Technology Use & Mindful Self-Regulation: Research and Practical Implications for the Classroom

[Music] you can hear me my name is Kendall Hartley I'll do a little more of an introduction in a few minutes here um Sarah you want to introduce yourself and then I'll jump back in sure my name is Sarah wolf and I am over in the eph is it l h e I always am get confused the letters keep changing but educational psychology is my background and I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the office of learning analytics um on an NSF Grant to study self-regulated learning and I am Kendall Hartley so I'm an associate professor of educational technology here in um College of Education I'm a former High School science teacher and that's really kind of how I got interested in technology and in self-regulation um let me I've been here at UNLV since the last millennium um so overview yeah what we're going to do I'm going to start a little bit with kind of Technology context some of the amazing things going on right now and maybe even some look at a bit of the trajectory I'll start with then a kind of a foundational discussion of self-regulated learning because I think it's a great framework for understanding these challenges around technology and then I'll tie that directly to the technology I've been focused on most directly uh the past few years which is the smartphone and then I'm going to pass it off to Sarah who's going to varyably describe mindful self-regulated learning she's done some fantastic work in this area for a relatively new scholar it's quite impressive but she's she's done and I'm anxious to let you hear about what she's she's done and then we're both going to kind of go back and forth on what we see as possibly some direct implications for educators and then we hope to move it on to a discussion this I inserted kind of at the last minute one of my former jobs was a Radio Shack salesman which they've been gone long have to know that that dates me even a little bit but I was so excited at one point I was able to sell one of these things this is a Tandy 1000 SX you get one of these for twelve hundred dollars it's pretty impressive however it didn't have a hard drive um it only and it only had I don't know like 256k of uh of ram but you can see down below there you could you could buy a hard drive you could get a 10 megabyte hard drive for 700 that you could add on to that thing um you compare that with that smartphone that's on the right there uh which is taking pictures that are 10 megabytes um in size and um and now even our watches are are even possibly more impressive so we'll fast forward a little bit here in the next slide I've got a chart that's summarizes kind of how quickly these things are changing if that Top Line there is a just kind of General survey around computers in the home see 1984 these things kind of get introduced and there's a relatively gentle slope until now we're up to virtually a hundred percent uh households with internet use at home that was kind of a similar thing that's actually the start of that is about where I started teaching High School too so internet in the schools too was starting about that point this um mid late 90s which again was a fantastic and interesting time but that took about 25 years into where we got to virtually everyone having the internet at home fast forward to the smartphone and Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone in 2007-ish so my chart starts a little bit after that but here you fast forward to 2020 2018 really when I came back from the graduate college and started doing research on what's this all mean for students to learn now that these smartphones are everywhere and then the next slide there's um so those things weren't fast enough now we look at how quickly some of these other tools that are quite familiar to us come online you see Facebook there this is the number of months it took to get to 100 million users so Facebook started a little slow and four years later there's a about 100 million people I'm actually using it and you can kind of work your way on down there Tick Tock we we started asking students what apps they were using in 2018 2019 Tick Tock didn't exist and before we know it it became the most popular thing amongst the students within that's nine months chat GPT which some of you have heard about that was actually introduced in November of last year and by January it had 100 million users and that hasn't seemed to uh have slowed down so things are changing rapidly so how do we deal with all this so in the next slide I'm going to start into self-regulated learning because when I came back and I wanted to restart my research plan came back from Administration it was clear to me that these tools existed in a way that was going to challenge Educators and students um significantly but I knew from my own work back in graduate school and even starting out that was my early work was around the internet and self-regulated learning what are the implications for students trying to learn online and learn in these kind of hypermedia environments we recognized believe in Elisa Ben Dixon and I recognize this is going to be a challenge for students who were poor self-regulators and so we we started with that so this but that that stuff existed self-regular learning um back in the 80s so what I use for my model of self-regulated learning there's several out there I'm very partial to this one because regulation of cognition and knowledge of cognition was came out of a paper written by Greg shraw our former colleague who unfortunately passed away a few years ago but he just did tremendous work and one of the things he did is he came up with along with Rayne Sperling who's out at Penn State this metacognitive awareness inventory and in a nutshell he was looking at these two components of self-regulated learning I didn't realize I have a third there I'll talk about that in a moment but this knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition were the two ways that he kind of mapped it out and had all sorts of interesting items to measure these things you know real briefly knowledge of cognition is these things that students understand about their own thinking and learning they understand strategies they know what might be effective strategies and they maybe know how to change up strategies they