There is power in high-quality content. It connects us.
- Words used to express the human condition that an author has translated into a relatable story…
- Words used to explain the arduous work involved in research and discovery that led to improving humankind…
- Words used to support individual ideas to sway the reader using specific examples…
Words, in any language, are powerful. They have a certain je ne sais quoi that includes an underlying passion found in texts written for real-world audiences.
Curriculum writers across the world understand this core concept of quality content and its relationship to quality education. According to the report put out by Common Core, Why We’re Behind: What top nations teach their students but we don’t: “Despite the vast cultural, demographic, political, and geographic diversity of Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, their educational systems all emphasized content-rich curriculum and commensurate standards and assessments.”
The reason for using high quality content, especially in English Language Arts here in the U.S., is simple — we want to create literate students. Most state standards, including the Common Core, describe a literate person in the 21st Century as:
- “seek[ing] the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews.”
- “establish[ing] a base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter by engaging with works of quality and substance.”
- “grappl[ing] with works of exceptional craft and thought whose range extends across genres, cultures, and centuries. Such works offer profound insights into the human condition and serve as models for students’ own thinking and writing.”
Since the goal of education is to create productive citizens of the world, then, logically, students need exposure to a variety of content written for other purposes than to meet an isolated educational skill. However, for many EdTech curriculum development teams, the more cost-effective method is to hire content writers to generate new, original content. Many argue that this approach suffers from a lack of richness and authenticity found in words written for larger audiences at different times and in different places. Although there are reasons to disagree with the use of the content they create, it is safe to assume that the standard for these writers is to know facts, to remain unbiased, and to have the students’ best interest in mind.
Now EdTech companies, and some schools, use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate short stories and poetry. Of course, there is room for experimentation with AI tools. Many teachers find tools quite helpful with rudimentary tasks, but there are limits to what such a technology can produce, especially when students are asked to read texts manufactured by AI. Frankly, I do not trust AI to know facts, remain unbiased, and to have the students’ best interest in mind.
I cannot emphasize enough that AI is not yet regulated. AI systems, including those based on large language models, are only as good as the input data and can easily become biased if given improper, incorrect, or misleading information. A research paper in Nature recounts a series of experiments to determine how AI affects humans. The study revealed “a feedback loop where human–AI interactions alter processes underlying human perceptual, emotional and social judgements, subsequently amplifying biases in humans.”
In the case of AI generated content, it’s all too easy to share what is believed to be known, and bad content being input into the system is only going to build off itself to create less engaging, potentially harmful content for students to analyze. I believe AI is a useful tool to assist teachers, but best suited today for the more mundane tasks like drafting an email to a parent or gathering data to analyze a student’s progress.
When it comes to quality curriculum content, there’s a reason why we love some texts which have stood the test of time — they speak to use in ways procedurally generated content, so far, cannot.
- It may be a speech that swayed millions of people to…
- It might be the final article based upon hours of research that….
- It could be a story that captured human experience in such a way that it…
- Or it could be a poem with a memorable line that connected a boy and his grandmother.
In the end, quality content has a heart.