New chat platforms and AI tools like Dialogues and Sway aim to transform campus debates – NBC News
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On one side of the screen is a teenage girl from Philadelphia, wearing a baseball cap that says “Chill.” On the other side is a girl in a purple-walled bedroom, with a stuffed Mickey Mouse in the background, who lives near Chicago.
They’ve been assigned a topic to discuss — gun control — and some questions to keep the conversation moving. The girl from Philly supports more regulation, explaining that she has “attended many funerals” for people shot and killed in her city. The other is warier of gun control and argues for “putting a bigger emphasis” on mental health solutions.
The two animatedly discuss the issue, veering off topic at times into snake-hunting and a plot point from a Spider-Man film. After 45 minutes, they sign off and rate each other’s debate style and civility in an online form. The reviews are compiled into “portfolios” that can be sent to college admissions offices to show how well they handle disagreement.
The teens met on Dialogues, a new platform from Sal Khan, the education technology entrepreneur who founded Khan Academy. The platform, part of his nonprofit tutoring website Schoolhouse.world, allows high school students to discuss a hot-button topic of the day with peers they’ve never met, who’ve been screened to ensure some friction. (The website provided a video of the girls’ session on the condition that NBC News not publish it or name the students.)
“It’s a way to do what I think is happening in very few parts of our society: building bridges between people who have different points of view,” Khan said in an interview.
Dialogues is one of several new chat platforms aimed at improving the way students engage with one another on contentious political issues. Their creators hope they’ll encourage more civility and open-mindedness and possibly put an end to cancel culture.
“I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem by itself,” Khan said, “but hopefully it’ll chip away at the problem.”
Polling in recent years has shown Americans feel more divided as a country than at any other time since the turn of the century and pessimistic about the state of political discourse. Endless digital ink has been spilled about the Gen Z college students who have supposedly turned campuses from centers of rigorous debate into bastions of woke conformity. The Trump administration has levied unprecedented financial penalties against universities it accuses of lacking viewpoint diversity. In that turbulent environment, the platforms are pitching a potential path to harmony — if they can live up to the hype.
On Sway, a program two philosophy researchers created for college students, an artificial intelligence moderator interjects in one-on-one text-based chats to keep discussions constructive. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a business professor is piloting a tool in which students get feedback after they debate AI avatars. And Harvard public policy professor Julia Minson is using an AI chatbot to score graduate students on how open-minded they are as classes progress and how they handle debates.
The idea, she said, sprang from a 20-year quest to help students “practice disagreement” in the classroom.
“You have some people that absolutely just hide their views because they don’t want to step on anybody’s toes,” said Minson, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, while others “are yelling and screaming and canceling each other. Both of those behaviors stem from the same thing — we didn’t teach them in high school to express their views clearly and then ask the other person what they believe.”
Since Dialogues launched in March, over 2,500 students have participated in more than 4,000 discussions on it, Khan said. But it has also generated criticism, particularly after Alex Bronzini-Vender, a Harvard sophomore, wrote about the platform’s use in college applications in a July guest essay for The New York Times.
Bronzini-Vender said in an interview that using it in admissions could screen out students who would improve their conversational skills on campus. “You are saying we need to accept people who are already good at this, instead of teaching people these kinds of things.” He also warned people would find a way to “gamify” Dialogues — and, to some extent, that seems to be happening.
The day his essay was published, a college admissions influencer with over 700,000 Instagram followers posted a guide on excelling at Dialogues to help kids get into their dream schools, and over 1,900 users asked in the comments for more details.
One admissions consultant for families, Sara Harberson, said private message boards she maintains with clients lit up this summer with messages from parents asking whether their kids needed to take part. But she advised them that they’d be better off doing something original. “There are a lot of ways to show civil discourse,” she said, “but I find this one to be just really fake and forced and unnatural and inauthentic.”
