Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 49 seconds
This is the story of publishing the preprint of our article:
Gupta, A., Atef, Y., Mills, A., Bali, M. (forthcoming). Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies. (accepted in Open Praxis. Preprint on Arxiv). https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08711
When you work in the really fast-changing field of educational technology, it feels like every discovery or strategy you make is urgent. If you’re an open educator, like me, it feels urgent to share. And so when I went to a workshop that discussed the use of metaphors to help clarify what we mean, I applied this approach immediately to my most urgent topic of the time: generative AI. And I tweeted about it. And I noticed that already many of us were using metaphors and some metaphors can be harmful whereas others help illuminate certain angles on AI.
Others saw the value of this, and were using it, too. Anuj Gupta (whom I had never ever met before!) started Tweeting about it with Anna Mills, Yasser Tamer and I, and he suggested we write an article about it. So we did!
It was such a fun collaborative autoethnography and writing process (read about it in the article!) and we submitted it to a journal that had a special issue coming out. Unfortunately the journal seems to have received a huge number of submissions and took a long time to get back to us – with a rejection. I’m on the board of this journal and get papers rejected every now and then š haha. But the issue here is that when you are writing about a current hot topic, you want to share as early as possible. I was already referring to this work in my keynotes!
So we submitted to another journal that thankfully accepted it (thank you peer reviewers of Open Praxis!) and we’re excited to share it quickly, so we published the preprint in Arxiv (linked above) so people could benefit as early as possible.
I hope you find it helpful and the suggested activities useful!
Featured image from DALL-E3 via Poe.com. Prompt: Cute dog rushing with a newspaper in its paw. Here it is again.
