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MnWE News
Early Fall “Artificial Intelligence” Issue
September-October 2023
In
this issue:
1. A New Paradigm?
BASICS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
2. Pedagogy
I:
A FIRST-YEAR WRITING EXPERIMENT WITH CHATGPT
3. Pedagogy
II:
MORE REPORTS OF AI IN THE CLASSROOM
4. Book Review: DAVID
MURA’S THE STORIES WHITENESS TELLS ITSELF
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5. Equity/Diversity Literary Resources
(in each issue)
6. Free Teaching/Learning E-Newsletters
(in each issue)
7. About MnWE
(in each issue)
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1.
A New Paradigm?
BASICS OF
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
What’s up
with AI? Students are beginning to discover free AI (“artificial
intelligence”) programs such as ChatGPT, Bard, Anthropic, and others. The
apps are downloaded easily and quickly: you then type your request into a
box using one or several sentences. If the answer isn’t sufficient, you
can modify it and try again.
What scares many faculty is the possibility that students might use AI to
write their papers—essays worth a “C” or higher
with acceptable quotations,
paraphrases, and
bibliographies in MLA,
APA, et al. However, other faculty see AI as an opportunity to improve the
teaching of writing and research. Still others wonder what policies should
be enacted by departments and schools.
To offer an
introduction of AI’s capabilities, longtime MnWE Committee member Gordon
Pueschner of Century College conducted several brief tests on his own. He
assigned the following series of tasks to the popular AI program ChatGPT:
1.
Format a correct MLA bibliography entry [from unformatted but
complete information].
2.
Provide two sources in MLA style for a paper on Elon Musk.
3.
Create an MLA Works Cited page for one source on the internet using
just a provided web link. Write an MLA Works Cited page for two sources.
Change it to an APA bibliography.
4.
Provide some possible thesis statements
for a paper on climate change. Then write an introduction and
thesis statement for a paper on climate change. Rewrite (regenerate) the
introduction so the thesis iss one sentence at the end.
5.
Generate a paragraph about climate
change containing
an MLA paraphrase and quote. Provide a different version (a
“regenerated” paragraph). Revise it so the MLA paraphrase and quote are
instead in APA.
6.
Rewrite the above paper as a high school student might write it.
Rewrite the above paper as a college student might present it with some
mistakes in it.
In the tasks forming
MLA and APA paraphrases, quotes, and bibliographies—ChatGPT did well.
However, the results of the paragraph formations and revisions were
mediocre. Pueschner says of Chat, “Though not super great with [essay
writing], it would at least give a student a starting point, something to
work with—though whether one would consider that cheating is another
matter.”
He also points
out that the “regenerate” command provides a somewhat differently styled
paper, and you can control a revision by prompting for what you want.
Additionally, the “high school” version was filled with repetitive slang.
And the “college paper with mistakes” had errors of style—more slang, much
like a raw, oral first draft (but with everything still spelled
correctly); however, a smart student could use prompts to control for the
types of mistakes that are planted.
Most first-year
writing faculty allow students to use citation generators, and most are
happy that students use whatever help they can get to improve their
grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It would appear that ChatGPT and other
AI programs might be a next step for students to perform these
functions. Pueschner points out that if you want to train your students
in specific rules (grammar, citation, etc.), it would be possible for you
to harness ChatGPT to purposely create specific types of mistakes in an
essay, and then ask students to work in class on correcting them (which
also could be done with teaching students how to cite and document).
Will students
use GPT to write “fake” essays? This may be avoidable especially if the
students are writing shorter papers: as it turns out, using AI, at least
for now, may be more trouble than it is worth for short assignments. See
the next article, below.
To avoid
cheating, another strategy might include asking students to write a first
draft during class (by hand, or in a computer lab with the internet off).
Rough drafts like this show a student’s basic skills, style, and thinking
patterns. You might even encourage them to input a copy of this draft into
AI (just as they might ask a friend, tutor, or Mom or Dad to help), show
you their original and the AI-generated revision, and then ask them to
further revise the results without AI. All of this would preserve much of
their original writing and thinking.
In any case, a
new writing revolution may be upon us. If so, it likely will unfold
slowly, just as did the personal-computer paradigm for teaching in the
‘80s and 90s. As it develops, the more that students workshop their papers
with you, the more control you’ll have. You may be able to stay ahead of
these changes and make students feel you are giving them a hand up in this
new writing world by showing them, yourself, how to use AI with
creativity, critical thinking, and careful research.
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Practical AI for Teachers and Students - YouTube
"Why I'm not (too) scared of ChatGPT" (University of Minnesota)
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2.
