Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education

LALE Seminar Series:
Forum on Applied Linguistics Research in the GenAI era

Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education

Professor Bill Cope

Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
 

July 4, 2024 (Thursday)

2:00 – 3:30pm

Room 408-410, Meng Wah Complex, HKU / by Zoom

Chair: Professor Lianjiang Jiang

Registration: 
https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUpdu6trTMiGNBbkNCiBLlt5DaZt-itbA0_?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1WhLDJ-xBgbzqa_FAuXOMCqzEokOdGq2-4YBCEywMr0F-45vDPMknp-cs_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw#/registration

Abstract:

The sudden appearance of Generative AI has precipitated a panic among some educators while prompting qualified enthusiasm from others. Under this umbrella term are a range of technologies for the creation and 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.

About the speaker:

Bill Cope is a Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His and Mary 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. He has co-authored or co-edited with Bill Cope: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (3rd edition, 2022); Literacies, Cambridge University Press 2012 (2nd edition, 2016); and the two volume grammar of multimodal meaning: Making Sense and Adding Sense, Cambridge University Press, 2020.