Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 42 seconds
I agreed to do an independent study this semester to see how on earth my course could possibly be taught as an independent study – a course that is heavily discussion-based and peer-interaction based. One of the ways I overcame that was to invite loads of guests to pop into class and do activities with us to add a voice other than my own and one closer to the students’.
Today, we did an activity togethe, which I usually let students do one their own in groups. I can usually tell roughly how they’re doing it from observing them work on large screens, and passing around, and asking questions, but today, because it was just the one student, I watched him struggle, asked him to share screen, gave more guidance, watching him struggle some more, etc. It made me realize that no matter how much you talk with students for hours and hours about some of the limitations of AI, they’ll still sometimes still revert to their old ways of doing things, using AI uncritically…
So the activity is related to fake news. I have a warm up activity where I show something outrageous and discuss how we hone our instincts for what looks suspicious; that skepticism is not equal to all news we hear, but that we need to verify things as we get bombarded with misinformation and disinformation all the time. I then teach them quickly the SIFT model and we discuss the process of trying to verify something in the age of AI – and I give them different examples to verify.
Almost always, they totally totally totally skip the step of either verifying the quality of the source, or make the effort to find the original source… and rarely do they make the very important realization that anything in Arabic that refers to some study done in English could have some info that was lost in translation. The second problem is they often start to try to verify using AI. In some ways, this is normal – even if they searched Google, they’d get a Google AI summary; the problem is that they sometimes stop there and get stuck, and don’t even scroll undernearth the Google AI summary to find the proper source – they try to click the link IN the Google AI summary, and are confused when the link is broke or whatever. I mean, really, after all this time, you’re still surprised when an AI tool gives you the wrong link?
Anyway 🙂 The point is, now that I’ve seen this up close, I think I will ask one student from each group of 3-4 people to be the “process observer” and to document the group’s search process. Which tools did they use to search, what keywords did they try, what were the steps, what were the key elements that warranted verification? And maybe I should put the SIFT process up on the board. I used to do that but stopped recently. Maybe let them do it on their own for 15 mins, then offer up the SIFT steps again and ask the process documenter to fill in the four steps?
Featured image: Chipmunk holding a magnifying glass, taken from Pixabay, added magnfying glass on Canva