Pedagogy
I:
A FIRST-YEAR WRITING
EXPERIMENT WITH CHATGPT
Beth McMurtrie, Editor of the Chronicle’s newsletter
Teaching, describes in the Sept. 21 issue an experiment with AI. David
Weiss of Georgia Gwinnett College asked his students to use the popular AI
program ChatGPT. His first-year writing students had little experience
with AI and thought its main purpose was to enable cheating. He asked them
to read Joan Didion’s essay
“Why I Write,” then describe
their observations of it on the class discussion board and respond to
classmates’ thoughts.
Then he had
them work in groups during class to use ChatGPT to generate a 500-word
essay on the reading. Most important, he then asked them to evaluate their
Chat-made essay “on how well it offered a personal perspective and
demonstrated a critical reading of the piece.” Lively discussions ensued.
The result?
Here are three of what Weiss calls “typical comments” from them:
I feel that the process of
using chat GPT actually prolongs the time that it would have taken to
write the essay if we had just used our own thoughts to write the paper.
This is because thinking of prompts to put into the generator is time
consuming, and also trying to decipher what is good enough to include in
the paper also takes a long time.
It felt like eating a
bowl of store-bought pasta with nothing in it.... To say the least, I
doubt I’ll ever use it for writing again, but this opportunity was an eye
opener.
I feel like it was a
very bold decision for Dr. Weiss to have this class explore AI when it can
possibly lead to students using it as an easy way to create an essay. In
reality, the essay wasn’t as great as expected. AI is a very smart
invention, but it still cannot compare to natural human thought. The essay
came out bland and didn’t really express any emotion. It was very
straightforward, almost like answering a question rather than expressing
an opinion.
Weiss also
graded the groups’ Chat-generated essays based on the given assignment.
His grades for the AI pieces “mostly
ranged from 50 to 80 percent. One earned a near-perfect score, though,
which the students in that group attributed to better prompting and more
work in assembling the final product.”
Weiss’s
conclusion? The students had only a short time to produce a good essay. He
says about his experiment, “I think it was very effective at introducing
the technology to many of them and making the point, a point that I want
to make, that this technology is not for ‘cheating.’ If you think you
cannot do the work and generate a writing assignment in a short period of
time using ChatGPT, without knowing the material well yourself, you’re
going to fail.”
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Approaches to ChatGPT & AI Writing
(University of Minnesota)
AI and ChatGPT in Teaching Guide
2023 (UMN)
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3.
Pedagogy II:
MORE REPORTS OF AI IN
THE CLASSROOM
McMurtrie in Teaching (see “2” above) offers more in the
October 5 issue about a variety of faculty using AI. Here are four.
Gregg Michel, U Texas-San Antonio, says he “asked students…in
groups to annotate a ChatGPT-generated essay using
Hypothes.is. Then each group rewrote the essay, using what they wanted
of the original in the final draft. ‘The students were divided on their
assessment of the AI essay. Some
thought, as
I did, that the argument was perfunctory and the writing flat and not
engaging. Some students, though, found the essay to be “college level”
work but did think it still needed…better prose [and] more evidence).
Several thought the essay amounted to a good outline for building a more
formal essay.’”
Kevin McCullen, State U of New York-Plattsburgh, had students
summarize a reading and then showed them ChatGPT’s version. He says,
“Their version and ChatGPT’s…seemed to be from two different books….
ChatGPT’s…was…a ‘laundry list’ of events. [The students’] version was
narratives of what they found interesting. The students…focused on what
the story was telling them, while ChatGPT focused on who did what in what
year.” He adds that Chat offered some fake info, and the students’
generally found its writing “soulless.”
Grace Heneks, Texas A&M, says her students were not impressed with
ChatGPT. They used it for cover letters and resumes for jobs, and, says
McMurtrie, found it to create extra “work because, even with multiple
prompts, the writing did not have much personality and was repetitive.
‘Over all,’ Heneks wrote, ‘it’s been fun to play with ChatGPT in class,
and I think the more professors do so, the more skeptical students will
be. My students definitely seem to be more critical of it now.’”
Dan Sarofian-Butin, Merrimack College, says, “I require students
to use ChatGPT in class and in every minor and major assignment (formative
and summative; low and high stakes). I show them how to ask it better and
better questions each class…. I also require students to…understand how to
develop a question (and thus an argument). Moreover, I am now teaching
them how to use ChatGPT to better understand, focus, and develop a topic
that they will be researching for their midterm projects.” He adds that
his students have become positive about ChatGPT. He says they “greatly
value the ability to have immediate responses 24/7, the ability to have an
issue explained clearly and concisely, and the opportunity to brainstorm
something in real time.” How does he keep students from AI cheating? He
asks them to complete low-stakes reflective writing (presumably in class)
so he knows their style and capabilities, and also creates high-interest
assignments for students individually. And, he says, “on a deep
psychological level, I hope that by showing them explicitly how to use
ChatGPT in all aspects of the course, they know that I know…how ChatGPT
sounds and works, and so they shouldn’t use it to pretend in their own
essays.”
