A newsletter on artificial intelligence and higher education.1
This changes everything …
In early December 2022 first reports started circulating that a free AI was writing fluid text on any subject you could imagine – and doing so at a level that was higher than what many of our students could achieve. A submission of an essay or report that would have received a solid passing mark for a midterm evaluation had become worthless by the end of term. Few of us have fully grasped what this means.
The imploding academy
got it right when he wrote “ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving". But once that killing is done, what will remain? What indeed, when the assessments we use assess something that is not the student, and when those assessments that we still trust in (exams, mostly) become irrelevant by the day: nice to master like a slide-rule, but not what the world does? The academy – in the form we have built it since the industrial age – has just imploded. We will kick around the empty husk for a while, wandering restlessly up and down the alleys, where the autumn leaves flutter.2Now what?
We need the best collective intelligence we can assemble to move forward. We need visions how to re-imagine the academy, we need concrete and practical advice, and that advice, we need that now. So we founded The Sentient Syllabus Project.3
“Syllabus”
In a way, the syllabus is at the core of our teaching. It is our mission statement, it regulates our interactions with our students, and it manages their expectations. Thus it’s a good starting point for change. We wrote some sample text and made it publicly available. You can hop on the Sentient Syllabus website to access it now, or you can wait for us to re-publish the contents here. But have a look before the winter term starts.
Go, have a look, let us know if any of this could be improved, but most of all: use it.
We?
We aim to assemble a collaborative of colleagues from institutions of higher learning around the world, who are passionate about thought, comment on and improve resources, and publicly share ideas. But this is not a time for name-dropping: it’s the content that counts.
Can you help?
The first thing that needs to happen is to get the word out. You can share this post, or you can tweet or toot about it. We use #SentientSyllabus #ChatGPT #AI #Education #HigherEd #University #Academia #Syllabus. Or you could cite this newsletter in your own writing.
What we do is free, and should remain free. If you subscribe to this newsletter (for free), you will have the same benefits as a paid subscriber. We are happy to be able to use the Substack mailing features to announce updates, or if we think of something interesting. But if you do support us with a paid subscription, you’ll help us do more (and pay for the server and domain name).
Cite: Steipe, Boris (2022) “The Sentient Syllabus Project”. Sentient Syllabus 2022-12-29 https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/the-sentient-syllabus-project .
To paraphrase Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn Day (Herbsttag).
Sentient Syllabus – mostly for the alliteration, but we understand it as a syllabus that is for and about sentient beings.