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….”
Our first blog posts of the semester have suggested how we can effectively engage students by providing multiple pathways and trailheads to writing in course documents and how
This blog post, including examples of practice for suggestions 1 and 2, draws on the insights of Leah Senatro, an English PhD candidate at the University of California Irvine whose research explores the rhetorical consequences of the body and sensorial experience as well as digital multimodal composition.
With the start of the fall semester, campus sidewalks and bike lanes are flowing, once more, with humanity—welcome back! In these early weeks of the term, there is plenty to navigate, and not just physically. For students entering new courses and new fields of study, there will be plenty of questions about location, schedules, course policies and procedures. Amidst the effort to get oriented to new terrain, students might not be thinking yet about other questions they have about writing or about writing processes and practices that will support their learning.
Generative AI has created some challenging new realities for instructors. While initial concerns focused on academic integrity and the risks of GenAI being used as a replacement for student work, emerging concerns are developing around the ways students may be differently impacted by these advances. Last fall, Indiana University was subject to media scrutiny and a lawsuit after its AI detection technology, Turnitin.com, systematically produced false positive results for work submitted by multilingual students.
The ability to paraphrase is a pivotal skill for writing and learning, but our tacit understanding of the complex purposes of paraphrasing is often clouded by its apparent simplicity. We may tell students that paraphrasing is simply “restating information from a source in your own words,” but choosing to include restatement from sources involves a much more significant set of questions about purpose, audience, writing task, and form.
Last month’s Teaching with Writing blog focused on strategies instructors can use when providing students with feedback on their writing. This month’s blog turns the tables by describing tools students can use when providing instructors with feedback on their writing instruction. Yes, this sort of feedback is routinely gathered at the end of the semester, but getting it at a semester’s midpoint is even better.
Posted by Jessa Wood // // 2