Each month our workshop brings educators from around Korea to share their passion and expertise with us on the most pressing issues. In September Dennis Laffey and Silayan Casiño came to talk about AI and globalization.
Dennis Laffey’s presentation, titled “There Is No Fate but What We Make: Language Education in the Age of Generative AI,” was an opening inquiry into a new and crucial topic. Beginning from the premise that generative AI is “very much artificial, but not yet really intelligent,” he provided some key background on what generative AI is. Broadly put, generative AI is a reactive system that responds to user input, synthesizing available data to create new content. Generative AI can be used to create textual, visual, and auditory outputs. Dennis discussed a few of the current forerunners in the field: ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, Midjourney, Gaudio Lab, and Deep Fake.
Silayan Casiño tackled the topic of culture’s relation to language in her presentation entitled “Bringing a Taste of the World to the Classroom.” Starting from the premise that we live in a globalizing world, Silayan recognized that many of her Korean students had a limited knowledge of many countries and cultures. Using a variety of resources, Silayan designed a unit plan where students would get into groups to learn about a new country. Dividing the globe up into regions – eliminating countries that groups were already knowledgeable about – the unit focused on learning about a new culture deeply. Each region had one group assigned, which meant that the class had groups working on all regions.
Join us October 21st for the next workshop:
We’ll have presentations on Storytelling and Virtual Exchange.
https://koreatesol.org/content/jnj-kotesol-october-2023-workshop
News article prepared by chapter member Frank G. Karioris.
