Task Sheet 2

This document provides task instructions for analyzing a research article about the relationship between universities and technology. The introduction summarizes that universities have both embraced and struggled with integrating new technologies. It notes chatbots like ChatGPT as an example of a technology universities have failed to adapt effectively. The next section instructs students to analyze paragraphs from the research article by highlighting instances of stance, determining strength, and explaining reasoning both individually and in groups.

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Task Sheet 2

Uploaded by

Presley Albert Clark

Available Formats

Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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Task Sheet 2

Task instructions:

Part 1:
1. Read the first paragraph of the introduction
2. Observe model analysis

Part 2:

1. Now you analyse and annotate the next two paragraphs.

Individually:

● Read each paragraph

● Highlight instances of stance
● Determine the strength of each instance
● Explain your reasoning

In groups:

● Compare notes
● Negotiate a common understanding of stance and how it is expressed.
● Report to class

AI, ChatGPT and the university

Daniel R. Fesenmaier ⁎, Karl Wöber
Modul University Vienna, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Wien, Austria

Introduction

The university has always had a longstanding love–hate relationship with technology.
Indeed, universities are often seen as leaders of technology where the future is ‘created’
through research and design, and then application by industry. As noted in a recent
essay in the Annals of Tourism Research by Nautiyal, Albrecht, and Nautiyal (2023), it
is easy to identify many such technologies that were either developed within the
university and moved to society or were developed first by industry but then translated
to support the university. Certainly, an appropriate example is the Internet which was
initially developed within universities for the military and is now an embedded
component of its ecosystem; another important technology employed throughout the
university is the computer (and software) itself, whether it is in the form of calculators,
mobile phones, laptops, or supercomputers. However, there are many other
technologies whether they are developed within engineering and computer sciences,
medical sciences, and/or the social and physical sciences. With this said, the university
has long struggled with the integration of these technologies within classroom settings.
And, indeed, the current discussion of the implications of AI-related technologies such
as ChatGPT highlights the failure of the university to recognize and then adapt them to
effectively update
current offerings (Lund et al., 2023).

This article expands the discussion of Nautiyal et al. (2023) by focusing on important AI-
related issues facing the university. Please note that in this essay we use ‘the university’
to refer to processes supporting education, research, and the many applied
relationships between education and society. We also recognize that students often
take classes that are directly related to and/or indirectly exposed to many forms of these
technologies. Last, we argue that many of these technologies comprise some form of
‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) which affords us (at the university) the opportunity to develop
new ways to improve capacities within our classrooms and our research.

This complicated relationship between technology and education has been long and
deep. For example, it is widely believed that while the advent of the alphabet
contributed to a new age of human evolution, it posed a substantial threat to traditional
education methods. In a recent article in the NY Times titled “What would Plato say
about ChatGPT?”, the author argued that Plato feared the impact of the written word
(the new technology) because he believed that it would lead to people without memory
(Tufekci, 2022). More recently (over 50 years ago) and more personally, one author of
this essay took biometry classes as an undergraduate student where he used
mechanical calculators to compute the required statistic(s); the professor, like Plato,
repeatedly stated that we needed to learn all requirements for computation to
understand the implications of the particular statistic. Fast forward 20+ years, students
in similar university-based statistics classes were told that the new computing systems
such as Minitab, SAS, SYSTAT, or SPSS would result in much ‘poorer’ students as they
would not have the knowledge to do their calculations. Now, students have to learn to
use even more powerful tools (e.g., Qualtrics, R, Python, Snowflake, Tableau, etc.) to
create, calculate and visualize statistics. While the impact of this change is certainly
debatable, we argue that this new technology offers the opportunity to design systems
that empower students to learn to ask and answer even more complicated (and
potentially more valuable) questions.