AI and the 4 C’s: Collaboration

In today’s episode, we'll explore three ways students can improve collaboration skills through interaction with generative artificial intelligence (AI). Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

#287 — AI and the 4 Cs: Collaboration

12 min
AVID Open Access

Keywords

ai, students, questions, collaboration, response, prompt, ideas, skills, critical thinking, collaborate, encourage, topic, interactions, feedback, follow, explore, suggestions, impact, creation, activity

Speakers

Paul (98%), Transition (2%)

Paul Beckermann  0:01  

Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I'm your host, Paul Beckermann. 

Transition Music  0:06  

Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So, what's in the toolkit? Check it out. 

Paul Beckermann  0:17  

The topic of today's episode is AI and the 4 Cs: Collaboration. Today's episode is part two in our series of AI and the 4 Cs. And in this episode I'll be focusing on collaboration. Back in Tech Talk for Teachers Episode 265, I explored how AI could be used to foster collaboration in terms of AVID's WICOR framework. I looked at how both educators and students could use AI to improve collaboration explored ways educators could use AI to design group experiences, set up group membership, and create assessments. I also outlined potential student use, including brainstorming ideas, synthesis, critiques, and feedback, as well as identifying blind spots. If you're interested in those previous ideas and strategies, I suggest you go back and listen to Episode 265, WICOR and AI: Collaboration. In today's episode, I'll once again be focusing on how AI can improve collaboration, but I don't want to be redundant, so I'm going to turn this conversation in a new direction and explore how students can learn to collaborate directly with AI. So why am I going in this direction with collaboration? This focus is largely motivated by the reports and studies describing how AI is, and will continue to be, impacting the labor force. Many of those reports predict that AI will significantly disrupt the job market in the near future. Unlike robotics and automation, which largely impacted blue collar jobs, generative AI is poised to disrupt white collar jobs. The key word here is Disrupt. While some jobs will likely be replaced by AI technology, and new ones will almost certainly be created, the most likely impact for workers is disruption, or a change in the way they do their jobs. A popular line that's been thrown around a lot lately states that AI probably won't replace you. But someone who knows how to use AI might. As with any innovation we've seen, there's probably some truth in that. In that context, it's important that we empower our students with AI skills and set them up for future success. We want them to be college- and career-ready, and we can take steps toward doing this by teaching them how to effectively interact with, or collaborate with, tools that use artificial intelligence. 

Transition Music  2:42  

What are some cool tech tools that I can use? Instructional technology. 

Paul Beckermann  2:50  

Although there are lots of tech tools that have AI integrated in them, I'm going to focus more specifically on generative AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot. If you teach students who are too young to create accounts or use these tools themselves, you'll likely need to lead these activities as a full class. If your students are allowed to access these tools themselves, you can be more hands on and let them experience these practices firsthand. Here are three ways you can teach collaboration skills through AI interactions. 

Number one, teach students to ask good questions. Now, this doesn't sound too techie. But perhaps the biggest key to successful interaction with AI is asking good questions. As the saying goes, junk in equals junk out. If you ask bad questions, you'll probably get poor results. On the other hand, a well-crafted question has the potential to give you a much better response. In general, questions should be specific and clear. And students need practice with this to become skilled at it. The beauty of asking questions of a chatbot is you'll get an immediate answer, and this answer is great feedback about the quality of the question you asked. If the response is off target, you'll need to reconsider how to ask the question in a different way. One good activity is to have each student in a group ask their own version of a question and compare results. Once students have identified the best response, they can examine the question or the prompt that resulted in that answer. What made that question better than the rest? Not only can this be an insightful activity, but it also promotes critical thinking. Based on what they've learned, students can then work together, or collaborate, to design the next prompt or question. Ironically, by learning to ask better questions of a chatbot, students will improve their own questioning skills in general, something that's important in all forms of collaboration. 