also kind of had a good sense of what's expected of them um and these are the types of things that really resonated with me as a high school teacher when I was observing students who were struggling what was the real difference between the students that were doing really well and those that had a a more difficult time and that turned out to be one of those things it's just their understanding of these strategies around for example formulas I was teaching High School science the density formula how could they manipulate it so they could solve for the variable that they they needed one you know some of the kids had the strategies around how they would manipulate that fraction um very easily whereas the others they had to go through kind of a long process that's an example of a strategy that was helpful regulation cognition was the second component was more kind of the management or you can think of it as like executive control of uh your own thinking um these most importantly kind of monitoring for understanding this thinking about your thinking am I really reading when I'm reading this am I really processing it do I need to kind of turn back the page a little bit to to figure out what I'm what I just missed and it also has to do with regulating on their focus so he came up with a great service him and him and others that asked some really neat items about those particular things the third component that I have listed here is actually comes from Paul Pentridge and his colleagues another outstanding scholar who unfortunately left us um all too early but he has something called the motivational strategies uh questionnaire for learning um I'm messing up it's mslq um within that he had something called Resource Management which is really focused more on kind of some of these more practical things like the environment that students are learning in managing cognitive load recognizing when things are too much and kind of cleaning up your own environment recognizing that you need to kind of hone in on things so I use these three things to study students first-year students at UNLV in particular at the academic success Center I worked with Dan gianutsis and Emily Shreve and Lisa Ben Dixon on a series of projects that ended up being really fruitful in terms of helping us understand what those students were bringing to the table when it came to their first year and just you know as a side note um these things are really important it turns out that when I wanted to predict uh their first semester gpas of students you can anticipate of course high school GPA is a great predictor of it so that one sure was strong and then you might think like uh acts and SAT scores and those types of things turns out that these items that I'm showing here are actually much more important than the act and SAT scores they're not as predictive as the high school GPA but they get pretty close so these are important things when we ask students these questions we recognize that this is going to have an impact on how well they do in their courtship I'm going to tie this into then what we start asking them about smartphones because I felt like this was a good framework for understanding how smartphones sell regular learning would be a good framework for us to understand how smartphones are impacting students so in the next slide I kind of broke down the um different areas that we asked students about when it comes to studying so while you're studying do you do multitasking we ask some questions do you watch watch videos while you're while you're studying and many of your students are watching videos um just on the side and they it just kind of becomes a part of their life I've watched my adolescence now young adults doing the same thing it just blows my mind they'll have headphones on too and they'll be listening to music we'll ask them questions do you pay attention to direct messages on your phone when you're studying and of course there's a range within there so that ends up becoming one component trying to ascertain the degree to which they're multitasking and then Focus we had another component where we'd ask them about um do they take explicit steps to to focus on their studying you know do you some of them would say they put their smartphone in the freezer or it's in the other room or they at least make sure it's powered down some students do that some students do not and as you might imagine it turns out to make an impact so if you go to the next slide there Young Buck you'll see these are the correlations then between these specifically the resource management component and these two items not surprisingly multitasking and Resource Management are at a negative relationship whereas we had a very positive relationship between focus and their responses to Resource Management surprisingly I don't necessarily see the same direct implications for a GPA that others have found um and it might be because we're a little more specific about what we're asking but it is clearly still related how well students will focus in on what they're studying and how well they'll do at the end of the semester and we had really good data on their scores at the end of the semester that's a little bit about self-regulation and smartphone use and we'll kind of broaden that a little bit but right now I'm going to turn it over to Sarah for a discussion of mindful self-regulated learning all right thanks so much Kendall mindfulness is the biggest buzzword I think of the past 10 years we see it everywhere and it promises all kinds of things to us I'm sure most of you have some mental idea or picture of what mindfulness might be and you know about I think about 22 of Fortune 500 companies are doing mindfulness at work right and and schools in the UK have introduced widespread mindfulness programs on a national scale through the British Parliament and places like the Mayo Clinic are really boosting its benefits and the more popularity that mindfulness gains really the more further reaching and diversely targeted its programs have become mindfulness is this term that's being employed with increasing frequency and it's holding increasing currency there's lots of apps these days I'm sure you've heard of some of them like calm or headspace it really is this billion multi-billion dollar industry of Wellness now um so I think that it's really important to