Following up on last week’s discussion, we decided to spend the first part of class in small group workshops devoted to peer feedback on preliminary final project ideas. Dr. Geller suggested peer response should include imagining formats, genres, evidence, etc. different from, or in addition to, what was described for the imagined project and helping one another imagine do-able projects (in scope, scale, length, time to develop, etc.) She reminded everyone these are intended to be abandoned projects in process abandoned at the end of the semester more than completed or finished final projects. We intended to spend about 20 minutes in these groups, but ended up doing this work until 5:50pm. At the end of this work, Dr. Geller asked that everyone write to themselves for a few minutes to be sure to remember any helpful questions and feedback they received.

Just before 6pm we began talking about AI and spent 45 minutes moving around to different topics related to AI, turning first to “An Introduction to Teaching with Text Generation Technologies.” Some of our conversation is captured here. As always, feel free to add any of your own notes from this conversation (with your name or anonymously).

If I (Dr. Geller) were to summarize some issues that came up again and again, I would note fear of AI (definitely both understandable and well-founded — we haven’t talked about a book like Algorithms of Oppression — and also perhaps overblown in some of the ways we think of it — the AI will change all writing forever argument). We talked about the labor issues of AI — where are jobs replaced? Where were jobs long outsourced already, for example, from the US? To what degree are we willing to think about labor in other parts of the world in our own consumption of information/use of technology tools in the US? We talked about how AI will affect education. As many published articles and opinion pieces take on, we talked about whether AI will change writing (in school and/or beyond) forever . . . or not? This led us to talk about writing that is evaluated versus writing as a process. We moved to some talk about what the teaching of writing is in college/in high school. How transactional is writing in school, and, if it’s transactional, why wouldn’t students turn to AI? How does language and literacy education in school work to reproduce dominant (“white mainstream” (Baker-Bell) literacies and language just as powerfully as AI tools do? (An article Dr. Geller recently read connects language and surveillance.) During and because of these conversations, Dr. Geller reminded everyone how important she believes is to revise deficit perceptions of/descriptions of students’/writers’ literacies, to remember and question the US tradition and history of privileging reading over writing literacies (Brandt), and to recognize the rhetoric of literacy crisis (see Johnson as a new article in a long line of articles to consider literacy crises).

In the last fifteen minutes we talked about what we wanted our plan to be for November 16th. Dr. Geller (hopefully!) captured what we agreed on in the By the Week for November 16th.

Dr. Geller also added her messy, somewhat (un)formatted collection of AI resources to the Crowdsourced AI Articles folder in Google Drive.

Have a good week! Write with any questions. See you on the 16th.