Welcome back to standard time. As most of us were sleeping at 2am on Sunday morning, our computers and smartphones magically jumped back an hour. This magical leap was due to the use of a Standard Network Protocol that digitally connected devices follow to coordinate time. The machines were synchronized through a protocol—“an established set of rules that determine how data is transmitted between different devices in the same network.”
Networked information technology has made this the best and the worst of times for literature review assignments. Positively, information science experts continue to refine our understanding of literature reviews, highlighting how systematic and rigorous review essays can provide crucial clarity in an age of widespread misinformation. Less positively, those promoting AI tools claim generative artificial intelligence technologies can produce ‘literature reviews’ from nothing more than a well-designed query.
If your writing has been subjected to academic peer review, you’ve likely experienced the scourge that is “Reviewer 2”: a reviewer who is uncharitable and nitpicky, cluttering one’s paper with irrelevant, unhelpful, or sanctimonious nastygrams concerned more with asserting their own expertise than helping strengthen your writing.
Semester to semester, many of us copy-paste ever-growing lists of policies and resource recommendations for our syllabi. When we’re down to the wire the Friday before classes start, it can be tempting to recycle old materials after a quick skim, rather than closely rereading and analyzing our choices. But of course, syllabi set the stage in important ways for the work your students will do in your course. Crafting a syllabus is an excellent time to assess the scaffolding and support you provide to students in your course.
In March, our Teaching with Writing Blog addressed the complexities of documenting how Generative AI might be used in students’ writing processes. It provided suggestions for creating an Acknowledging AI assignment for courses where AI use is allowed.
As we move towards the end of the semester, many faculty are feeling overwhelmed by the mounting stack of student writing awaiting their feedback. With this in mind, today, we’re offering tips for streamlining the process of giving feedback while actually boosting its effectiveness for students.
When they imagine students using AI, faculty might picture a student plugging an assignment prompt wholesale into ChatGPT and submitting the output with minimal or no editing. But students—who are far more prolific users of AI than faculty—report that this approach to AI use is relatively uncommon. AI tools are more often leveraged as collaborators that enhance students’ writing, rather than replacing their efforts wholesale.
The Provost’s Office and the Senate Committee on Educational Policy at the University of Minnesota provided strong early guidance for instructors on student use of ChatGPT and other GenAI technologies in classrooms (Embrace, allow, and prohibit). Since the publication of those original policies, the landscape of GenAI tools and the quality of GenAI outputs has changed dramatically.
Welcome to the last two weeks of the semester! Amid the rush of completing and assessing final projects and navigating end-of-term challenges, we invite students and instructors to pause and reflect on positive writing experiences—perhaps even milestones—from this semester. Doing so can provide a much-needed dose of motivation and gratitude during these final days of shortened light, dropping temperatures, and fervid intellectual labor. Looking back can also inspire us as we begin to look ahead to the Spring semester: “Blue skies, nothing but blue skies from now on….”
Posted by Matthew Luskey // // 1