Number two, teach students to ask good follow-up questions. This point's a natural follow-up to the first tip. While a well-crafted question or prompt is a great place to start, a single question is seldom enough to generate a complete and useful response. The key to better quality responses is in examining the response, reflecting on its strengths and weaknesses, and then asking an effective follow-up question to refine the answer that was provided. Students should ask themselves questions such as, What might the Chatbot have misunderstood about my question? What important information was left out? And what follow-up question can I ask to get a better response? In addition to these guiding questions, students can even ask the chatbot for suggestions. In fact, because that's a great strategy in general, I decided to practice what I'm preaching and ask ChatGPT for some suggestions about asking AI follow-ups. I really liked the results I got. Here are a few of the suggestions I received. Clarity and specificity. Ensure your question is clear and specific to guide the AI toward the kind of response you're looking for. Context. Provide context from previous interactions, or the topic at hand, to build upon the information already provided. Purpose. Be clear about the purpose of your follow-up. What do you want to achieve with the additional information? Scope. If the initial response was too broad, narrow the scope of your follow up question to focus on a particular aspect of the topic. Precision in language. Use precise language to avoid ambiguity, which can lead to more accurate and relevant responses. Feedback. Include feedback about what you found useful, or not, in the previous answers to steer the AI's next response. Sequencing. Sequence your questions logically, building on what has been discussed to delve deeper into the subject matter. And open-ended questions. Ask open-ended questions that encourage elaboration, explanation, or analysis, rather than just Yes-No answers. I feel like this would be a great list to give the students, and again, learning to ask quality follow-up questions is a skill that will benefit students in any type of collaboration, including both human-to-AI and human-to-human work. 

Number three, have students engage in collaborative tasks with AI. Okay, so now it's time to build on the skills of asking quality questions and follow-up questions, and apply those to specific tasks. Once again, I asked ChatGPT for some ideas, and after a little refining and some follow-up questions, of course, here's some of the responses that I found to be quite good. Defining objectives together. So for this one, students start by articulating the goals of their project to the AI, prompting it to ask clarifying questions. This encourages students to think critically about their objectives. I found the key part of the suggestion to be prompting the AI to ask clarifying questions. This sets up the AI to be a thought partner that pushes the student to think more deeply and completely about their ideas. Idea generation. Students can use AI to brainstorm, asking it to provide prompts or questions that stimulate further discussion and exploration of ideas within the group. In this example, the key is that the AI is asking questions, rather than just giving answers. That puts the onus back on the student and requires them to do the critical thinking. Debating with AI. Students can present different viewpoints to the AI and use its responses to challenge thinking or validate arguments, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

I'd suggest taking this one step further, and asking the AI to challenge responses that students add to the conversation. This pushes critical thinking to an even higher level. Iterative feedback. Students can have the AI review their work at various stages of the creation process and offer feedback, which the group can then discuss and decide whether to incorporate or not. This will again improve critical thinking and decision-making skills. The students have to do the hard work. Project planning. Ask the AI for suggestions on project planning and task delegation. But let the students make the final decisions, using AI's input as one of several considerations. Again, AI is not doing all the work for the students but helping in the process. Reflective practice. Have students explain their reasoning about a concept, process, or event to the AI and then ask AI to offer questions or alternatives, which encourage deeper reflection about thought processes and assumptions. Simulations and practice. Students can use AI to simulate social situations where they must collaborate, helping them to develop empathy, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. These are all important skills to collaboration in general. Diverse perspectives. Encourage students to ask the AI for different cultural or historical perspectives on a topic, which they can then discuss and incorporate into their collaborative work. While this activity isn't collaboration by itself, it does support the collaboration process and help students develop important empathy skills. 

And finally, co-creation. Engage AI in the creation of digital artifacts, such as writing, coding, or design, where AI's role is to suggest improvements or alternatives that students must evaluate, and then integrate on their own, as appropriate. Again, students should direct the chatbot to restrain from doing the creation itself, and instead habit prompt the students for ideas so that they do the majority of the creating and hard thinking. The theme to all of these ideas is to structure the interaction with the AI chatbot in such a way that it prompts the student to do the work. And to think more deeply. This back and forth is key to collaboration in general. And the chatbot is essentially modeling how to be a good thought partner. Rather than dominating the idea generation, it's pushing the student to stretch and offer ideas. This set of skills is key to coming up with better ideas and greater production. One final thought: these interactions with AI do not need to be done alone. In fact, they probably shouldn't. They can be done collaboratively. That's right. Students can collaboratively collaborate with the chatbot. They can generate prompts and responses together. Or you can have them each interact independently with the AI before comparing and compiling responses with their peers. These approaches combine human-to-human collaboration practice, with skill development in human-to-AI collaboration. And if the predictions of experts are accurate, these are skills students will need in the workforce of the not-so-distant future. 

To learn more about today's topic and explore other free resources, visit AvidOpenAccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out our collection of articles about AI. You can find it by going to AvidOpenAccess.org and searching for AI in the K-12 Classroom. And of course, be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we're joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai