For educators, is ChatGPT the new Wikipedia?
Image CC by SA 4.0, Author: James Rhoda
Last week, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT. Jenna Lyle, the deputy press secretary for New York public schools, reasoned that ChatGPT does not promote critical thinking and could be used to cheat on assignments.
I’ve seen this before. There was a time when teachers would tell their students not to use Wikipedia in school, and to some extent, they still do. The fear is that students will use it to cheat, copy-pasting answers from collaboratively developed articles perceived as “unreliable.” When I joined the Wikimedia Foundation as Education Program Manager in 2016, this was still the most common stance of classroom teachers.
Since then, the narrative has changed significantly. Of course, the quality of articles on Wikipedia has improved since its inception in the early 2000s, but that’s not why more teachers are embracing Wikipedia. Through outreach efforts of the vast community of Wikimedia volunteers, educators worldwide are supported to understand and use Wikipedia as a learning tool. Wikipedia is a familiar platform that facilitates learning across the curriculum, allowing students and teachers to practice vital 21st-century skills. Banning Wikipedia was never about learning; it was simply about the fear that students would use it to cheat. This fear is mainly present in rote, memorization-based systems relying on stock lessons and standardized assignments and tests. These systems have shifted their fear onto ChatGPT for the same reasons they banned Wikipedia and are repeating the same mistakes. Like Wikipedia, ChatGPT is simply a tool. It is neither good nor bad; it is all about how you incorporate it into teaching and learning that determines its value.
In 2020, my team at the Wikimedia Foundation worked with volunteer communities in three countries to launch “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” (RWiC). RWiC is a teacher training program that helps teachers embrace open pedagogy. Teachers use Wikipedia as an open education platform that helps students develop media and information literacy skills. We ask participating teachers to pose questions to students about content online, so they think critically about it: What makes a source reliable? How do we know? How can we tell if all perspectives on a topic have been covered equally in an article? What should we do if we find something inaccurate or biased on Wikipedia? We cover knowledge equity online and emphasize the importance of contributing locally relevant content to open projects like Wikipedia. After the 2020 pilot, 100% of teachers had positive attitudes about Wikipedia as a learning tool. Since the pilot, we’ve trained roughly 75 trainers in 30+ countries, reaching more than 10,000 teachers worldwide.
The discourse around ChatGPT is the same as the early discourse around Wikipedia and misses the point in the same way. If students can use ChatGPT to cheat, it’s not ChatGPT that’s the problem — it’s the assignment. 21st-century learning is about using technology to develop transferable skills that keep up with evolving technologies, preparing students for futures where the jobs of tomorrow don’t even exist. Students need to not only be using and creating with ChatGPT to be competitive, but they also need to reflect on AI critically. We need today’s students to think about algorithms and bias. We need them to reflect on why content online has massive gaps, with an understanding that the vast majority of the world’s knowledge is not yet online. We need them to contribute to building an internet that is inclusive and accessible to the majority of the world’s population. A global ban on ChatGPT stifles learning and is a lazy response to new technology we should have all seen coming.
What can school administrators do? What if teachers aren’t ready to dive head-first into teaching with ChatGPT? What we learned through helping teachers adopt Wikipedia as a tool is this:
- Develop open training resources that can be easily adapted, translated, and shared.
- Train trainers who can support intensive and ongoing professional development on new technologies as they emerge.
- Recognize teachers who upskill and incorporate new technology into their teaching practice.
- Facilitate learning communities that support, encourage, and share openly.
With these core tenants, we’ve seen teachers and students increase their understanding of online content and become passionate about Wikipedia and free knowledge. Some have even joined local user groups, contributing local knowledge to Wikipedia. We’ve seen teachers shift from teaching with rote learning to incorporating student-centered approaches after learning about open pedagogy. There is more opportunity to impact student learning in a positive way when we do the work to embrace new technologies. Let’s stop with the bans.
Want help thinking through your teacher training approach to new technologies? Get in touch.
Want to learn more about Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom? Check out our space on Meta-Wiki.
