Showing Our Work With AI: Our Students and Their Coursework

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Today, we met with colleagues to talk about AI stuff, but what we really talked about was learning. During the first part of the workshop, I offered some reflections on examples of coursework completed by various students, some using AI and some not. During the second half of the workshop, we got into an interesting convo, asking each about the learning our assignments promote: when and why does our course design invite students to use AI tools?

Here’s the doc I share during the discussion. I’d love to hear from you if have thoughts or want to collaborate on the next Showing Your Work with AI discussion about learning, course design, and engagement.

WritingwithMachines in Fall 2023

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Tech innovators aspire to move fast and break things. Well, one of the things they’ve broken is my class. And there’s nothing I can do this semester (or the next) except enter into my broken class with my students and together dialogue over what processes, tools, and content still have value and then sharpen our techniques and deepen our knowledge in pursuit of the goals we set. 

WritingwithMachines is officially on hiatus in the Letters department at MiraCosta college in the fall of 2023 to focus on a program-wide portfolio project for our 100-level composition course. What I am excited about is the way this project centers process and reflection in the student’s writing-reading experiences. The constraints of the final essay draft are no longer enough to inspire an investment of time and labor in developing ideas for a considered audience by crafting effective forms. For most students, they never were enough. The portfolio project we’re engaging encourages students and professors to play within an array of processes and source materials; to interpret texts with an awareness of the ways our cultural and/or personal experiences inform our reading; and to strive to engage the attention of others by making our own audience-aware texts. In short, this semester, professors and students alike in ENGL 100 will emphasize the value of showing our work.

I am still active in conversations around campus about the ways we (continue to) read and write with machines, and from time to time I will post to this blog if for no other purpose than to organize helpful frameworks and perspectives for myself.

In all, I am holding a deep epistemological and pedagogical humility. And I am finding as I apply this in dialogue with my colleagues and with my students, I am discovering hope.

Have a great semester my friends 🙂

Building Biliterate Brains

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Catch up on our second discussion orbiting around Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home

To listen to our full convo, check out the Zoom recording or the podcast

All content shared and perspectives we discussed are collected in a Padlet.

Our next discussion will be May 10th, and we’re creating space: What topics are on your mind with regards to new technologies and how we teach writing, reading, and thinking?

Post your ideas to our Padlet! Or email curry directly. Stoked to explore these topics with you!

Reading, Attention, and Thinking-about-Thinking

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In our first discussion orbiting around Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home, we got into

  • how unique and plural our experiences are when we engage content media
  • how time and labor demands often limit contemplative practices with content
  • how sometimes the goals we place on reading misalign with the goals we place on writing
  • how important it is for us to ask our students: what value does this [book, podcast, videogame, article, oration, play, story] have in your [journal, essay, project, life]?

To listen to our full convo, check out the Zoom recording or the podcast

All content shared and perspectives we discussed are collected in a Padlet.

Our next discussion will be April 26th, where we will continue discussing our experiences reading in different modalities to form “bi-literate brains.” We will be sharing from “Letter 8” & “Letter 9” in  Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home. You do not have to have read the book to participate in the conversation. Hope to see you then to explore literacy, and what the teaching of literacy skills looks like today.

Voice, Bias, and Templates

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We had a really rich convo yesterday about concepts of voice, concepts of bias, and concepts of templates by which we mean reproducible structures, devices, or tools that shape our thinking for us, or with us. At one point in the conversation, we got here:

“We’ve created an academic voice, and we’ve imposed structures and processes and practice on our students, so that by the end of their training, they write with an academic voice. That’s ideological. That’s a system that takes in what students say–and how students would on their own arrange and express that–and mutes, mars, and shapes their voice. By the end, we all speak in this certain way when we write in this space. That’s not something ChatGPT is introducing; that’s something that has defined and does define an English class and an English curriculum.”

To listen to our full convo, check out the Zoom recording or the podcast

All content shared and perspectives we discussed are collected in a Padlet.