Eight selective colleges signed on last spring to accept Dialogues portfolios as part of a pilot project, but two of them — Vanderbilt University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — backed out in July. In a statement, Vanderbilt said that after “careful consideration and hearing some concerns,” it had decided to stop accepting them. MIT, which did not explain its decision, told NBC News it remains “committed to developing in our students a capacity to listen openly and disagree respectfully.”
Khan compared submitting a Dialogues portfolio to sharing volunteer hours or describing other extracurriculars in a college application and said it requires a real time commitment, just like those other activities. “It is actually very hard to fake authenticity,” he said.
He declined to comment on why the schools pulled out but acknowledged the platform has its detractors, including critics who worried it could be used to ideologically filter out more right-leaning college applicants. Khan noted that the transcripts do not include negative evaluations of students or identify their political positions.
“If anything, this is a way of making it safe for more conservative viewpoints on campuses,” he said.
Jim Nondorf, dean of admissions for the University of Chicago, was an early supporter of the platform. When he arrived at Yale as a first-generation college student from a modest background, he said, he was “unsophisticated and unprepared” for the wider set of views he would encounter on campus. He thinks Dialogues, because it is free, can help prepare more students to encounter differing opinions on campus.
“The ability to hone or practice some of these skills may only be offered at wealthier or better-resourced high schools and communities,” he said.
Three high school students who have participated in Dialogues sessions praised the platform for allowing them to talk to peers from across the country, and they said they do it because they simply like to debate. Only one said the goal was to submit a Dialogue portfolio to colleges.
“We’re the students who care about these heavy topics and who want to discuss them to create change,” said Tessa Klein, a high school senior in New Jersey who has discussed the death penalty, immigration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues on Dialogues. “This is one of the first opportunities I’ve had to not just debate someone, but actually question the ‘why’ behind someone’s perspective.”
Faculty members concerned that students might be incapable of respectful debate have also turned to chat platforms fueled by artificial intelligence.
Sociologist Abigail Saguy said she was initially among those who thought the hand-wringing over students’ handling of political disagreement was overblown. But she changed her mind six years ago when she started to notice students in her classes on gender at UCLA were “coming in with a very clear sense of what was right, what was wrong, and ready to kind of shut down or correct people, including the professor.”
“That wasn’t the kind of environment that I wanted to teach in,” she said. “I wanted the students to feel comfortable to ask questions, to get things wrong, to make mistakes, to learn from each other.”
Last spring, Sway invited Saguy to become the first professor to use its chat system in a classroom. She set aside time during a large lecture course, presented a set of topics, including trans athletes, gender discrimination and abortion, then paired off her 250 students to debate them on Sway. The platform monitored students’ conversations for derogatory insults and offered fact-checking in real time. Saguy said many of her students reported that using the tool made them more empathetic.
At the end of a discussion, as with Dialogues, Sway asks students to evaluate their discussion partners’ reasoning and how they responded to disagreements. Professors get only a brief overview of how the chats went, rather than full transcripts, and a synthesis of how the class did as a whole.
“We’re trying to mitigate all of the pressure that drives students to self-censor in classrooms, so the students really are given a private space,” said Simon Cullen, one of the platform’s co-creators and a visiting professor of civil discourse and artificial intelligence at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Faculty members on over 200 campuses have used it, and Sway’s own survey results show the vast majority of student users felt that it helped their conversations and that people were respectful.
Cullen recently began working with Michael Strambler, an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and an expert in social and emotional learning, on a version of Sway that middle schoolers could use.
Sway has gotten less public blowback than Dialogues, most likely because it is not advertised as a way to achieve something, like admission to a selective college.
But Khan said fewer people would participate in Dialogues if it “wasn’t tied to something that mattered for students’ futures — you’d be just preaching to the choir.” He hopes that if more universities, and even employers, use Dialogues, it could become a catalyst for pushing young people outside of news and social media bubbles.
“The real world is not TikTok, it is not Instagram, it is not cable television,” Khan said. “The real world is you’re going to meet people — or you should meet people — that you disagree with, and you should be able to listen to them.”
Tyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.
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