Why schools will block ChatGPT - the answer may surprise you

People who 'can't believe why schools would block ChatGPT!' should slow down on giving digital learning advice to others. Here's why.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone ranting online this past month about how ‘shortsighted’ schools are in blocking ChatGPT, or how ‘unbelievable’ it is that a school system would be wary of this ‘inevitable’ technology, I would have…well, at least $50. I won’t exaggerate. But you get the point.

Don’t get me wrong - I am very understanding of people who feel ‘disappointed’ that schools or school systems would block access to such a tool. I also share the ‘frustration’ of knowing how much more difficult it is going to be to model use of ChatGPT while it’s officially blocked. When I remember all the workarounds we collectively had to devise to get around previous technical and policy blocks, I too roll my eyes.

But ‘unbelievable’?

No. No, the blocking of ChatGPT is totally believable. It was a completely predictable move. If you work in a digital learning/education role and seriously did not expect most schools to block this tool - at least most public school systems - you might consider taking a few days off from your commentating to reflect.

We’ve always blocked content we can’t filter

(And by ‘we’, I mean ‘most public school systems in Australia’.)

On Monday 28 January both the SMH and the Guardian reported that ChatGPT would be blocked in public schools in both Queensland and NSW. And oh! The outcries!

Mind you, this was just one week after a ripple went through EdTech commentary as people realised that the Terms of Use lacked clarity with regard to whether users had to be over 18 years old to use the tool, or to use the API. Commonsense suggests it’s the latter (as users are not asked their age when making an account), but the fact that people had indulged a utopian vision all summer of learning with AI, without interrogating it’s safety (or even checking the Terms?), had me palm-to-face in my previous post.

I was cheeky in my tagline in saying people who were amazed by the decision to block have no business advising others on digital education. But I’m not sure I’m wrong.

To be ‘amazed’ at ChatGPT being blocked is to have forgotten (or not learned) that YouTube was blocked for ages after laptops were rolled out to schools. Remember illegally downloading YouTube videos so you could play them in class the next day? Twitter was blocked for ages too, despite being the tool so many of us were using to power up our professional learning. NSW DET even blocked Edublogs, at one point.

Someone I spoke to likened denying students access to ChatGPT to denying them access to Google for internet searching. Except it’s not the same is it? Because Google not only has it’s own ‘safe search’ filtering, but schools (or school systems) put their own content filtering on top of that. When ‘the system’ can be as confident in the content coming out of ChatGPT as we are with a Google search, it too will become available in schools.

If you really thought ChatGPT would be allowed more quickly than every other risky/unknown/disruptive tool that came before it, I really would love to hear your good reason why.

It’s not panic, it’s due diligence

There are no shortage of people ready to frame schools and teachers as ‘panicking’ about technology they are afraid of, and teacher reluctance to allow immediate access to ChatGPT is ‘symbolic’ of a Luddite-like fear of machines, like calculators.

For teachers in public schools, this isn’t the experience.

What the experience is (as usual) is of bureaucracy and its processes.

While teachers at independent schools, along with co-founders/CEOs of edtech companies, and a range of ‘consultants’ got all hot and bothered about the potential of ChatGPT over summer, most public school teachers would have intuited that this would come to nothing in their schools for about another 12 months.

As many in my PLN have noted this past week, for a disruptive technology to be embraced in a school, the school leadership have to be on board. But in public schools, the ‘leadership’ ladder goes all the way up to the Minister. That’s a lot of meetings we’re going to have to get through before we overturn the ban.

Not a single public school system has said: ‘We’re blocking this forever!’

All they have said is: ‘Schools just just got back from holidays - we’ll need some time to review this one.’

(And in a state like Queensland where student data is not allowed to be stored offshore, there are going to be a few extra meetings before ChatGPT makes it through a review.)

Quote from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

I wanna be disruptive…but

Returning to my lament, that I too am frustrated with having to wait to use this new disruptive tool, that I too am impatient with the slow-turning cogs of bureaucratic machines. It is true - I want to play.

But…

I can’t help but remembering the lessons we learned from dealing with tech companies and publishers. They have been known to steal and sell our kids’ data. Last time I checked, we were upset about that? And had promised to look out for it more carefully in future?

And…

I can’t help but return to the little rule that niggles in the back of my mind: if it’s free, you’re the product.

So I’ll sign off this post by clarifying that I don’t think being cautious about OpenAI as a company means an educator is ‘anti-AI’. And I don’t think asking critical questions about how data gets stored and used when we use ChatGPT means an educator is ‘panicked’ or ‘scared’.

If we want this disruption to do good things, we have to see each other more complexly than that. And we have to respect that most public school systems will be treading more cautiously in the meantime, perhaps with fair reason.