note before we kind of go into talking about mindfulness where that word really came from it was a translation of the poly term Sati which is also sometimes referred to as smurthy and it was introduced in 1910 the word mindfulness was introduced in 1910 by this guy named T.S rice Davids in his translation of the mahasati patana suta which is a mouthful but if you're interested it's actually quite fascinating to read that translation and it does exist out there and it comes from this Buddhist tradition and the practices of mindfulness were really aimed at freeing oneself of suffering and that encompasses about 2500 years of History it spans a whole bunch of different continents and within that Maha Sati patanasuta the Buddha introduces these four frames of references for this practice there's Kaya the body vedana which is feeling chippa which is mind and Damas which are the mental contents and the idea is that through these frames of reference we can practice freeing ourselves of suffering so these are what are largely references the basic practices of contemplation during meditation which is something you might associate with the term mindfulness the mindfulness that we recognize today and the mindfulness that it's made its way mostly into mainstream culture and our and in education is a secularized version of this so Cabot Zinn and his work at the stress reduction Clinic which in founded in 1979 was really the first to make a major contribution towards the psychological literature of what mindfulness is his definition is mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally so contextualizing mindfulness that idea within the context of education has been my research interest and just human curiosity for about a decade now um I used to be a photographer and after a kind of Eat Pray love-esque trip far before grad school where I traveled to 26 different countries with just my backpack and did all that um I was photographing yoga for this photography project and I began doing these mindfulness practices learning about this concept I came back I was teaching in the K through third grade as an art teacher and I started doing mindfulness practices with my students just to help them relax not get so frustrated when they messed up their you know brush stroke on the kitten they were drawing um but I'll give you an example of what it looked like it evolved a little bit so I used to tell the kids you know hey imagine that your emotions are like a river and you're this boat that's floating along the idea being that that river is going to change and the kids would naturally assign different kind of emotions to that River and long story short at the end of the exercise I'd say okay well if I were to say you know I am mad or you know I am bad at math is that really true if we take our metaphor and they would naturally answer no right we're the boat that's on the ride of these emotions on the river so they would change those sentence structures they say I feel mad or I feel bad at math today and introduce this more temporal quality and dissociate free themselves of the suffering of identifying so strongly with that emotion of being bad at the thing and that completely could change you know their interpretation of that emotion and so it wasn't just me who was interested in this but I decided I had to go to grad school and I've been interested in this ever since um and researchers have really started to converge on this consensus as to what mindfulness manifests like in education and that's as an enhanced form of self-regulated learning or self-regulation but and so you can see in this diagram uh this there's sort of these three dimensions of mindfulness this idea of intention attention and attitude intention being a purposeful orientation towards learning something that's flexible and dynamic attention characterized by this focus on the present moment and attitude which is this non-judgmental and accepting attitude this kind sort of calm attitude and what really differentiates mindful self-regulated learning from just self-regulation or self-control is this quality of reperception or re-perceiving and what you can think of this like is is like a refresh button the ability to in the moment catch yourself you know looking at that phone and not be attached to it so you can just hit refresh refocus re-attune and that goes the same for your emotions and for your behaviors intentions attention and attitude um Shapiro describes reperception as allowing you to deeply experience each event of the Mind and Body without identifying to or clinging to it so thus our mindful self-regulated Learners might demonstrate improved Focus self-awareness Stress Management goal setting skills metacognition all those kinds of things all those advantages coming from this quality of reperception so I'm going to move forwards a slide here and just talk about a little bit more about distraction in online environments so just last year myself and some of my colleagues we we ran a study where we were interested investigating the relationship just between something very simple what we call a task a relevant visual distraction and this was just a gif of us like a door opening and closing that we've stuck on the page of every question so it was just there was no sound it was just this visual distraction we assigned a group to get that visual distraction when they took some s.a.t reading questions we assigned a group to get that distraction plus a countdown clock that would appear on the page a group that would just get the countdown clock and then we had a control group and what we found was presenting that visual distraction really increased reported distraction and having the clock present also increased self-reported time pressure we didn't see really a impact on the test accuracy between those experimental groups but this was a very low stake situation we used online participants through prolific there was no Stakes to this exam so we didn't see any changes in in their test accuracy but really the group membership deeply influenced the self-reported distraction and the time pressure and what we also found is that mindfulness seemed to alleviate time pressure in the absence of distraction so we measured mindfulness using the a questionnaire that I developed for my dissertation around mindful self-regulated learning and we found