article to show where I got my interpretation.

“In a blog post, Khan Academy Founder Sal Khan wrote: “When GPT-4 is carefully adapted to a learning environment like Khan Academy, it has enormous potential. It can guide students as they progress through courses and ask them questions like a tutor would. AI can assist teachers with administrative tasks, which saves them valuable time so they can focus on what’s most important — their students.”

I think there is a big difference between arguing that a product helps the student versus helps the teacher simply because these positions mean very different things to me as someone interested in the history of mastery learning and the role of tutors in this instructional approach. Is this quibbling? If my interpretation is correct, I don’t think this is a difference of no consequence.

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