Kat O’Meara
Director of WAC, Assistant Professor of English
This blog post shares a semester-long inquiry into finding and curating AI resources that meet the needs of both faculty and students. It will recount everything I did—researching, presenting, attending—as well as the deliverables that I am in the process of creating. It also shares, based on what I’ve learned, a prediction of what the future may hold for generative AI at SNC and beyond.
Note: The images used in this post are, in fact, AI-generated, via Adobe Firefly!
Project Motivations/Inception
As Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at a small liberal arts college, I have fielded many inquiries in the past year about generative AI. Ranging from panic to excitement to resignation to outrage, emotions are running high about how to manage this new technology as it makes its way onto our campus and into our students’ writing processes.
The MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI, in their AI Working Paper, describe this moment as a “seismic shift” in how large language models (LLMs) will affect our everyday composing practices (2023, p. 4). This blog post shares what I’ve explored through my Fall 2023 Digital Fellowship to respond to this seismic shift from a writing program administrator (WPA) vantage point. My exploration has been done with the goal of sharing with my campus constituents the tools they need to use AI constructively and ethically.
Fall 2023 Initiatives (and Beyond!)
Resource Generation/Sleuthing
Across the whole semester, I’ve been collecting as many links, texts, and other resources about generative AI and its impact on the lives and work of faculty and students. From opinion pieces lamenting AI’s rampant spread to academic LibGuides and educational websites that detail its ethical use for the classroom, the tenor and purposes of each source vary widely. This firehose of information proved to be quite overwhelming, and so I began to focus on the more academic and pedagogical sources I uncovered.
The next step (yet to be finished!) is curation. I am working on a giant Google spreadsheet to categorize the found sources, add keywords, and eventually reorganize the lot into categories for maximum usability. Thus far, the following keywords are emerging from this abundance of resources: academic integrity, assignment design, best practices, copyright, faculty audience, pedagogy, recommendations, student audience. It has been useful to uncover the many threads of conversation from a wider context; in addition to this semester-long sleuthing, I wanted to listen to and learn from opinions closer to home.
Generative AI at SNC
In writing studies and writing program administration research, one’s positionality and local context/material factors is always an important consideration. As I learned more about AI and its affordances and limitations in the national conversation, it also felt vital to gauge the AI climate on the SNC campus. Over summer break in 2023, various campus groups collaborated on two AI statements: The first is student-facing: an addition for the SNC student handbook, The Citizen (see section 18 on p.50, under “Acts of dishonesty”). The second is faculty-facing: some language options for faculty in the Fall 2023 syllabus template.
Here is the information faculty were provided in the template:
All instructors should strongly consider adding explicit language about what manner (if any) of usage of AI technology is permitted in their courses. An example of such language is below. Do note that The Citizen for 2023-24 will include “unauthorized use of AI generative technology (e.g., ChatGPT)” as an example of academic dishonesty.
[Sample statement for faculty:]Note that in this course students are not permitted to use AI generative technologies such as ChatGPT in any graded assignments except when explicitly permitted by the instructor.Based on my inquiry, SNC is approaching AI like most other colleges and universities; they acknowledge its existence and capabilities, and then they leave it up to the instructors of record to decide how (and how much) generative AI is incorporated in the classroom. I feel like SNC had a grasp of AI from an institutional perspective… but what did individual faculty think?
AI + Writing Faculty Reading Series
During the fall semester, I offered a three-month “AI + Writing”-themed faculty reading and discussion group. After being equipped with the syllabus language and acknowledgement in The Citizen, faculty were somewhat left to their own devices to authorize (or prohibit) AI use in their classes, and/or for their own work/research/course planning. I used this three-session discussion series to do an informal temperature check on how SNC faculty are coming to AI.
What I discovered is that, for the most part, faculty on campus are tending to avoid the topic of AI in the classroom. Many professors simply don’t talk about tech like ChatGPT beyond the syllabus statement, and they wait to see if students ask about it (or, worse, get caught using it in their papers). This somewhat punitive approach is unsurprising—heck, people had similar reactions with the inception of calculators, word-processors, and the Internet. But I’m hopeful that with more discussions and availability of resources, faculty will be less panicky and negative about AI, and more willing to see its capabilities for both the beginning (invention, brainstorming, source-finding) and end (polishing, proofreading, checking citations) of the writing process.