that when students that were more reported more mindful self-regulated learning they it seemed to like help alleviate that sense of pressure and distraction and this finding really does align with previous research that indicates that mindfulness could mitigate test anxiety exacerbated by time pressure possibly due to more like the affective qualities of mindfulness um and that thinking about this last point which is the relevance of the distractor towards negative affects so we use something that really isn't attached with much valence right there's not it's just a door that's opening closing on your screen you're not you're not attached to that in any way but where we take tests now anywhere I'm taking this meeting in my kitchen even though it doesn't look like it right there are so many distractions present in our life and especially the Ping on the cell phone with the email or the text message from your friend who wants to meet all of a sudden your attention is just constantly divided right and so what does it really mean when we show that just this simple visual distractor impact we saw those impacts on time pressure we saw those impacts on distraction because it's a very mundane distractor right we have much more pressing distractions and so it'd be I I'm interested in doing this study in a little bit more of a real world environment and seeing kind of what we see in terms of effects when we add those things in but for now I'm going to move forward and kind of talk about okay well what can we do so talking about some implications for using some of the strategies that we might devise from Mindful self-regulating learning principles or self-regulated learning principles in terms of helping our students or helping ourselves kind of manage these overwhelming distractions so I put my little refresh icon here to remind you right that we can always hit that refresh button so I'm just going to talk about sort of four possible things that we can do one thing is priming for distraction management so metacognitive priming is when we prompt our students before tests or ourselves we can do this ourselves before things like doing Zoom webinars right where we encourage our students to reflect on the most typical sources of distractions and maybe even ask them to develop a strategy or participate in a strategy that could mitigate them so while they're sitting down to take their tasks before the test begins maybe say hey stop put your phone in the other room right prompt them to do those activities that Kendall was Finding or helping students in terms of uh their Focus right and then I like to think of mindfulness as maybe needing activation right it's this idea we can really all buy into this idea oh let's not be judgmental let's not be attached to things let's be present in the moment but really being able to do that takes a certain amount of prompting or many many years of practice doing that thing so we could help as Educators we can help doing that we can prompt our students with just simple prompts to hey pause take a moment take a breath clear the desk clear your head right is this the best time to take a test we can we can ask things like that the very simple Act of taking a deep breath down regulates the nervous system it's not even necessarily A mindfulness practice it gets umbrella in mindfulness practice but the idea of take like really calming down the system before you engage in these learning activities before you engage in taking a test before or whatever it is before you need to go do something stressful the DMV right really you can you can do it at any point but it takes continual practice and prompting so I really encourage if we have teachers who are listening in on this to try this with your students try prompting them every time what happens if we always were to prompt our students to do this but how happens if any time somebody asks you or somebody said to you you know I uh I am bad at math if your response was always like like no I think you feel bad at math today right just reminding somebody of that and I like to think of it like how a teacher in the classroom would say things like when you raise your hand and say can I go to the bathroom and be like I don't know can you right it's that little language that little idiomatic change that might make a lasting impact continual practice over years over a Lifetime right and then we've got this third point of integrated approach to mindful learning so does this is designing learning activities that integrate mindfulness practices within an academic context for instance during study sessions you could encourage students to engage in brief mindfulness exercises to help enhance their focus a bit of the priming that we just discussed but within the context more of mindfulness or tying mindfulness exercise to specific subjects highlighting how being present can Aid in understanding those complex system excuse me Concepts and last is this idea of self-assessment and reflection so we learn so much simply by asking ourselves hard questions right being able to be honest with ourselves about the level that we're extract distracted if we can ask ourselves those questions and answer them honestly if we're prompted to regularly self-assess we become more and more aware of those distractors I think a big part of why technology in particular has become this increasingly distracting environment is because we're not as aware that it's it's a distraction right we're opening our computers to do to do something to engage in a zoom meeting or to engage in a test online and we we don't turn off those notifications right we don't take the time to recognize how those things really impact what we're doing in the moment and so regular self-assessment and reflection may help encourage your students or yourself to fine-tune your use it's a in itself a mindful practice to engage in self-reflection without judging right without judging yourself is sort of the caveat of it being something mindful and so with that I'm going to pass it back over to Kendall to talk about more implications on his end as a segue you know as Sarah's describing some of these too it reminds me how so many of these things become just so ingrained conditioned is a term that you hear a lot when it comes to mindfulness literature and other things and that we're just so conditioned to accept for example that somewhat high intensity part of our world we accept that the technology is always going to be there and until we kind of Hit the refresh button or step away from it a bit we have a hard time recognizing that this has become so ingrained so part of what we're doing so I think that's really helpful I think that's that's consistent with some of the challenges that I see around the smartphone and really our watches and other technologies that are coming forward we've we've been convinced conditioned convinced that these this is just the way things are you need to have notifications flying around all the time you need to be constantly in in touch and that's not necessarily the case so but let me follow along my uh Four Points I want to make before we head into a little bit discussion um I I'd like to think of the um you know in the big picture that I we kind of see ourselves as learning scientists we're studying the brain we're studying learning we're studying having stuff but there's really a lot of good reasons why we might ask our students to become learning scientists I've learned so much from my classes in cognition and instruction it just seems silly not to make sure that everybody gets exposed to these things not just researchers so so the broad picture might be the learning scientist or the students and help them become and study themselves to some degree and become more aware the other thing that I'm very interested in is what I call kind of the Reclamation of the smartphone we're paying for these things we're paying lots of money actually for these things we're paying a lot of money to services to get us access to it but yet it's not really seemed to be serving us right it seems to be serving others and we need to figure out how to essentially reclaim that smartphone right now it's um it's a distraction device it's what it does best is distract us it has all these different ways to grab our attention subtle ways not so subtle ways and then it's very well designed to maintain that attention too with the infinite scroll right so there's been all of this great research great research that's been done on how to make sure we are paying attention to this and that's fed into what you know what you've heard of the attention economy and I think that means that we need to kind of reclaim the narrative there we need to reclaim the device the notifications are a privileged not a right um that's that really it's amazes me how many different ways these um apps and stuff come up with somehow being able to to re-establish notifications somewhere along the line I made some sort of change somewhere and that clued them into oh we can now start to bug him again it's like no cancel no cancel but we have to become better at that and especially if it's challenging for us to study these things you can imagine what it's like for student spinner and and I should make kind of a developmental note too here I always that's always work with Lisa Bendix and she's a developmental psychologist among many other things and she's always helpful in terms of helping me understand that not everybody's a high school science teacher and some of these things are not necessarily apply at all different levels but I know at least with the Early College student and the high school student they need a lot of help around this to to kind of work their way up to a more mature use of the technology it's one of the things that got me interested in this initially was talking to two of my nephews who were graduated from college and asking them about how they manage it because they weren't necessarily the best students as I recall but and they use their phones a lot but they they learned quickly that they had to kind of Advance away from it and they weren't going to get to their goals if they if they didn't but they needed some sort of prompting and some sort of modeling to make that happen so reclaiming the smartphone I think we can use self-related learning as a guidepost for this technology as well as any of the other technologies that are going to come about going forward um the second thing is planning for Success so as in this learning scientist framework we can help students think about because oftentimes they know it's a problem it was really interesting to see the survey response to this the first year seminar students the academic success Center you know they're not totally oblivious to this being a challenge but they don't necessarily know what steps to take towards making things better and and so there's all sorts of I hate to suggest apps sometimes an app maybe would work but there's other ways to think about how they might be able to better manage their time and fortunately some of the devices Apple in particular does seem to be trying to do some more screen time management types of things to encourage folks to to think about how much time they're spending online and spending in front of a screen um unitasking we need to every time you hear about multitasking I really want you to hone in on unit tasking and we're I was in a two and a half hour meeting this morning and of course the the laptops are everywhere um yeah some of folks are taking notes but I know a lot of folks really think they're managing two things at once I'm sorry you're not you're and you're not fooling anyone either um so um but we're not we need to model that for students too we need to get back into unit tasking and recognizing that we're really best designed to focus in on one thing at a time and need to be helping students see that and they need to see us doing the same thing and then finally technology through the srl lens so the latest technology now that everybody's concerned with and this meeting was this morning was no different was what are we going to do about AI how are we going to manage this what are the students who have to do something and students are going to I think self-regular learning again actually has some implications here because it is about managing your own learning managing your own cognition and recognizing what strategies are going to be effective and not effective so for example with writing with AI what is the point of the writing assignment and hopefully the more well-regulated students going to have a better understanding of the writing assignment what the purpose is is it tenders you know many times I