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Claude by Anthropic
– A different AI: good for academic work like summarizing and tutoring
Working Paper
(MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI)
Teaching Strategies
(MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI)
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4. Book Review: DAVID MURA’S THE STORIES WHITENESS TELLS ITSELF:
Racial Myths and Our American Narratives.
University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Review by Karen Sieber
David
Mura’s new book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, examines the
language, stories, and systems that have created a distorted version of
American memory that ignores violence and racism against people of color,
and prioritizes white narratives. Part memoir, part historiography, part
investigative journalism, Mura masterfully weaves together storytelling
with data, breaks down historical and fictional narratives, and makes
complex academic concepts accessible.
The book is split into three sections. Part 1 examines the present
moment in race relations, looking at the then-recent killing of Philando
Castile at the hands of police, and the Black Lives Matter movement. It
illuminates how myths of Black criminality and violent behavior have
plagued, and continue to do so, Black men in particular.
The second section, “How We Narrate the Past,” thinks critically
about epistemologies and ontologies, anddelves into the myths, lies,
tropes, and distorted viewpoints that white America has used to talk about
the past. This includes ideas such as the Lost Cause mythology seen in
popular cultural like Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation,
to Americans ignoring the evidence that Lincoln was actually a racist.
The final section examines the burden of racism on the Black
psyche, and lays a path forward. Following his essays, Mura includes an
appendix—“A Brief Guide to Structural Racism”—that educators and students
alike will find a useful framework for dismantling Whiteness.
As with his other works, for example,
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sensei,
this new book has moments that are personal and intimate, delving into his
own complex feelings about identity and his changing understanding of race
over time. And he excels in getting readers to think about their own
complex relationship with race. Throughout Stories, Mura uses
language that speaks directly to both the individual and the collective
with questions posed such as “How do we root out implicit bias?”
(30), or by repeatedly using words like “us” or “our”—including in the
title, “Our American Narratives.”
He also draws attention to an impressive number of key moments in
history to make points about the violence of racism, including the
Wilmington Massacre, convict leasing system, and Rodney King beating. He
also engages regularly with Black intellectuals, from W.E.B. DuBois and
Frantz Fanon to more modern scholars like Ibrahim X. Kendi, Michelle
Alexander, and
Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
Mura also interweaves post-colonial studies and writers like Edward Said.
The diversity of scholars throughout is a reminder to us all to decolonize
our syllabi, reading lists, and works cited.
How Mura fits it all into one book is nothing short of magic. It
stands out for its thoroughness in research yet clarity in writing,
resulting in a read that is accessible, engaging, and authoritative. Mura
also excels at connecting the past to the present. He began writing the
book following the police killing of Philando Castile, and initially wrote
a closing chapter on George Floyd titled, “I Can’t Breathe.” He had to add
an additional piece on the killing of Daunte Wright, “Coda.”
The book provides many opportunities for engaging students with
complex, timely topics and with writers and scholars who may be new to
them. Mura’s book is a love letter to James Baldwin in many ways,
referencing him throughout, showing repeatedly Baldwin’s prescience and
relevance, connecting his writing to the present racial tension and
violence in America. “Baldwin continues to stand for me as our great
diagnostician when it comes to race and the knots race has tied in our
souls and psyches,” Mura says (221). He serves as a Baldwin refresher.
Also excellent are Mura’s piece on Alexs Pate’s novelization of
the film Amistad from a Black point of view (in contrast to the
film’s white protagonist), and his chapter on “The Contemporary White
Literary Imagination.” Both are great reads for educators and students to
think critically about how authors write about race.
Mura’s book is more needed now than ever with ethnic studies
curricula being whitewashed or banned, continued police killings, racial
gaslighting, and increased white supremacist activity under former
president Donald Trump, To make any true progress in race relations in our
country, Mura argues, white America needs to not just acknowledge what
Americans of color already know: that the country was built upon systemic
racism, oppression, and violence. They need to see that it still exists.
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Karen Sieber
is a historian of Black history and labor history, best known as the
creator of
Visualizing the Red Summer,
part of the new AP African American Studies curriculum. She also is a
Humanities Officer at Minnesota Humanities Center, where she runs the
Minnesota Writers Series.
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U Minn. Publisher's Site with Reviews and More
Author's Website
Wikipedia
Biography of Mura
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5.
Diversity Books:
What might you or your students enjoy reading and researching?
Asian-American:
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Black:
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Indigenous/Native American:
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Latinx:
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LGBTQ:
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Graphic Novels Offering Diversity:
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7.
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Richard Jewell, Editor
MnWE News
Pronouns: He, him, they, them
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Minnesota Writing & English
www.MnWE.org
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