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| I spent my summer developing a suite of AI literacy assignments that are appropriate for writing courses. Over the next several CfLT newsletters, I will share those. I developed them for my ENGL 342: Utopian and Dystopian Fiction class, which I am currently teaching. The first assignment consists of two parts. I’ll elaborate on the first part this week. Please stay tuned to the next newsletter for part 2.
Part 1 asks students to create a bibliography of 10 citations for scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies. While students can use any research tool they wish, I encourage them to explore Google Gemini because in my experience it seems to be better than ChatGPT at outputting actual (rather than hallucinated) sources, possibly because it is built on top of Google’s already hefty infrastructure for academic research. Gemini may actually be an appropriate place to start with research when a student is encountering a field of study for the first time because it is particularly good at identifying the foundational texts. Indeed, one student who used Gemini managed to produce a bibliography of what I would identify as the top ten foundational texts in utopian studies. However, like any LLM, Gemini hallucinates, so one of the lessons of the assignment is that students need to check the output for accuracy. Learning how to do that is an important AI literacy skill. If students can’t find 10 real sources via Gemini, then they need to turn to the other research tools. |