have writing assignments that are really just intended to help the student process what they read and to demonstrate you know that they have read it and they understand it and they can see some implications for it that's really the point of it they could have chat GPT or somebody else something else write that fairly quickly for them but they really doesn't get them any closer to understanding the things that we intended for them to to go towards so I I really as you can tell I feel like self-regulated learning as a model is a way to help us think about students learning in a way that focuses in on the things that are important that we can kind of demonstrate improve understanding and that is things like managing their understanding monitoring for their understanding managing their resources both cognitive and as well as what their environment is is like those can have a real impact so so those are some of the things that I think are helpful I think that's probably our last slide we do want to work into a discussion just so you have our contact information however this ends up at the end there I don't have the slides on my website just yet apparently but I'll certainly email them to anybody who's interested in them and my understanding is this will be um set up on on the YouTube channel I believe we have a YouTube channel that has the scholarship and practice videos on them so you could see them later so with that uh please feel free to put some questions up in the uh the Q a I guess if you have access to that I see um we have one right away it looks like kind of a direct distraction one Sarah do you want to start with that one sure yeah so we have a question how do you respond to a student who claims external stimuli are not distractions to them so they claim the music videos actually help keep them focused so this is a fantastic question thank you for for posing it um would I yes how do we how do we convince our students that hey it matters well there are some really compelling sort of studies out there there's one in particular um from I believe it from was from UCLA I'm gonna pull it up right now um that looked at multitasking and images of fmri brain studies so I always really like to respond to this question is like sure it might help but are you really going to learn that information so it's about kind of convincing our students that the process by which they truly learn and retain information is sort of embedded in this idea of we really do need to focus and attend to it so we can encode it in our long-term memories however when we have all these distractions and we might learn something but we're not going to really deeply learn that thing and so it might be a function of of telling your students hey you know you just need to be aware that that is happening and make the decision consciously like okay I don't want to or need to deep learn this particular bit of information just know that that's happening and so I'm going to drop actually this link in the chat so everyone this is the my favorite kind of thing to pull up and show students when this comes up is like brain scans say otherwise right you might not think you're distracted but this impartial evidence suggests that really you are even if you don't feel you are you are this is what's going on in your brain I just want to say one thing I add one add-on to the uh Nancy's question about the distraction so one thing that's interesting with our study we asked students about that do you use listen music while you're studying um and it ended up being a bit of a confound because if in terms of the relationship with kind of what we see as a positive self-regulated learning strategies and through their open-ended comments we kind of could tease out a little bit here where and you can Envision and actually actually a positive use of listening to music while you're studying and that is if the environment is more distracting than what you're actually listening to so if you're for example instrumental music um something calming but yet you have to again we have to remember not everybody gets a room of their own right not everybody has the opportunity to study in a place where they don't have um their control over their environment so so there actually is the possibility of that being ineffective although most of them are listening to instrumental music and I think as soon as you get away from that I think it gets to be a bit of a challenge so that might lead into actually the next question here which is can you address the impact of covid-19 and self-regulated learning so I'm I'm not in totally unsure what you mean by the impact of on a self-regulated learning there was an asterisk there so impact of covid-19 on self-regulated learning well uh a positive outlook on it I think would be that covid-19 really exacerbated how important self-regulated learning is towards Student Success at least in the eyes of Educators and and parents and I think that that has actually definitely helped in the field of mindfulness where this idea of oh these affective components of learning are things that really do matter right student mental health anything that can sort of help support our students in the affective dimension of self-regulation as well as the cognitive and Behavioral um do you have anything to add to that Kindle no I think that's true I'm not sure of Howard's yeah certainly it it did emphasize it um so that it exacerbated the challenges that's what got Lisa and I understood in this not covid-19 but just leaving letting students kind of out into the wild so to speak on these um online learning materials and it's it's obviously going to vary a great deal depending on the background and skills of the student and the developmental level as well so it was huge and it's you know talk about context coping 19 by basically shutting everything down and sending everybody into this mode um you know in a matter of days or weeks really put us through a lot of changes so okay we have quite a few questions so I'm going to try to hit some more here Bridget noted that she was teaching ASL college southern Nevada students are easily distracted by the response and it's yeah absolutely that's what got me interested in this because I know it's I'm having a tremendous impact and it's it's really one of these places where we can really be very helpful to students