From the Leadership Team

A World of Opportunity

What an amazing world in which we live! 

 The gifts God has given people to be able to create and imagine such incredible things constantly leaves me in awe. Such gifts! 

Such responsibility for how we use them.

One of these quite mind-blowing concepts in recent years has been the expansion in access to AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools. November 2022 must be one of those dates that history will reflect as a turning point. It was the time that ChatGPT was released as a free research preview to the world. 

This was the every-persons first real taste of AI. Just two short years later it seems hard to believe that it hasn't always been there (possibly a bit like COVID…).

Within the College, conversations have been evolving and last year, much of the College's philosophy and guidelines for teachers in particular, was created and shared. 

This year the work has started at Middle School assembly to formalise our education about AI and its use. This work will be shared with the Senior School in coming weeks. It is an interesting tightrope to walk for education. Students and staff have to balance the benefits with the challenges and discernment is playing a more significant role than ever before.

AI can offer helpful supports for students and staff. Students can ask an AI tool to design a series of revision questions to support their test revision, ask for a glossary of key topic words and meanings to be created to support their vocabulary development and subject specific terminology. Students can ask AI to add to their brainstorm thinking, do grammar checks and suggest alternatives, summarise complex research to give context and general meaning of the text and even design relevant backgrounds for their presentations. In so many ways AI can support inclusion and equal access to support learning.

The critical words here are to `support learning'. The thing AI cannot do, is to learn for us. It can write an essay for us, design an artwork for us, write a poem for us. It can do the work for us but it cannot learn for us. The processes involved in learning are far more complex than just finding information and sharing it. Learning involves understanding, reasoning, practising, knowing, reflecting, applying and above all effort. A learner needs to do these things themselves. It is a personal and active process.

Regardless of our cognitive ability, AI tools can be used to support learning and enhance it. The challenges come when we confuse doing the work with learning. This is where we get shaky on our tightrope. At what point is our AI use not supporting our learning but rather inhibiting it? When are we handing our learning over to something else to do it for us and not with us? An Olympic runner does not watch someone else run the track, work in the gym, eat nutritiously and then expect to be able to be competitive in the race themselves.

This is just the start of the thinking we need to be doing in relation to AI in our College. We need to learn how AI works in order to be able to use it effectively and safely. We need to consider some of the broader ethical questions that such technology raises. To do all this, we need to work together, to ask the hard questions and interrogate our justifications, challenge our thinking and above all, learn because AI tools cannot do it for us.

“When you eat or drink or do anything else, always do it to honour God” 

1 Corinthians 10:31

Sandra Barry

Director of Learning