Our next discussion will be April 12th, where we will discuss how our experiences reading in different modalities form us (as thinking, writing humans) and assist metacognition. We will be sharing from “Letter 3” & “Letter 4” in  Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home. You do not have to have read the book to participate in the conversation. Hope to see you then to explore Attention and Thinking-about-Thinking with new writing technologies.

Surfaces, Tools, and Affordances

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In our discussion about the materiality of writing–different surfaces, different tools, and the affordances/constraints of each–we focused on an exploration of how we write. A writing process: scratching out words on paper; typewriting + whiteout back in high school; handwriting, touch-typing (8 fingers) or two-finger-hunt-and-peck, all thumbs. A writing style: the boring kind of writing or the truthful kind of writing generated (by what? by whom?) in the word, the sentence, and the structure.

Very early in the discussion, we zoomed in on how different ways of writing increase access or limit access. We talked about the cost and labor required of writers to participate fully in different mediums. And we talked about authorial/editorial choice as a fundamental value of our teaching: do our students have full confidence about how to write in a certain medium? Have our students reflected on why they write this medium?

To listen to our convo, check out the Zoom recording or the podcast

All content shared and perspectives we discussed are collected in a Padlet.

Our next discussion will be March 8th, where we will discuss how the writer’s voice, technique, and material encode values in text and which of these forces most shapes expression. We will be responding in part to Independent Lens’ Coded Bias (watch via PBS Passport or Netflix). You do not have to have watched the doc to participate in the conversation. Hope to see you then to explore Voice, Templates, and Bias of new writing technologies.

BYOD Sources on ChatGPT

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What other forms of expression can we teach now that the essay template is so easily reproducible?

What will happen to the struggle and the joy we experience as writers throughout the processes of composition?

What deep places can we expect our students to reach and what opportunities for deepening understanding of ideas, concepts, and content will we gain?

How are we–us and our students–giving up autonomy and agency to AI content generators to think and speak for us?

These are a few of the questions that emerged from our first discussion on teaching, composition, and new generative AI technologies like ChatGPT. We also collected a range of interesting sources and a cool AI generated image of MiraCosta College set in the dystopic future!

To listen to our convo, check out the Zoom recording or the podcast

All content shared and perspectives we discussed are collected in a Padlet.

Our next discussion will be Feb 22nd, where we will discuss other technologies in history that have shifted the way writers process and produce texts. We will be responding in part to Nova’s A-Z: How Writing Changed the World(watch via MCC Library). You do not have to have watched the doc to participate in the conversation. Hope to see you then to explore Surfaces, Tools, and Affordances of new writing technologies.

Writing with–and not by–Machines

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This semester, WritingwithMachines will host a series of research inspired discussions to explore new writing technologies like generative AI. In these discussions, we will reexamine basic principles of composition and how we teach reading, writing, and thinking. Each meeting will invite participants to contribute sources, classroom experiences, and critical lenses. As such, our goal will be to curate research, debate emerging issues, and collaborate in our teaching practices as compositionists. Hope you will join us!

Feb 8th, Discussion: BYO article on ChatGPT

What article, podcast, or other source provides you with helpful insights?

Feb 22nd, Discussion: Surfaces, Tools, and Affordances

What other technologies in history have shifted the way writers process and produce texts?

March 8th, Discussion: Voice, Templates, and Bias

How does the writer’s voice, technique, and material encode values in a text? And which of these shapes expression?

April 12th, Discussion: Attention and Thing-about-Thinking 

How do experiences reading in different modalities form the brain and assist metacognition? 

April 26th, Discussion: Building Biliterate Brains 

What is literacy, and what does the teaching of literacy skills look like?

May 10th, Discussion: TBA (maybe grading/rubrics?)

