{"id":158,"date":"2025-02-06T00:02:49","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T00:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecoreai.whitworth.edu\/?p=158"},"modified":"2025-02-06T00:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T00:22:11","slug":"taking-a-page-from-an-old-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecoreai.whitworth.edu\/?p=158","title":{"rendered":"Taking a Page from an Old Playbook: A Bonkers Synthetic Proposal on Inviting Collaboratively Active Learning at the Dawn of LLM-AIs\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Matthew Bell, 20 January 2025<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

mbell@whitworth.edu <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t resist opening this reflection by going meta and relating an experience I had just as I began to write my first draft. I begin almost anything by first locating where in my filesystem I wish to save my creation; I then click the button labeled \"\", usually on the upper left-hand side of my window on my Windows 11 laptop. This gives me several options, say to create a new folder or a new Word document. That\u2019s the option I took today as I set out to start a conversation on a strategy for inviting students to be collaboratively circumspect on where, when, and how they use AI tools to write, well, anything! Lo and behold, what was the very first response Microsoft Word gave as it jubilantly booted to life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, you read that right: Word immediately pushed me to use Copilot to begin my draft before I had written a single character<\/em>.i<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the world we now ask our students to learn in. We assign them to write code or articles or posters or art or music as stages in a larger process of discovering themselves vocationally in the world. We also orient them to tools to enable that discovery. Tools, however, are not neutral. As the proverb goes, if you only have a hammer then you will try to use that hammer to do everything \u2013 even and hilariously for tasks to which hammers are not suited. Tools are intrinsically biased to optimize specialized tasks in particular contexts<\/em>. I do not invoke the category of \u201cbias\u201d here pejoratively. Bias is not prejudice. The postmoderns are surely right when they say that everyone and everything operates with bias. This is no more intrinsically bad than a hammer. However, it does mean that we need to be circumspect and critical in our choice of tools. For the purposes of this article, I want to argue \u2013 heuristically and hopefully charitably \u2013 that the spirit of the age is short-circuiting the development of those powers of circumspection and criticism. We, as teachers, need to pursue countercultural<\/em> strategies for rewiring our education systems and our students \u2013 and, frankly, ourselves as we research and write \u2013 to rediscover our shared, critical powers for reflective creation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll start with a couple more observations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The context of this blogpost\u2019s publication is Whitworth University, a Christian<\/em> university. Also, my own background skillset is schizophrenically interdisciplinary, combining computer science with theology.ii<\/sup> So, my method in approaching this conversation will be to take a page from Christianity\u2019s pastoral-theological (and missiological) playbook. Since the goal is to engender a countercultural response within the AI revolution, I\u2019ll set my imagination to explore free-range on how Christianity, at a critical point of threat and decay in late ancient culture, set out to be generatively countercultural, interestingly in ways that arguably recreated culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That moment was the constitution of religious orders with rules of life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For again heuristic and not dogmatic purposes \u2013 I\u2019m letting my imagination run free range, after all! \u2013 here\u2019s the quick and dirty history of that chapter, shamelessly highlighting precisely why I think there might be some surprisingly low-hanging fruit there for considering what to do at the Dawn of the AIs. In the 3rd<\/sup> century C.E. Christianity suffered one its most traumatic corporate experiences, the Diocletian persecution. Up to this point, Rome had actually been fairly tolerant of the new religion, but Ceasar wasn\u2019t having it anymore. A systematic pogrom swept the Roman Empire. Coincidentally, the Empire also faced economic and political stressors that resulted in resentments between, e.g. its Egyptian province and the Imperial HQ. This had a curious result. His Majesty commanded that the Christians be publicly and gruesomely executed in settings designed as entertainment for the crowds. However, martyrs are kind of badass.iii<\/sup> When the masses \u2013 people who increasingly felt oppressed by their version of the 1% \u2013 saw Christians singing hymns or otherwise going stoically or even joyfully to deaths orchestrated by the very people those masses resented, large numbers of them began to convert. Diocletian\u2019s strategies for seeking Imperial cultural unity backfired terribly. His now even more destabilized empire was ripe for picking by Constantine the Great, who promptly issued the Edict of Milan<\/em> decreeing toleration for Christianity. Over the decades that followed Christianity\u2019s star in the West rose higher and higher, from toleration to imperial favor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This complex, organic political development created a bit of a crisis for the Faith. First, it now found its numbers gorged with enthusiastic converts, both from the conversions that the Diocletian persecution ironically produced and from converts entering the suddenly powerful religion because it was now politically favored. Second, its social status had changed overnight from being a countercultural movement to being chaplain to state and society! It’s intuitive to see how to follow, say, the \u201cSermon on the Mount\u201d (Matthew 5\u20147) if you are under threat of martyrdom or some other form of cultural oppression. It\u2019s not so easy to see that when you are now rapidly becoming the majority and when the Emperor is giving civic offices to your clergy and funding your churches. Enter St. Anthony of the Desert. He heard a sermon one day on Jesus\u2019 call to give up everything. Tony decided to take that literally<\/em> and begin a spiritual experiment in the desert regions of Egypt. In ways that evoke for me thoughts both of John the Baptist and Carl Jung, Anthony liquidated his substantial family assets, moved to the middle of nowhere, and faced down demons. And it worked. Tony developed a reputation for being a powerful exorcist, thaumaturge, and holy man. This impressed the eccentric and extroverted bishop St. Athanasius to write Tony\u2019s biography, which then became a best seller. Spiritually and existentially hungry folk, people longing for depth in an age of banality and increasing anxiety, began to read it and get ideas. However, Anthony\u2019s lifestyle proved too extreme for a great many of his admirers and their efforts at imitating him ended in predictable disaster. Clearly, St. Tony was on to something, but scaffolding was needed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter religious orders. The idea was elegantly simple. Someone with the graced discipline of a Tony would make him\/herself available to a community of siblings to learn the spiritual life.iii<\/sup> That father<\/em> would then organize the community around a compendium of practical spiritual guidance that would serve as a rule of life<\/em>.iv<\/sup> That rule bound those who lived in the community voluntarily to practices that were, in turn, designed to initiate to bedrock spiritual reality and to reinforce solid habits. There was the scaffolding! The results were a paradigm setting success, but that\u2019s maybe a story for a different blogpost.v<\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That<\/em> is the page I\u2019d like to consider taking from Christianity\u2019s playbook. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the intuition: our students find themselves in a rapidly mutating culture, one where the pace of change, much of it wrought by technological advance, verges on the terrifying, and which at points threatens a tsunami of banality. Those changes render the embrace of graced discipline intrinsically hard: the tools we must<\/em> learn to use in this rapidly changing global economy are biased in ways that simultaneously occlude human powers of self-differentiation, critical thinking, and reflective creation and design. All this is occurring at a stage of heightened anxiety, especially on economic and political themes, producing graduating high school seniors whose capacity to respond in healthy ways to stress is enervated and even anemic.vi<\/sup> Scaffolding is needed to promote healthy use and further innovation of AI tools in our setting, a pattern of health that increasingly looks countercultural. This picture looks eerily like that wherein Christianity found itself in the late ancient world. Might we invite students and faculty into patterns of community where we voluntarily bind ourselves to practice <\/em>disciplined<\/em><\/strong> use of AI (specifically) and technology (generally) precisely so that we might continue its innovation?<\/em> If so what \u201crule of life\u201d might express those voluntarily agreed upon community disciplines?<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What might such a community rule involve? Here, I\u2019ll depart from history a bit and propose some touchstones to be explored in further conversation (or possibly expanded upon in a later blogpost). <\/p>\n\n\n\n