This morning, a colleague shared an announcement with me via email. Embedded in the email was a comment about generative AI possibly taking over much of the routine work of scholarly editing and publication in the future. I closed the email, shut my eyes, and thought, I need a vacation from all things AI. AI is everywhere: the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education offer AI-themed articles and advertisements daily, while various departments at my university are hosting brown bags on the topic. Our linguistics club hosted a symposium on AI, with two PhD candidates speaking on their research in AI and applied linguistics. Our department’s WAC/WID committee is hosting a series of Webinars on AI in college writing, and the administration sent a lengthy AI survey for faculty to complete. I follow colleagues who focus on AI, including linguists like Emily Bender, composition/rhetoric specialists like Marc Watkins, and my fellow Bits bloggers Stuart Selber and April Lidinsky. My first-year composition course this semester has focused on writing about AI. With just two weeks left in this academic term, I have reached AI saturation.  I am going to set aside—for a while—all the urgency surrounding AI and think about what has driven my teaching and thinking over 30 years: working with students at the intersection of applied linguistics and composition studies. Nothing has been so energizing and restorative as dialogue with these students as they explore concepts of language, rhetoric, or pedagogy—and discover those concepts as sense-making tools. This semester, I worked with five writing fellows at our university, and as part of an internship course, they completed annotated bibliographies, choosing articles from a list of journals and classic pieces that I provided for them. I sat down this week to read their summaries and reflections. Here’s just a sampling of some of their initial choices: Elizabeth Wardle’s 2012 piece, “Creative Repurposing for Expansive Learning: Considering ‘Problem-Exploring’ and ‘Answer-Getting’ Dispositions in Individuals and Fields.” Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu’s 1999 article, “Representing the ‘Other’: Basic Writers And the Teaching of Basic Writing.”  A 2024 piece by Naitnaphit Limlamai, Emily Wilson, and Anne Ruggles Gere, “‘There are Other Ways to Answer This’: Development of pedagogical content Knowledge via Listening as a Benefit to Writing Fellows Across Disciplines.”  A 2024 pedagogy piece by Megan Heise, “Teaching Students How to Give and Receive Peer Review Feedback." Mark Blaauw-Hara’s 2006 classic, "Why Our Students Need Instruction in Grammar, and How We Should Go about It."  A 2018 piece by Elizabeth Busekrus, "A Conversational Approach: Using Writing Center Pedagogy in Commenting for Transfer in the Classroom." These writing fellows, who had been tutoring in literature, psychology, and corequisite English classes, bubbled with insight and questions:  I have never thought about this, but it makes so much sense!  I have seen this before… This explains why… I cannot wait to try this in my small group sessions… This reminds me of… So does this mean…? I remember reading about this in another class, but now it makes sense.  That is SO COOL. I know that I will eventually have to return to AI-related concerns. And the fellows have dealt with these concerns already (What do we do if we suspect the draft was AI-generated?).  But for this week, exploring these texts with my students was a welcome respite from all things AI. Have you experienced AI-information overload? What brings you energy and joy in those moments? ... View more

by Sonakshi Srivastava, Ashoka University This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Sona was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” In July of 2023, I made my debut as a teacher in a classroom. Up until then, I had been comfortable with my position as a writing tutor—looking at students’ scripts, working with them on polishing their drafts, completing their essays and the like but the summer of 2023 warmed me up to a different experience and experiment in my tutor life. My duty as a teacher, then, included teaching English to a cohort of some twenty students as a part of my university’s pedagogical programme, the Academic Bridge Programme (at Ashoka University). As the name suggests, the programme is intended to help students transition smoothly from school to college and places particular emphasis on English writing and speaking skills. With this particular intent in mind, I curated a curriculum that sought to invite the young minds to a world of curiosity and critical thinking. And, as a scholar of reading and attention, I dedicated a whole module to this specific strand with readings taken from the works of Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) and Sandra Cisneros. In total honesty, I was supremely proud of my curation—the naïve thrill of a first-time curriculum designer was hard to contain, so much so that I had already pictured my students smitten with the select excerpts, awed by the creative spill of words on paper. I was so read-y for this! However, as much as I was prepared to teach, I was also anxious about the reception and to some extent, my fear was founded. I had misread the class. In their seminal pedagogical work How to Read a Book, pivoted around critical reading, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler regard the reader as important as the writer. They compare this relational importance through the analogy of a pitch, a ball and the players. They compare the pitcher to the writer, the fielder to the reader, and the ball to the text. In that, the text as the ball is passive, and it is the sum total of the activity between the pitcher and the fielder that gives meaning to the receiving or the missing of the ball. What is implied here then is that the ball may be missed or received – the onus of this acceptance or rejection depends