I will say, however, there are some SNC faculty and staff who are embracing the potential of AI. Through the “AI + Writing” series, I learned of a business professor who had students implement AI to generate a go-to consumer for a hypothetical product launch. A creative writing professor asked students to generate pros and cons for writing an editorial piece. I chatted with an Education professor who shared she has used AI not only in the classroom, to help multilingual students translate difficult texts, but also in her own life, to design a logo and travel itinerary for a months-long excursion to Europe. And personally, I had students in my College Writing class use ChatGPT to summarize a TED Talk they were going to analyze, and then they reflected on the experience.
Long story short: AI has entered the SNC chat, but there’s still a long way to go. And that makes me feel hopeful!
SLATE Conference
A few of the high school English teachers I work with in the College Jumpstart program told me about the SLATE (School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education) Conference—a long-standing educational technology conference held annually in Wisconsin Dells. The conference theme was, appropriately, “Harnessing the Power of AI.” Although SLATE had a definite K12 educator/administrator audience, I jumped at the opportunity to attend. And it absolutely did NOT disappoint!
I learned about soooo many incredible tools for teachers—from lesson planning to differentiating texts to various grade levels to generating rubrics to creating discussion questions. (I’ll be adding all these to my big, fat spreadsheet of resources for faculty!) But beyond those tools, here are my three main takeaways from SLATE 2023:
- Generate > Iterate > Edit
This is the recommended three-step process for anyone (students, faculty, etc.) to successfully use generative AI. It all starts with one’s ability to tell AI what you want clearly and effectively. This skill is known as prompt generation. Once you have your first response from the AI tech, you iterate (aka, refining the design of the information you’ve requested through repeated review and testing). For example, you might receive a 500 word response from ChatGPT, and then you can re-ask it to slim things down to 300 words. The final step is editing: Reading over the content to ensure there are no hallucinations (fake, fabricated, or incorrect info generated by the AI) and more. This final step leads to the second takeaway… - Work starts and ends with a HUMAN
The capabilities of generative AI are pretty astounding. Still, the lack of the human element in what it generates bears some necessary review of whatever it produces. It’s imperative that any work completed with the assistance of AI both starts (with original ideas) and ends (with review, fact-checking, etc.) with an actual human. I found this point very compelling; often what AI generates sounds too robotic and strange, or it’s just plain boring and uninspired. (My College Writing students had the same observations!) Thus, the ability to properly assess the AI-generated content and then use the most relevant parts of it for one’s own purposes seems paramount. - Compliance > Engagement > Empowerment
Finally, this last lesson links up with my position as the Director of WAC at SNC. In my administrative position, I find myself accountable for sharing what I know about generative AI in ways that will educate and liberate the faculty I work with. One of the SLATE sessions I attended shared how an entire school district approached the topic of AI, and the bolded three-step phrase above was their ongoing mantra.
Here’s how I’m thinking about it from the SNC perspective: The first step is to convince folx that AI is here to stay (so we might as well learn more about it!). The next step is to equip faculty and students with tools and support to help them engage with the tech—to learn about it, to play with it, to see for themselves how it might benefit them. And finally, equipped with knowledge and confidence, all parties involved are empowered with digital AI literacy to use it effectively.
Looking Ahead: the Writing Innovation Symposium
At the time this blog post was written, both my student- and faculty-facing deliverables are still in progress. Well, I’ll have to get my you-know-what in gear over winter break, because I’ve had a poster presentation accepted at the 2024 Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) being held at Marquette University in February. (No pressure! 😅) I will be presenting on everything from this blog post through the lenses of the student-facing LibGuide and the faculty-facing resource list. My assumption is that I’ll have many conversations about how other institutions are approaching the topic in similar ways, and my hope is that I’ll learn even more to bring back to St. Norbert.
The Future of AI (at SNC)?
This semester, I feel a bit like I’ve been building the plane while flying it, and necessarily so: Generative AI continues to expand and change, iterating itself (So meta!!) and adapting for the needs of its users. As the landscape of AI changes, those of us in higher ed have an obligation to keep an eye on these iterations and how they may affect our work and that of our students. As a WPA, the point person for faculty teaching WI classes, and a writing teacher myself, I am committed to continuing to learn about AI and facilitating digital AI literacy on the SNC campus.
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Thanks for reading! And HUGE thanks to Molly Lucareli and the rest of the ITS wizards for their sustained support and encouragement, this semester and always.
