The Value of Vague

"Hey Google. What should I do with my life?" If only the decision-making process was that simple.

This semester (January - April 2023), I am teaching a course called HEALTH 100: Foundations of a Healthy Lifestyle. It is a service course, meaning that I have students from all faculties (arts, engineering, environment, health, math, and science) and I have students from 1st - 4th year of study. One of the learning objectives of this course is for students to be able to critically appraise information and their own health. How do I get them to do this? Through reflective writing. Which they are unfamiliar with, and do not like. To my students I say: "You're welcome."

In the planning phase for this course, I considered ways to best support student success on this major assessment component. I could provide links to critical and reflective writing resources. I could verbally provide an example of how to connect information. But do I provide an exemplar? This was designed to be a scaffolded assignment, so should I scaffold the grade weighting? I ultimately decided the best way to support them was to not support them (in a sense) and let them figure it out on their own.

I told my students at the beginning of the term that many would struggle with the reflective writing assignments since critical reflective writing would be new to them - and that is OK! That is why we have 4 of them (worth 10% each). After they received feedback and marks on the first one, many students were frustrated. Some mentioned that they would have liked an exemplar. I took the opportunity to be transparent with my students and explain why the assignments are set up the way they are. First, if I provide an exemplar, what do you as the student do? They all agreed that they work to the example. Right. So, does that really help us to develop our critical reflective writing skills? No, not really - the class reluctantly agreed.

I also shared with students my thought process on how I determined the weighting of each assignment. I considered weighting assignments 1-4 at 5, 10, 15 and 20% respectively. This way, the earlier ones where we are still learning to reflect critically are worth less of our grade. BUT, then you as the student are more likely to view the later ones as "more important." Or that the content we are reflecting on as more important. This is not the case. Okay, so that is out. What if I drop the lowest of the 4 assignments? I could even say that as long as all 4 are submitted, I'll drop the lowest one. Great. But what do busy students do? The class agreed they would probably put low effort into one of them as they wouldn't care because it would be dropped. Since I value the purpose of the assignments and more importantly, I want YOU, the students to value the purpose of the assignments, what am I left with? As far as my brain can compute, equal weighting of all assignments.

I tried to impress upon my students the "value of vague." In this life, we will be faced with complex problems that are large, vague in nature, and un-Google-able.

Here's the example we worked our way through in one of our lectures:

"You are a graduating student and you and your partner have been together for 2 years. You have been applying to jobs and your partner has been applying to master's programs. You received job offers in Hamilton Ontario, Toronto Ontario, Halifax Nova Scotia, and Sydney Australia (you applied on a whim to that one).

Holy smokes Batman, how do we decide which job to accept? The points of consideration that we came up with as a class are below:

Salary	Livability of the city	Permanent vs. Contract Position
Benefits Package	Housing Availability	Perceived Job Satisfaction
Pension Plan	Housing Affordability	Commute Time
Relocation Funding Support	Transportation options in the city	Workplace Culture
Proximity to Family & Friends	City Recreation: sports, concerts, trails, restaurants, gyms, etc.	Company Reputation
Vacation Time	Parental Leave	Sick Leave

But wait, you haven't even factored in your BAE (before anyone else) yet! What if the only master's program they were accepted to was in Halifax, NS, and that employment position is really the last one you would choose to accept? What decisions do each of you make regarding your education, employment, and relationship status? I hate to break it to you but Google, Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT can't give you an answer. Trust me - I've tried! See below:

While I personally believe in the value of vague as a means to teach students to think analytically, thoughtfully, critically, and creatively, I'm not sure they were really buying what I was selling. Being transparent with students is a large component of my philosophy towards teaching and education. I'm happy to continue to encourage students to value the process of learning over their GPA, but I'm not sure I've fully figured out how to do this. Maybe this is an area of vagueness that college and university instructors must value, and further explore themselves, in order to continue to help our students navigate this mindset.

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Let's Chat about ChatGPT

The rise of the machines is upon us, at least in terms of generative artificial intelligence (AI). I'm sure it's on everyone's mind - parents, students, instructors, educational developers, those who work to support students in academic support units, researchers, journal editors... and anyone else that I am missing - you too!

In my current role as an Instructional Developer this is a topic that many instructors (and students) want to know about and want to know how to navigate. Google Maps to the rescue! Maybe not.

My two cents, which is worth far less than that, is that ChatGPT and generative AI is not going away. If anything, it is going to continue to improve, learn, and grow in its availability and accessibility to the general public. It really isn't any different than the "boom" of the internet, online search engines, and Wikipedia. Policing the use of AI will be futile and frustrating. And while we may have software that can detect human vs. AI generated work, how long will this detection be effective for? Are we quickly and increasingly at the risk of falsely accusing students of breaching academic integrity due to the competency (or incompetency) of the detection software? Which is the greater of the two evils?

A colleague of mine pointed out a quote by Carl Jung, which might apply in this case:

"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."

In my opinion, the focus for instructors shouldn't be on preventing students from using AI as a resource. The focus should be on teaching students to be critical of the information gained from the resource. Sure, it can write that 5-page paper on whether or not safe injection sites are beneficial for those trying to manage addiction, but WHERE did the information that supports / negates the argument come from? Reputable, peer-reviewed journal articles? Other opinion pieces? Buzzfeed? Although, I do love me a random Buzzfeed quiz from time to time..... Sometimes it is important to know Where Should You Build Your Dream Cabin in the Woods? Although, based on that title, I would have thought - you know - the woods? I digress. All of the information that we could want is available to us in our back pockets on our smart phones. Maybe the focus on the memorization of content is less important than learning how to truly be critical of that information and learning the limitations and pitfalls of generative AI.

One last point to ponder before I leave you. We know that academics are already using ChatGPT in order to help with the writing of grants, research papers, assignment prompts, and exam questions. Is it not just a wee bit hypocritical to tell our students "thou shalt not use the AI for your tertiary academics" when we ourselves are using in an academic and professional setting? If you're not sure - just ask ChatGPT. I'm sure it has an answer.

The real question now is, which path do you choose?

Still from movie: "The Matrix", 1999