heavily on the reader as the fielder. And this is what the act of reading eventually condenses to. The text is a complex object set forth in action by the writer. It is the task of the reader to “catch” the writer’s intentions. What if Adler and Doren’s intention, set for the reader-writer relationship, were to manifest in a classroom? What if the writer exchanged places with a teacher in this analogy? These ifs found an answer through me. I, the teacher, had the ball rolling by prescribing the readings. My students, the readers, had failed to catch them—and this fault here was mine to claim. It was not them who had misunderstood or misread the texts. It was I, who had failed them and the texts in a classroom by misreading them. I can talk about this failure of mine because my being as a teacher stood challenged that particular day. This challenge is further fuelled by my reflection on Adler and Doren’s analogy which gracefully saves the writers from the act of reading or misreading the text by their readers. What possibilities would emerge if a teacher recognizes their shortcomings in a classroom? What if it is not the fielder’s error but an error by the pitcher? Since time was limited, and the course set, I had to come up with an alternative approach to the text. Over the course of a week, we worked together in different languages—switching between Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Khari, and English. We workshopped Cisneros’ story in our native tongues and connected it to stories that we had grown up listening or reading. Interestingly enough, the idea that the students are less “fluent” in English was also circumvented, prompting me to think if the assumption about their “fluency” was typecasted because of certain attributes (hailing from Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities, educated in state board schools etc.) that they had failed. The students were proficient in English—and where the vernaculars failed, English—no matter how “broken”, how “unpolished” brought our ideas and us together. Everyday, then, was a navigation through translation in that class, and that made all the difference. An initial challenge that channeled into a lesson for me not only as a teacher but also a translator. This was praxis. As I transition in my tutor role, from one ABP cohort to another, I cannot help but reflect how being in and reading with the classroom has influenced my perspective(s) on teaching. I think of it through the triad of the Cs—connect, correspond, and collaborate. To not think less of the students but to think with them and through them. A classroom is the most fertile field where a critical mind may flourish. And to think of it, perhaps this is what the pitcher and the fielder should do with the ball – approach it in the spirit of collaboration—one where we are not playing against one another but with one another. References Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster, 2011. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

Mckenzie Bergan Mckenzie Bergan is a PhD student at the University of Connecticut studying gothic fiction, young adult literature, and the campus novel. She explores how students and instructors form their identities within educational institutions, both individually and in relationship to those around them. She is the Assistant Director of First-Year Writing and is writing a textbook with the Director of UConn's FYW program. In this role, she also plans professional development opportunities for instructors and helps plan and host the Conference on the Teaching of Writing. She has taught English 1007, Writing and Multimodal Composition over the past several years and in the summer. She is the co-host of the “Reading Shirley Jackson Podcast” and has published “Theorising the Uncanny Adaptation through Hamlet” in Adaptation.     What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students? The most important thing I hope to instill in my students is the ability to recognize and hone their own curiosity. For so many students, school becomes a series of check boxes, and they often don’t have time to linger on questions or ideas that excite them. And that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault! Of course, students become overwhelmed with all they are expected to do in order to gain entry into a university and to graduate from one, and educators have those same responsibilities, especially when so many students face gaps in access and instructional time from the pandemic. That's why I feel it is so vital to give students space to be curious, to recognize when an idea sparks something in them, and further, to give them tools to practice their curiosity. Google and Wikipedia are amazing resources that give us more access to information than anyone has had in the history of our world (!!!), but helping to guide them through the process of navigating those resources, how to be on the lookout for information, and how to process different information in intuitive ways are all skills I work on in the classroom. Further, exposing them to the resources they have through the university and how to use them while they can is central to my work in the classrooms.   