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Melissa Chadburn's avatar

Just listened to this podcast episode which might be of interest. https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/myths-and-metaphors-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

The guest spoke about how pervasive he anticipates these new Meta glasses will be in the future. I wonder what thoughts or ideas you might have about this as it relates to teaching.

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Mike Izbicki's avatar

One issue you don't get into is the signaling / credentialing value of education. I find the arguments in (e.g.) Brian Caplan's *The Case Against Education* that signaling is the main value of education to be pretty persuasive. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about how AI will impact the signal of a college degree, or how professors should incorporate AI into their classroom to influence this signal. Your discussion, for example, only focuses on how AI impacts student learning and ignores issues like how employers will interpret degrees and grades.

My sense is that the main reason that most faculty are "scared" of AI is really about how they perceive it to effect the prestige of college. This can manifest itself in issues like grade inflation or increased cheating that reduce the value of the signal of a college degree rather than the actual impact on student learning. (Although I'm definitely putting words into other professors' mouths here and the people I'm thinking of certainly wouldn't agree with that framing.)

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