and our peers by the way to help them kind of think more about what what's actually happening in there um okay and then uh share shuei has a question about implications of AI machine learning on self-regulation and what you think it how it would think of a shaped learning for the future yes it's it's pretty amazing folks and if you haven't messed around with these things um it's it's uh interesting to say the least and it's really I think fascinating um and I know there's some um some concerns and maybe rightfully so in terms of we thinking about how we manage our classrooms and we do assessments and we um encourage students to learn but I do see suffering and we're myself and a couple others are writing a paper around how how does the idea of suffering and learning shape how somebody might learn from AI we talked in educational technology circles about kind of the two Sigma problem if you can have a one-on-one tutor on any material if that if that person is an expert in that area they essentially can get you two standard deviations ahead of um you know maybe the more broad class and the more standard instructional approach so it's there's a lot of potential there and I've been able to learn a lot from the AI tools that I'm playing with um you know for example with the programming so you say you know not only about specific topics but give me a plan for studying programming and there's a certification test for python for example so I tell it I want a plan for this certification test and pass it and it'll gives and I say I want to pass this in six weeks it gives me a plan for it and then I just go step by step through and I say okay well now describe the subtopics in this first week here and what kinds of things should I be able to do and it gives me that and then I say okay we'll explain that topic to me and give me an example and it gives me an example it gives me the code and then I try to do um I ask it to give me a problem and it'll respond back and say now of course there's a lot of self-regulated learning going on for myself to do that I have to be at a certain point I have we haven't talked about motivation which is kind of another lay of the self-regulation world but it's really interesting to think about um and I the the this can extend in a lot of directions right um you know at this point do we admit that we actually this whole presentation was AI generated um and it turns out actually that we're not even here uh that the voice has been AI generated and I know it sounds far-fetched but it's it's not if you look at kind of the latest tools of what people can do with voices and the graphics and then I'm just asking it to um ask him whatever device or topic to give you something um on a particular topic and and if you haven't tried this try it in your own areas of expertise uh it's it can be pretty impressive it does still most of them still hallucinate but we're looking at uh version 1.0 here folks um and uh we're actually looking at maybe version 2.0 because they come out

so fast and improve so quickly so I'm not sure I know all of the information there's 4.0 in chapter right so chat GPT is actually considered 4.0 the first one we saw was 3.0

um and it's it's improved by Leaps and Bounds so yeah I mean these are big wonderful questions and I think they're questions that I ask myself in terms of okay how how what's appropriate how should I use AI how can I use AI to streamline some things that maybe would be more difficult but to the point of Sue who just wrote something in the chat editing AI outputs might be very instructive and I've found that as well I mean I went into looking at some of these Chachi BT things um from a very skeptical kind of scrutinizing or place and I did find that the one of the first tasks that I gave it was I had some APA formatted citations I needed I needed to put them in Sage Harvard for a research article that I was submitting so I I copy pasted the APA ones in there and I said hey change these just the formatting to be sage and what I found is that the AI took a lot of Liberties in changing it those dlis that were in there were suddenly linked to different papers they hallucinated extra papers in my list that made a lot of sense because they took like names of authors that would write that paper and they put them in the same line and I went through and was like whoa I couldn't believe what was happening um and so editing AI outputs I think what I'm emphasizing with my students is these are amazing tools that if we can use them well can really enhance our learning experiences but and also enhance you know like help us time manage right there's certain tasks that AI can do that are appropriate for AI to do but if I'm going into using AI with this Baseline skepticism right with this Baseline knowledge already of what I'm looking for in that output right and I think the more we can emphasize that we need to be able to discern that the output is valid and reliable to deal with these things like these hallucinations that we're seeing um is going to be a really important instructional Avenue as we move into this age of AI that we've suddenly been thrust into so Bridget has a comment about which I think is interesting to ask about grammarly and I'm not familiar with word 10 but I am familiar with grammarly and and you may what you may not have seen this in um unlv's instantiation of Google docs but if you're outside of our UNLV one it's been this kind of magic right is showing up which is essentially AI built into all of the Google tools so your students when they're actually writing in Google Docs they're actually being prompted to use these things um already so it's and grammarly is interesting because grammarly and you even think of just the sentence completion stuff that we get on Gmail and and other tools that's really the beginning of that's that's really what AI is doing is it's doing a prediction of what it thinks sounds plausible and what based on you know whatever knowledge it has whatever it was whatever texts and words it was built on it's trying to come up with something plausible that's why we get hallucinations is because it's not necessary I look and depend on how you tune it and depending on what tool you use it it'll it'll hallucinate a little bit more but you can go from word completion to grammarly which ends up checking things but