seminar
Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 precipitated a panic among some educators while prompting qualified enthusiasm from others. Under the umbrella term “Generative AI,” ChatGPT is an example of a range of technologies for the delivery of computer-generated text, image, and other digitized media. This presentation reports on an application of Generative AI in the CGScholar platform, a community knowledge sharing and e-learning platform developed by researchers in the College of Education at the University of Illinois and Common Ground Research Networks. The presentation explores the intrinsic limits of generative AI, bound as it is to language corpora and their textual representation through binary notation. Within these limits, we suggest the range of emerging and potential applications of Generative AI in education.
William Cope (Bill Cope) is a Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His and Mary Kalantzis’ recent research has focused on the development of digital writing and assessment technologies, with the support of a number of major grants from the US Department of Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. He has co-authored or co-edited with Mary Kalantzis: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (3rd edition, 2022); Literacies, Cambridge University Press 2012 (2nd edition, 2016); and the two volume grammar of multimodal meaning: Making Sense and Adding Sense, Cambridge University Press, 2020.