[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
To circle
back to the starting point of Monday’s post on First-Year Writing: I haven’t
seen that much obvious or clear use of generative AI in those courses (no more
than general instances of plagiarism over the years); but I most definitely have
seen far more than I would like in my online-only literature courses over the
last couple years (I’ve been teaching one online section every semester since
about 2013). I think that’s no coincidence, for a couple of distinct reasons:
these courses are entirely online, meaning they use technology and the web for every
aspect, and so AI programs are just that much closer to the surface of our work;
and I don’t get the chance to talk in person with these students, to show them
how much I respect their voices and work and how much the use of AI takes them
away from those things in all kinds of damaging ways (I try to make that case
by email, but I’m well aware that it’s just not the same when it comes to
tone).
I have to
admit that, beyond trying to communicate those overall emphases early and often
in emails to the students, my main strategy for dealing with this challenge has
been and remained this semester a responsive one: when I see a first instance
of clear AI use (almost always in an early weekly Blackboard post/response, and
almost always because generative AI programs invent
quotes and evidence when asked to work with texts; seriously, they
do that, and not
just for texts either), I reach out to the student to make the case as
clearly as I can for why that’s a bad idea on every level, and to give them the
chance to create a new version of the post featuring their own work and to receive
the grade and credit it would have had it been the original one they posted (ie,
to get a mulligan).
It's not a
bad strategy, and it generally seems to help push students toward sharing their
own voice and ideas, literally my only
central pedagogical goal. But the question I return to is whether there
would be ways to shift my syllabus and assignments in order to mitigate this
challenge on the front end as well. I’m not sure there are such ways, as in a
literature course we are always going to be reading texts and responding to
those texts in one way or another, and in an online lit course those responses
will take the form of short-form posts a good bit of the time. But I am
considering using somewhat more creative and first-person post prompts in my
Spring online lit course, to see if such prompts make clear from the jump that only
the students themselves can do this work. I’ll keep y’all posted!
Last
reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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