Educational Process Might Need a Ride on Spaceship Earth

The flagship attraction of Epcot in Walt Disney World is Spaceship Earth – the big ball near the main entrance to the park. It’s a ride on which you travel back in time to the dawn of humanity. The initial scene on the ride is of early humans sitting around a fire in a cave and one painting on the walls — the first human opportunities for education and learning. 

As the ride moves forward in time it details the advancements of communication and our increased ability to educate. The ride doesn’t move fast, flip you upside down or bombard your senses. It’s completely, you guessed it, educational. 

Here in Happy Valley we are all about education. And as Labor Day is now less than four weeks away, it means that summer is quickly disappearing and Penn State students will be back soon. For some student-athletes the new college year has already started. On Sunday, I dropped our son off for the start of football camp in his first year in grad school. 

As far as college educations go, both our kids have outpaced their dad in the traditional academic metrics of their university lives. Both graduated with latin phrases (summa cum laude, magna cum laude), whereas their dear old dad was a believer in the old adage that, “C’s get degrees.” 

Let’s be brutally honest, I was not a good college student. I spent the first year and two terms (Penn State was on a “term” system back then), in the architecture program. After five terms of pulling all-nighters and doing everything I thought I could, I was told by the department that, “we believe your talents are better suited to two dimensions.” Oh well. Designing buildings was not to be in my future!

Notwithstanding that forced change of career choices, I didn’t do that well in many other courses either. But I was sometimes baffled when I took tests and the questions were seemingly neither covered in the book nor in class, causing me to answer incorrectly and putting me near the bottom of the grading curve. 

It was only years later that this topic became a running family feud – ever since the kids have been old enough to understand how the concept of testing fits in our traditional educational models. You see, it seems that someone we know, through membership in a letter society, had access to “test files” during college. And the tests in those files were exactly the same as those in one class. 

The feud revolves around cheating. Some members of the family believe having access to test files constitutes cheating – when you have the answers to the test in advance. Others believe that if the professor made the tests available and didn’t change them from one time to the next, then using the tests was simply studying. You just conveniently studied the exact material that would be on the test. I, for my part, was unaware of the existence of test files and when I became aware the proverbial light went on as I understood how students could do so well when test questions were obscure to say the least.

However, as a ride in Spaceship Earth demonstrates, our communication systems have gotten better over time, and testing has changed so that “test files” are a thing of antiquity to modern students. No longer do professors have to manually type tests and send them to the only photocopying shop in town well in advance of a test date – making the use of the same test over and over a timesaving mechanism – or run many extra copies on a mimeograph machine, and then save them for later use. 

But “testing” in educational circles not only involves answering questions, it sometimes involves expository writing. The classic thousand-word essay, for example. And it is this kind of testing that is now suffering from our advancements of communication.

Perhaps you’ve heard of ChatGPT. In its own words, here is what ChatGPT is: 

ChatGPT is a conversational AI language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, specifically GPT-3.5. GPT-3.5 is the third iteration of the GPT series and was designed to understand and generate human-like text responses. It has been trained on an extensive dataset consisting of a wide range of internet text to develop a general understanding of language patterns and context.

The primary purpose of ChatGPT is to engage in natural language conversations with users and provide relevant and coherent responses to their queries. It can be used for a variety of applications, such as customer support, content generation, language translation, and more. ChatGPT’s ability to understand context and generate contextually appropriate responses has made it a powerful tool for various real-world applications.

ChatGPT’s website is free and available to anyone with an internet connection. All you do is type in a question and the interface provides an answer. And, as you can see from the answer above, it’s not just a short, simple answer. It’s a thoughtful, informative, detailed answer. Meaning, if you are a student, one unwritten real-world application could be educational writing. Classroom writing assignments, essays, term papers. Maybe even a thesis or two.

As a further example of Chat GPT’s capabilities, given all the news during the last week about further Big Ten Conference expansion, I thought it would be appropriate to ask it, “Why should the Big Ten conference invite the University of Central Florida to be a member?” Below is the answer I received:

Keep in mind the above answer was generated in seconds. 302 words. Thoughtfully organized with section headings. Good sentence structure. Informative. Reasonably all-encompassing. In response to a single question. At my snails-pace typing speed, just typing it would have taken 10 minutes. 

I think you can see how the educational community might be a little concerned about the authorship of anything involving writing. Which is where we circle back to Spaceship Earth. 

Our traditional educational models involve testing individuals to verify that a subject matter has been understood so that institutions can confer their stamps of approval on that individual. With the continued advancement of our communications systems, there are now so many ways to skirt the boundaries of tests – even with written tests, as you can see above – that perhaps there needs to be a new educational model. 

As parents whose children homeschooled for a few years – resulting in a couple trips through Spaceship Earth while most other kids were in school – we’ve experienced the benefits of “unschooling.” Maybe “education” needs to be more collaborative instead of top-down. Maybe it’s time our educational process comes full circle and we go back to that campfire in the cave for enlightenment in how we teach and test.