What topics are on your mind with regards to writing, reading, and thinking? Assessment practices anyone? 🙂

May 24th, Discussion: One Clear Lens: Composition and Generative Tools

At the end of the semester, what source or experience supplies you with a clear lens with which to view new writing technologies and your teaching as a compositionist? 

These are the [spaces] Where Writing Happens

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We’re exploring the spaces in our classes where writing happens. Some of us met in Zoom to share our thoughts. Some of us are participating asynchronously. You can too. Today or whenever. 🙂

Thinking about Material Affordances – A [Doc] Where Writing Happens

Thinking about Language Affirming Practices – A [Discussion] Where Writing Happens

Thinking about Contexts and Lived Experiences – A [Padlet] Where Writing Happens

Each space offers a different frame and a different mode of writing-to-think and writing-to-express. We might think of these as models for designing spaces where writing happens in our classes. We might simply use these spaces for reflection and collaboration. Like all shared, asynchronous spaces, these are simply spaces for our conversation to have already started and to be ongoing.

If you’d like to catch the convo we had in the Zooms, you can watch here or listen on our Letters Department Podcast.

Thank you for collaborating!

The Contexts and Lived Experiences that Bear Upon the [spaces] Where Writing Happens

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Right after I post this, I will open Canvas to read my students’ writing. 

I have some catching up to do. My onsite ENGL 100 students are posting Reading Journal responses this morning before we meet in class at 11am. Some of these will be minimal–75-word entries of ideas, quotes, and responses–and some of these will be lengthy. Some of them will also be missing. This group of students seems to be getting tired and many seem stressed lately. At one point, I thought we had some momentum, but since then, each week has felt like a restart. I know that a couple are experiencing some real challenges right now. They’ve told me. As a whole, the current paper we’re writing is proving to be a heavy lift, even though I had hoped it would feel more like a creative, edifying process. 

So, when I open Canvas to read, I will skim many and closely read a few, so my opening remarks in class today can feature a couple direct ideas and phrases from certain students’ writings, and in this way, I might offer those particular students an emotional boost or perhaps a reason to jump into our discussion. 

I know we all are experiencing similar realities in our classes. When we open Canvas to read our students’ writing, we’re thinking about them and what they are going through. As MiraCosta Faculty, we’re also thinking about what it means to be an HSI right now. As Letters department members, we’re thinking about Learning Outcomes, HyFlex, and what the spring semester might look like for our program and our teaching loads. As community members, care givers, and news-readers, we also have our own whole worlds to think about. 

So, you and I as teachers–when we open Canvas to read our students writing–we are bringing a lot into the spaces where writing happens, and practicing somehow a method to temporarily put on hold our worlds or simply concurrently thinking about our worlds to create space for thinking about our students at this midsemester moment: how to support them, their whole selves; how to support their growth, their reading and writing selves; and how to support their writing, the shapes and structures of their expressed selves.

I’m taking a moment to pause and mull all of this over. If you agree, I invite you to a space for writing we might do together as a kind of contemplative practice, a space where we can use writing to think. This is an HSE/Peter Adams activity I picked up at the HSE conference several years ago. Remember that? The activity asks: start with an 8-word sentence and then build up to an 80-word sentence. Maybe the process for writing this sentence will facilitate a mindfulness of the moments we’re experiencing right now. Maybe the process of crafting this sentence will lead you to insights about a particular class or a particular assignment or a particular student’s experience. Maybe the creative process of crafting your sentence will be a welcome distraction from reading your students’ writing 🙂 

Either way, here is a space for us to work with language to process this teacherly moment, right now (or whenever):

This is a [Padlet] Where Writing Can Happen

And here’s another space for us to collaborate in real-time tomorrow:

This is a [space] Where Writing Happens 

A Letters Community of Practice Workshop, facilitated by WritingwithMachines

Thursday, October 13th, 2:30-3:30pm in the Zooms

Attendees will be remunerated; participation in asynch activities eligible for remuneration or FLEX (up to 1.5 hours) 

More info, coming soon,