ChatGPT: Classroom Update
I have some interesting updates on how my students in Freedom of Speech are utilizing ChatGPT. This semester I have engaged my senior level students with radical transparency regarding ChatGPT. The goal is to be vulnerable with them about the technology and ask them to reciprocate. In doing so I’m hoping to learn more about the kinds of things students are using it for to better craft future policy for my classes and to be a better educator. This has even included the rollout of the new Turn-it-in tool and my deep skepticism of it. As an aside, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce a persuasive speech outline for adopting a vegetarian diet, copy-pasted the output into the turn-it-in tool and it told me the writing was a 15% AI match, with the majority of the match being a direct quote. I have some big ideas about ChatGPT and equity along with the pace of change in higher education, but I want to focus on something smaller this week: The real world practices of my students. So here you will find real use-cases from students in my writing class.
Understanding concepts to form an opinion: I recently assigned a quick write asking students to take a position on deplatforming controversial figures. One student reported they used the program to generate arguments for and against in addition to doing the assigned reading. They used the generated summaries as a jumping off point for their own opinion formation. This is similar to a use-case in speech and debate that was briefly explored on The ChatGPT Report podcast wherein a student used the program to identify rebuttals and holes in their argument.
Identifying topics for exploration: A big part of my class is writing a literature review. Sometimes students struggle to figure out what major themes to cover. At least one student used ChatGPT to identify major themes in a body of literature and then used those as the structure for their literature review.
Writer’s Block: Several students let me know they used the program when they hit a block in their writing. They came to a spot where they just could not come up with the right words or phrasing for the ideas and leveraged the program to move forward effectively.
References: This one is from me. I recently submitted an article about ChatGPT for publication. I wrote it quickly and when I am moving fast I often just drop URLs and notes about references into a document and then spend one long evening formatting everything. This time I dumped it into ChatGPT and told it to format an APA reference page. I went through and checked–the work was pretty good.
This is not an endorsement of all of these practices. I think there is something productive about struggling to find the right words and reading literature to the point of saturation. However, I think these will be increasingly common practices among students with access to ChatGPT and other similar programs. Knowing this–what policies do you think should guide writing classes?