grammarly actually now has an additional tool where they will um you give them a prompt and they will actually write stuff in so it's actually being embedded so chat open AI is a company that they did chat GPT they've also done Dolly which does the image editing they have several other tools but the biggest thing that's happened is they're selling this as an API and the application programming interface so that all the other tools that we're using are pulling from it so it's not just that students are going to go to open Ai and get a chat GPT account going it's there it's going to be built within whatever tools they have I do have one more thing to add to the AI and it's with respect to shaping self-regulated learning practices or learning in the future which is a fantastic question um this idea that you know these prompting things these metacognitive prompting things these implementing strategy self-regulated learning strategies if we can have a i detecting different levels of Trace data and how our students are navigating their courses that we might expect to map on to certain dimensions of self-regulated learning right they're not oh they're not planning they're not utilizing these resources it might help us build predictive models in the moment to catch students who are falling behind or students who need assistance or need tools to support them in their learning AI might become embedded in these Learning Management Systems as some kind of you know almost like personal assist learning assistants to be able to keep track of how you are doing in the course and also your patterns of behavior based off of what you're clicking on Etc so I think there are a lot of applications of AI that we might start to see in the next couple of years as we kind of cross collaborations happen I know self-regulated learning researchers have been looking at this idea of Trace data and learning analytic data and how can we use this data to predict who's going to do well who we need to like convinced to go to academic coaching those kinds of things AI might be able to be folded into that as sort of help in the personalized learning experience and that's certainly an application of AI that I would be incredibly interested in I don't know too much about AI I would be able to take that API from Jackie Beauty and make one of those if anyone is here listening from the math department who is interested in that I would be so interested in chatting with you more but I think did we have one more question in the Q a here oh Howard Howard just put one up and I'm not sure if we actually addressed all of those uh I knows Bridget had um how can I prevent the student's distraction in my future classes I think I just I think again the developing the learning Sciences means we need to talk about these things we need to kind of come up with some ground rules um in classes and decide what are the implications of having these devices available there's research that demonstrates that just the mere presence of somebody else's smartphone is a distraction because it gets you thinking about what is coming through on your phone um and again it's a developmental thing obviously it's going to vary a great deal if you haven't been in an elementary school classroom of late my understand I haven't either but I have a lot of work with a lot of teachers who have and there's a lot of smartphones in those Elementary School classrooms anymore so that wasn't the case when I was there but and then the high schools of course they were Banning them for a long time but they gave up on that and they they don't even allow them to confiscate them anymore for whatever reason so I don't know if I have a great um answer to that but certainly it's worth a discussion and trying to get students engaged in you know what's the point of this thing and why do I need it in this next 50 minutes what's going to happen and and what am I going to do to help whoever this happened to um from here that we couldn't have done um a decade ago when we didn't have that that thing so possibly the last question here um from Howard is what are some disadvantages of AI and and I have been reading a lot about this and listening to folks who supposedly are kind of um forward thinkers around us and there are a lot of people that are concerned um that you may have seen there was an open letter from a bunch of tech folks that's asked for a pause in the development um there's you know there's concerns about how far could this these things go and you can Envision scenarios where you know good thing about some of the um you know dictators and such that have been around is they're not very smart or but once you get AI and being incredibly smart and just think how smart well much much smarter than any of us um in in everything and so um you give them access to the give it access to the internet you give it um all the tools it needs to to program and then people are concerned about what how far that could go that's kind of the more doomsday one the others it has to do with kind of the Wally phenomenon is that the name of the movie yeah the movie was Wally where basically everybody just gets fat and lazy and we're hanging out letting the the ship run our show um and and even at the at the level of the things that we're doing now um whether you're a student or you're a researcher or um is there you can kind of get this bit of a feeling of uh dismay that's like well why would I go make that it seems like that's going to be just obsolete in six months or something or um because that's how powerful some of these these things are so there's probably other disadvantages to AI too I bet Howard has a few foreign okay that puts us right at uh five o'clock I'm happy to hang around a couple of minutes if there's any more questions um but I do want to make sure there's a little bit of closure for folks who want to um check out we have our contact information on the last slide there and I really appreciate you all coming I appreciate Sarah joining me on this like I said she's a superstar and someday we're all going to say hey I knew her when she was a year promise you I don't know about that maybe AI will help us all be more mind maybe there'll be AI apps telling us to pause and relax and help us regulate our emotions thank you all thank you all for being here foreign [Music]

2023-09-18 02:01

Other news