26 A motivation for conversation
Claire Smith, Postgraduate Student, Education, United Kingdom
I use GenAI to summarise academic papers to help me to get a broad overall knowledge of those referred to by the course notes. I also use GenAI as a way of having a conversation about what I am learning. The course I am a student on is delivered online, so interaction with peers is limited, which means that discussing what I have learnt with AI is useful to me.
I discussed new concepts as a conversation with ChatGPT, asking whether certain theories are generally accepted or widely challenged, as the type of literature used by the course was often not backed up with statistical evidence and was more opinion based which is something I am not used to. I used ChatGPT to reflect on what I had learnt during my online learning. Some of the information delivered was shocking to me, and I sometimes felt that I needed a conversation to understand what it meant. I also generated self-learning check quizzes where I didn’t feel I understood what was being presented in asynchronous work. I effectively used GenAI as a personal tutor to guide my own learning.
GenAI helped me feel less alone in my online learning as I could bounce ideas around concepts
I found ChatGPT motivational, for example in generating quizzes on content, because I found independent reading difficult to concentrate on without a thought of needing to identify answers to key questions. GenAI helped me feel less alone in my online learning, as I could bounce ideas around concepts with the tool to help me to better appreciate them. I think ChatGPT is transforming learning in a similar way to the arrival of online literature searching 25-30 years ago. However, it’s taken some time for me to begin to use it, as I wasn’t familiar with what it could do e.g. conversations. I also don’t use it for assignments at all because I don’t want to risk doing something inappropriate.
