Description

Bill Cope is a professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He and Mary Kalantzis are directors of Common Ground Research Networks, a not-for-profit organization developing and applying new publishing technologies. His research interests include theories and practices of pedagogy, cultural and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication. His and Kalantzis’ recent research has focused on the development of digital writing and assessment technologies, with the support of a number of major grants from the US Department of Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. The result has been Scholar, a multi-modal writing and assessment environment.

Mary Kalantzis was dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States from 2006 to 2016. Before this, she was dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. With Bill Cope, she has co-authored or co-edited: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2nd edition, 2012); Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009; Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research, Elsevier, 2009; Literacies, Cambridge University Press 2012 (2nd edition, 2016); A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Palgrave, 2016; and e-Learning Ecologies, Routledge, 2016.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 precipitated a panic among some educators while prompting qualified enthusiasm from others. Under the umbrella term “Generative AI,” ChatGPT is an example of a range of technologies for the delivery of computer-generated text, image, and other digitized media. This presentation reports on an application of Generative AI in the CGScholar platform, a community knowledge sharing and e-learning platform developed by researchers in the College of Education at the University of Illinois and Common Ground Research Networks. The presentation explores the intrinsic limits of generative AI, bound as it is to language corpora and their textual representation through binary notation. Within these limits, we suggest the range of emerging and potential applications of Generative AI in education.