Hot on the heels of C&Ding the agent that logs into Canvas and does work for students, Instructure releases an agent to do teachers' work for them.
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@mttaggart @da_667 As someone on the front lines (and who has it WAY better than K-12):
a) AI has basically made it impossible for us to use the majority of our traditional forms of assessment, particularly in freshman and sophomore courses. As a result, most of us are moving back to more high stakes testing.
b) I haven't personally seen "AI will replace teachers" in higher ed yet. We are, however, increasingly told that AI is going to solve our problems by people that have no idea how AI works or what our problems actually are since they haven't spent much time in the classroom in years.
The problem is that higher education Boards of Trustees are usually made up of the same people who either shilling for the AI hype train or are being inundated with AI hype spam 24/7.
@nerdpr0f @mttaggart that's more or less the experience in K-12 as well. Buncha people who have no idea what in the hell they're talking about assuring teachers that AI is the future.
So far, my wife has gotten away with no using it in the classroom at all, but I can't imagine its been that easy in other places.
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@da_667 @mttaggart That's actually kind of how it was for me going from academia back to industry. It's ridiculous.
@cR0w @da_667 @mttaggart Likewise, when I was looking at making the hop. I was repeatedly told (and am still somewhat frequently told) that my experience in tech through teaching is more or less useless. Those folks are perfectly happy hiring my students, though.
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M mttaggart@infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@nerdpr0f @mttaggart that's more or less the experience in K-12 as well. Buncha people who have no idea what in the hell they're talking about assuring teachers that AI is the future.
So far, my wife has gotten away with no using it in the classroom at all, but I can't imagine its been that easy in other places.
I have one assignment in one class where I require the use. Basically, pick an LLM and use it to generate a small webapp without including anything about security in your prompt. Then, evaluate the security of the web app generated and see what needs to be done to fix the problems it inevitably includes.
Beyond that, I've kind of given up the fight a bit. In many of the other assignments - like most of the assignments in my reverse engineering class - it's really not that helpful. For the ones where it is, I require them to cite their chats while making it clear that "AI told me" isn't a defense for getting something wrong and that copying an answer wholesale isn't acceptable.
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@cR0w @da_667 @mttaggart Likewise, when I was looking at making the hop. I was repeatedly told (and am still somewhat frequently told) that my experience in tech through teaching is more or less useless. Those folks are perfectly happy hiring my students, though.
@nerdpr0f @da_667 @mttaggart I heard that a lot too but I was fortunate enough to have a good relationship with our advisory board, which was mostly former students of mine, and I had successful students who liked my classes enough to help get me interviews where they were working. That didn't land me the job I'm in now but it was really helpful for the job search process in general.
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@cR0w @mttaggart I can tell you that salaries here in michigan are fucking GARBAGE. and that my wife with 10 years experience was told to give up her steps when she transferred into the current district she is in.
Imagine as a tech worker, you have 10+ years of experience, and you're searching for a senior role. You expect to get paid more or better than your current salary, but they tell you flat out that your experience isn't worth shit, to give up on making more money, and start over from the bottom of the totem pole.
> Imagine as a tech worker, you have 10+ years of experience, and you're searching for a senior role. You expect to get paid more or better than your current salary, but they tell you flat out that your experience isn't worth shit, to give up on making more money, and start over from the bottom of the totem pole.
That's kinda what it's like right now. Twenty five years in and I'm being told that they'll take me on as an intern but that's it.
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@nerdpr0f @da_667 @mttaggart I heard that a lot too but I was fortunate enough to have a good relationship with our advisory board, which was mostly former students of mine, and I had successful students who liked my classes enough to help get me interviews where they were working. That didn't land me the job I'm in now but it was really helpful for the job search process in general.
@cR0w @da_667 @mttaggart I didn't have to leverage networks, luckily. Despite being teaching faculty, I had enough extra service gigs (being a sys admin, running an "applied research" (ie: consulting) lab) that I was able to get passed the experience barriers directly. It was definitely a slog, though, and took a lot of work per-application.
Ultimately, I got a couple of offers but chose not to make the hop as, around the same time, there were a bunch of student loan forgiveness initiatives that ended up allowing me to give my loans forgiven. In retrospect, I'm definitely glad. I'd have been the newest person and each one of those places has had layoffs since.
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Hot on the heels of C&Ding the agent that logs into Canvas and does work for students, Instructure releases an agent to do teachers' work for them.
Even in this early form, it's clear that the desire is to make as much of teaching as possible an automated system. That is an anti-human agenda, and should be rejected out of hand.
I'm not against automating (or just, y'know, abolishing) busywork. This ain't that.
@mttaggart they somehow put rubric creation among what they refer to as low value work.
JFC did no one consider this at all? How can you possibly automate assessment like that??? Do they not know what the purpose of a rubric actually is???
