Teaching with Writing Blog

As we approach the end of the semester, one topic on many faculty members’ minds is undisclosed AI use. Whether you prohibit AI use entirely or place just a few limitations, you know that restricting AI use is easier said than done. Students may misuse AI in a number of ways that result in academic integrity violations, including using AI in ways prohibited by course policies or assignment directions; failing to adequately attribute their AI use; or using AI in ways that produce other academic integrity violations, such as misrepresentations of sources or fabricated citations.

This semester began with civic unrest, requiring many instructors and students to pivot quickly to HyFlex teaching and learning environments. HyFlex—also referred to as “hybrid,” and the rather elaborate “synchronous learning in distributed environments (SLIDE)”—is when onsite and remote modes of participation occur simultaneously in a class.

Recently, many of us have seen Gemini integrations pop up on University Google platforms. Tech companies rolling out consequential changes to GenAI tools, access, and capabilities seem to pay little attention to the semester calendar or our existing assignments, assessments, and course policies. These integrations vastly reduce the friction of using GenAI tools, making it easier and more automatic for writers to use GenAIs.

Students are often eager for feedback on their writing. While faculty comments on assignments are crucial, with limited time, faculty can’t always give as much support as students might like, particularly before assignment deadlines. Students can also find it nerve-wracking to approach faculty for help.

The window between fall and spring semesters is an ideal time to reflect on our work and brainstorm new teaching strategies. After finalizing fall grades and taking time to rest and recharge, we have just a few short weeks to prepare for spring. In this month’s blog post, we recommend strategies for productive reflection and revision that will make your midwinter less bleak.

At the beginning of the semester, instructors often notice that when they introduce major assignments, students note the due date in their planners and add the appropriate length and format for their documents. Students understand that instructors and graders appreciate well-formatted, correctly scoped documents and value the concrete expectations that such guidelines provide. The differences between a two-page white paper and a 23-page research report are dramatic, after all.

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.