{"data":{"ID":1600,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1791162032,"CreatorID":79,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Talk Is the New Text? Orality, Literacy, and Assessment in the Age of AI","Handle":"talk_is_the_new_text-orality-literacy-and_assessment_in_the_age_of_ai","ShortDescription":"When AI can write the essay, what does it mean to know something? Drawing on South Bronx Community's discussion-centered mid-year PBATs, we'll look at the shifting balance between orality and literacy. Together we'll ask how assessment can prepare students to think, speak, and write in their own voices.","Description":"In many ways our students live in an oral world again. Video, voice notes, livestreams, and podcasts shape how they learn and argue. Meanwhile, generative AI has made polished writing almost effortless to produce. Walter Ong called this \"secondary orality,\" and it raises hard questions for schools built around the written word. If a machine can draft the essay, where does the evidence of a student's thinking live?\r\nThis year at South Bronx Community, our mid-year PBATs used discussion-based protocols as the anchor for assessment. Students showed what they knew by building on, challenging, and pulling together each other's ideas in real time. Several teachers also paired these discussions with written performance tasks. [Insert a real observation, e.g., which students surprised you in discussion versus on paper, and what writing still did that talk couldn't.]\r\nIn this conversation, SBC leaders and teachers will share student work and the protocols behind it. Then we'll open the floor to the questions we're still working through. What does speaking reveal that writing hides, and the reverse? Should an oral defense count for more when writing can be outsourced? How do we keep writing a tool for thinking, not just a product?\r\nThe kids the world will need can think out loud with others and write with clarity and voice. Let's work out together how to assess both.","Link":["https:\/\/southbronxcommunity.org\/"],"Audience":["High School"],"Practice":"We'll run the session with the same kind of protocol our students used in their PBATs, so participants experience it rather than hear about it.\r\n1. Opening (10 min): Chris and Rob frame the orality\/literacy tension. Two teachers share short clips or excerpts of PBAT discussions next to the matching student writing.\r\n2. Fishbowl seminar (25 min): An inner circle of presenters and volunteers discusses a provocation, such as \"In an AI world, the oral defense matters more than the paper.\" Open seats let outer-circle participants rotate in.\r\n3. Talk-to-text reflection (10 min): Participants write for five minutes about what shifted in their thinking, then discuss what the writing captured that the talk didn't.\r\n4. Harvest (10 min): We co-build a shared doc of protocols, rubric language, and open questions for participants to take home.","Presenter":["Christipher Fleming","Robert Gulya","Ramon Razon","Sarah Popa"],"PresenterAffiliation":[],"PresenterEmail":["christipher.fleming@southbronxcommunity.org","robert.gulya@southbronxcommunity.org","ramon.razon@southbronxcommunity.org","sarah.popa@southbronxcommunity.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":null,"ScheduleLocationID":null,"SubmitterID":79,"AdditionalComments":null,"LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":14}}