All tagged critical thinking
… I think of those conversations with my dad often. About the enthusiasm and curiosity they inspired in me. And the stark contrast in how I felt about technology and the future then to how I feel about technology and the future now. All of which was highlighted for me recently when I tapped my phone - my little doom machine - awake to send a message, only to receive a Google News recommendation about an article in Forbes magazine entitled, “When Knowledge is Free, What are Professors For?”
The conversation around generative AI in education is often dominated by a sense of apprehension. Will these powerful new tools encourage students to take shortcuts, offload their thinking, and sidestep the valuable productive struggle that leads to genuine learning?
The first post in this series gave an overview of Artificial Intelligence - a broad field that seeks to both better understand human cognition through computer models and to improve task-based computer models - and some of the different AI tools that have been developed. These different AI tools have different pros and cons that make them more or less suited to certain tasks. […] In this post I want to explore how generative AI, specifically chatbots, are used and how they affect our thinking and development of expertise.
Artificial Intelligence is many things. As a field of study, Artificial Intelligence seeks to both better understand human cognition through computer models and to improve task-based computer models (that is, where the goal is to improve performance on a task and not necessarily to model how a human would perform on that task). Artificial Intelligence is in many ways a sister-discipline to cognitive psychology which also seeks to better under human cognition.
Thinking is hard. ... To better understand the relationship between mental effort and negative affect, David, Vassena, and Bijleveld conducted a meta-analysis of 170 studies of mental effort (1). They looked at a number of moderators to see what factors have an effect on this relationship.
When we are presented with a stressful event, a variety of hormones, neurotransmitters, and peptides are released in our brains. All of these things work to activate systems to help us cope with the stressor. This initial response is typically referred to as the “fight-or-flight” response. If you were walking in the woods and actually saw three bears your fight-or-flight response would put your system on high-alert. Your body diverts resources from less-pressing matters, like digestion, and focuses on giving you superhuman strength and speed…
