Teaching Writing With AI
“Wikipedia is not knowledge, and ChatGPT is not writing.”
Prof. Anicia Timberlake
Assistant Professor of Musicology Anicia Timberlake experimented with generative AI in her Spring 2023 classes to get students writing and reflecting about the writing process.
In one assignment from her undergraduate music history survey class, students use ChatGPT to generate initial ideas about musical borrowing—or as some would say, appropriation—from other cultures. They then produce their own written response to ChatGPT’s output. Using ChatGPT as a starting point helped students to discuss a fraught topic more confidently and productively; the AI provided a personalized prompt for the student to respond to that they nevertheless had some distance from, as it did not represent “their” beliefs. ChatGPT’s dispassionate tone was also an asset for a topic in which media commentary can be sensationalized or clickbait-y.
Anicia found that using ChatGPT as an entryway to a subject can also be helpful for novice learners when the academic conversation is taking place at a level that is hard for them to access.
For her graduate class introducing master’s students to research methods in musicology, Anicia found the most success using ChatGPT during an in-class lesson on crafting research questions. In this activity, the instructor models iterative use of the tool, since getting a useful response from the bot takes skill and repeated follow-up. Asking ChatGPT to explain its “thinking” (i.e, what makes this a good research question?) activates students’ metacognition. By the end of the session, the class discussion had identified the limits of ChatGPT’s usefulness in this arena and students were empowered to continue generating and refining research questions on their own. View the graduate activity—as well Anicia’s reflections on a previous, open-ended assignment that was less successful—here.
Instructors planning to use generative AI in their classroom should set clear boundaries about what academic integrity means in your classroom. Anicia’s undergraduate and graduate policies specify acceptable and unacceptable uses, explain how students should document their use of AI, and alert students to the current weaknesses of the technology. Both policies and assignments aim to help students understand ChatGPT as a tool with limitations and affordances–not an oracle.
