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| Thursday (11/21/24) from 11:45-1:00, I am hosting a Teaching Matters session entitled “Cultivating Trust, Honesty, and Disclosure in the Age of Gen AI.” It is an opportunity to share our experiences with student-use of AI for our writing assignments and to generate ideas around helping students make better decisions about how and when to use generative AI to complete assignments. |
Writing in the Age of AI
Regina Martin, Chair of Denison’s Writing Committee, shares resources and ideas on teaching writing in the age of AI.
Teaching: Do we need to teach students how to use gen AI?
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| This student guide to AI has been circulating widely in the past few months. It begins with a provocative quote by an economist: “AI won’t take your job. It’s someone using AI who will take your job.” The jury is obviously still out on this claim, but students are hearing it loud and clear, and I imagine their parents are as well. |
Teaching: Plagiarism and AI
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Carleton College provides students with a guide to “Plagiarism and AI.” It contains some sample scenarios to help students (and faculty) think through the thorny question of whether particular uses of AI may constitute plagiarism or a violation of academic integrity. Here is an example:
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Teaching: We Can Help Students Think
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| In this article, John Warner, author of Why They Can’t Write, ruminates on what it means to think and what it means to teach students to think in the age of AI. He usefully points out that students have always turned to strategies and tools to help them think or to help them avoid thinking. |
Writing as Thinking vs. AI as Thinking
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| Alexis Hart, English Professor and Director of Writing at Allegheny College, shared this writing activity at the GLCA AI workshop in August:
According to writing professor and author of Why They Can’t Write, John Warner, “Writing is thinking” because “the basic…unit of writing” is the idea (144-145, emphasis added). However, in May 2023, a student at Columbia University, Owen Kichizo Terry, wrote an article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education claiming that when college students are given an essay assignment “it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking” and therefore, “writing is no longer much of an exercise in thinking.” |