What is your greatest teaching challenge? It might be cliche, but my biggest teaching challenge right now is how to engage with AI ethically. Not only is it a technology that will necessarily change the course of my teaching forever, but I struggle to navigate the ethical concerns I have about it, like the environmental impact it causes, and the lack of credit given to the writers and artists whose work AI uses to create its products. While I’m deeply interested in ways AI can be utilized in the classroom, I don’t feel comfortable asking students to play with AI or asking it to do the same thing multiple ways, as many class activities suggest, because creating one AI generated image is the same as completely charging your phone, according to the MIT Technology Review. In addition, AI draws from resources that it does not credit. How can I ask my students to think about ethical citation methods while using a technology that fails to follow the methods I teach? And yet, it feels like if I don’t embrace AI in my classroom, I’ll become a dinosaur and lose the opportunity to bring an exciting new technology into the classroom. It also obviously won’t stop students from using AI technology in a variety of ways. Is a “I’d rather you do it in the house” mentality a better way of teaching them how to navigate this development even with my ethical concerns? These are the questions that take up most of my teaching thinking at this point. And while they are difficult, it’s also exciting to be at an important turning point in the way we think about teaching, the composition classroom, and writing itself.   Mckenzie's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Mckenzie's assignment. For the full activity, see the Freewriting Portfolio assignment prompt. For Assignments That Work, I shared my “Freewriting Portfolio” assignment. This assignment emerges out of a daily practice of freewriting that I do in my First-Year Writing classroom. For 10 minutes each class, students respond to a prompt I create. The prompt may be on the content of the class that day, a question about writing or composing, or a reflection on the project they're currently creating. Every student then shares one thing they thought about in the freewriting time, even if it’s just one sentence. I find starting the day with writing and sharing not only sets a concrete expectation of what class will be like, but it also helps to create a classroom community in which every student’s ideas are valued and heard. By the end of the semester, students have almost 30 freewriting responses. Our final project, the Freewriting Portfolio, asks students to create a multimodal collage of their freewriting artifacts. They must select 5 excerpts from their writing and then combine them with images that represent their thinking throughout the course. By combining visual and linguistic modes, students can reflectively think about their experience in the class in new ways. Students then create three footnotes that explain how their thinking has evolved throughout the course, and how their projects might have grown out of these preliminary meditations. It also asks them to consciously consider how they navigated their writing processes. I find reflective writing at the end of the semester to be very meaningful, and italso asks me to think about how I want to frame the course for future students. ... View more

I am definitely learning alongside my students as we consider the place of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the writing classroom. I’m not an early adopter — far from it. But I am certainly open to AI’s generative possibilities. I’ve enjoyed hearing how students use large language models such as ChatGPT in almost all areas of their lives. Some use it to figure out what to make from the weird collection of ingredients in their apartment fridges. Some use it to find less confrontational ways to phrase difficult messages to friends. My nephew used it to generate on-the-spot ceremonial language for his sister’s wedding. He’s a coder with a realistic sense of what AI does and doesn’t do. He made an assessment: Wedding ceremonies are largely formulaic, and using AI got him out of a tongue-tied spot so that he could embellish with some personal touches. Writing in our classrooms, though, has different purposes. I’m learning a lot from instructors in the “Bits on Bots” series, including Jeanne Beatrix Law’s recent post about the energetic student engagement she has witnessed with some generative classroom uses of ChatGPT. In another post from that series, Jennifer Duncan proposes an annotated bibliography assignment that guides students into meta-analysis of AI research results that moves students’ thinking to higher levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and pushes them into deeper thinking about how and why to use sources in their papers. That certainly seems like using AI as a “tool, and not as not a crutch,” as her students observed. And yet I’m also learning from AI insiders how to explain to students some of the serious limits of AI, including the crucial insight that the “I” in AI is not “intelligence.” A machine learning algorithm can predict the next words in a standardized sentence, but it is not grounded in reality, in culture, or in the network of creative meaning-making that humans bring to the task of interpretation and argument. Helping students understand this can guide their decisions about how and when to use AI. So, I highly recommend bringing into your classroom the student-friendly, accessible and very funny blog by AI researcher Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness.  Shane also has a TED talk, “The Danger of AI is Weirder Than You Think” that could be 10 minutes well-spent as a conversation-starter in class or as a spark to reflective writing.     Shane consolidates her argument in these “Five Principles of AI Weirdness”:             * The danger of AI is not that it’s too smart but that it’s not smart enough             * AI has the approximate brainpower of a worm             * AI does not really understand the problem you want it to solve             * But: AI will do exactly what you tell it to. Or at least it will try its best.             * And AI will take the path of least resistance.  Shane illustrates these principles in ways that will likely catch your students’ interest. For example, she experiments with AI to generate pick-up lines, including, “You look like a thing and I love you,” which became the title of Shane’s 2019 book. On her blog, she collects hilarious examples of the ways AI cannot replicate human creativity and experience when it comes to designing Halloween costumes (“Spartan Gandalf,” anyone?) or ice cream flavors (care for some “praline cheddar swirl”?). Keeping up with the value and the limits of AI might be one of the most important conversations we have this year — for our students, and for ourselves. ... View more

by Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Saurabh was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” "POETRY SOCIETY POSTCARD" by summonedbyfells is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Poetry and the topic of teaching poetry to multilingual writers are both very personal for me. As a poet and a person of color with an immigrant background, I often share my story with my students along with some of the poetry that is important to me. Recently, for example, I enjoyed reading Postcolonial Banter (2019) by British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. I connected in particular with her narratives of white supremacy (in her case, the U.K.). For example, in her poems "This Is Not A Humanising Poem" and "British Values," Manzoor-Khan resists positivist ways of thinking by showcasing the multiplicity of voices, experiences, and truths. The multilingual students in my classes have found her poems especially relevant. I think of one student in particular, Sonam (a pseudonym). After reading Manzoor-Khan's works, including her poem “A Cold Funeral of the Authentic Muslim Woman,” and listening to her TED talk, "I'm Bored of Talking about Muslim Women," Sonam wrote about her own journey. In a resilient reflection, she centered what it is like to be a Brown Muslim woman who wears a Hijab in the U.S. South, explaining her experience is an American truth, too. As Sonam confided to me, Manzoor-Khan's work gave her legitimation and authority to write about her own experiences. I cherish such moments, and the power poetry can have for multilingual students in my writing classes. However, I recognize that inviting poetry into the writing classroom can require strategic thinking. In writing courses I teach, I refer to exercises from Mike Palmquist’s The Bedford Researcher (2021) to introduce poetry as part of brainstorming activities for literacy narratives and other story-based genres. For example, I have assigned poems such as “Dhaka Dust” by Dilruba Ahmed, “Birth” by Fady Joudah, and “The African Burial Ground” by Yusef Komunyakaa. Then, as they develop literacy narratives, I ask students to respond to the following questions about what they read: What/who prompted you to think about in your life or someone you know based on what is happening in the poem? If you have to summarize the poem about the genre we are reading, how might you do that?  Similar to the poem, who are some people who play a crucial (positive or negative, you decide) role(s) in interpreting/receiving your experiences? Were there situations/people in the external world who influenced your experiences, and how? Have you read anything (across other languages/cultures) that has had a similar (or entirely different) perspective to the genre we focus on? What perspective do you agree with and why? The results can be powerful. I remember one of my students, Pablo (a pseudonym), with Bengali as his first language. During the outline stage of his literacy narrative, he wrote about how others assumed him to constantly need "English coaching" just because English is not his first language. In his draft, he described how he took a stand for himself as someone who had AP credit for an introductory composition class at the university. Utilizing poetry as a compositional tool empowered Pablo to express his resistance to native English fallacy and allowed me to better understand his challenges and triumphs. At times, at the beginning of a first-year writing or teacher education course, when I explain the overarching theme and the kinds of poetry-based activities and resources I’ll be using, I encounter resistance. I have had students who assume they cannot read or produce poems, and the prospect of doing so can be especially daunting for multilingual writers. To make my case, in such scenarios, I discuss the power of poetry and how reading and writing about it can help develop critical thinking skills. Providing students accessible ways to give poetry a try becomes even more crucial in such scenarios. In general, I have noticed that reading poems such as “March” by Ye Chun and “Poem for When You Want to Remember” by Mia Ayumi Malhotra can do more than enliven class discussion. Such poems can ignite brainstorming about personal storytelling and also influence students’ word choice and attention to details in their own writing. To enhance these effects, I often supplement poetry with the narratives of creative writers who write in a second or other language. Teaching “Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language” by Kaori Fujimoto and “Born Again in a Second Language” by Costica Bradatan, I have seen my students' confidence grow along with their motivation to be future agents of the critical world. Sonam’s and Pablo’s stories are just two of the many examples I have collected of the power of poetry in writing classes. Again and again, it helps my students, especially the multilingual college students I teach, bring their own cultures and experiences into their writing. As a result, poetry fosters their sense of belonging in college and in English. It also strengthens their understanding of language and of themselves, including their cultural identities. The latter, in particular, is something I want to ensure I preserve as a multilingual writer and a writing teacher. Teaching Resources I Recommend Chamcharatsri, B., & Iida, A. (Eds.). (2022). International perspectives on creative writing in second language education: Supporting language learners’ proficiency, identity, and creative expression. Taylor & Francis. Link Palmquist, M. (2021). The Bedford Researcher with 2021 MLA Update (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link Starkey, D. (2022). Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief: Four Genres in Brief (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link For Further Reading Ahmad, D. (2011). Dhaka Dust. In Dhaka Dust. Greywolf Press. Link Ayumi Malhotra, M. A. (2018). Poem for When You Want to Remember. SWWIM. Link Bradatan, C. (August 04, 2013). Born Again in a Second Language. New York Times. Link Chun, Y. (2005). March. The Bitter Oleander Press. Link Fujimoto, K. (January 27, 2021). Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language. Literary Hub. Link Garcia, D. (October/November, 1995). Italicized Writings. The Writer’s Chronicle. Link Joudah, F. (2013). Birth. In Alight. Copper Canyon Press. Link Komunyakaa, Y. (March, 2014). The African Burial Ground. Poetry Magazine. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, November). I'm bored of talking about Muslim Women [Video]. TEDxCoventGardenWomen. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, October). Suhaiymah Khan performs at TedxYouth@Brum 2017 [Video]. TEDx Talks Link Manzoor-Khan: please add citations for works referenced, including TED talks. Sailer, T. (2021). Why Write in English? Non-Native Speakers and Their Love for a Language. Tinted Journal. Link Smith, S. (January 28, 2019). Writing in a Second Language. Common Thread: Stories from Antioch University. Link Warner, M. (March 13, 2012). English that's good enough. The Guardian. Link The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

While reviewing first drafts of a source-based essay from my corequisite students, I noticed how often they introduced quoted material without much integration or context. In general, they had mastered the use of a signal phrase, but they used such phrases without providing any context to indicate the relevance of the source or the expertise from which the author spoke (again indicating that the internet is, for many of them, a flat landscape).  In a subsequent class, I revisited source integration via short summaries and author credentials.  At a few minutes after 8 o’clock that morning, I could see I was rapidly losing the class. I stopped and asked them a simple question: “How many of you took the interstate to get here this morning?” Several raised their hands.  “So did you use an on-ramp when you got on the interstate?” Nods all around. I asked them what would happen if they skipped the on-ramp and tried to enter the interstate using a right turn. “We’d hit someone and cause an accident,” they laughed. Exactly:  you have to speed up and merge into the flow of traffic. I explained that introducing quoted material is similar to a car merging onto the interstate: it has to merge into the flow of traffic by using the full on-ramp. The proverbial on-ramp in writing is the way you set up a context for the quoted material.  Did the analogy lead to sophisticated integration of quotes? Of course not. But in the next drafts, I could see the students’ attempts, however rough, to add context. Analogies are ubiquitous in college classrooms. After all, students make sense of new concepts and skills in light of what they already know. And over my career as a writing teacher, I have often resorted to analogies to teach writing concepts: a choppy paragraph is similar to what happens when I try to drive a car with manual transmission (being proficient only on an automatic), or like trying to climb a stairwell with missing steps. I explain the information deluge that occurs when corequisite students neglect paragraphing or end punctuation this way: what if I am asked to drink an entire pot of coffee at one time, rather than in measured sips?  I’d choke on one of my favorite things!   Sentences weighed down by unneeded adjectives or adverbs remind me of swimming in the Gulf of Mexico when the seaweed is heavy: it’s hard to see where I stand because the seaweed obscures the sand. And of course reading a text whose author has not yet found a thesis reminds me of what happens when my GPS malfunctions: I just don’t know where I am going. Or perhaps it’s more like being in a corn maze in the fall: I have no sense of where to go next because I don’t know what the big picture is. If the writer could just take the view from above—from a hovering drone—I would be much more willing to follow.  There are days when I wonder whether I am (at 57) too far removed from the experiences and digital spaces that my students share to make meaningful connections with them. But I have found that analogies cross generational divides, even as vocabulary and lived experience seem further apart. Shared laughter over my silly analogies—or my students’ adaptations of those analogies—is a reminder of what has not changed, and what we have in common. What are your favorite analogies in the writing classroom? I would love to hear from you. ... View more

by Christina Davidson, University of Louisville This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Christina was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) became widely available in November of 2022. Since that time, students have been exploring their use and are eager to learn more. As a veteran composition teacher and member of a WPA team, I was hopeful to find a way to address student GenAI curiosity in my own classroom. AI and Writing (2023), Sidney I. Dobrin’s classroom-friendly text, was exactly what I needed . In the second half, which focuses on “opportunities and applications,” Dobrin borrows a powerful metaphor from GenAI expert Cath Ellis. He compares approaches to writing to ways of summiting Mt. Everest. For Ellis, writing is akin to climbing just as GenAI is to riding a helicopter to the mountain top (60). Each option leads to the summit or goal, yet they provide contrasting experiences—and very different opportunities to learn. Together, Dobrin’s book and Ellis’s metaphor gave me an idea for getting writers to think about GenAI and the writing process. The 75-minute workshop I designed, “Process, Post-Process, and GenAI,” starts with a focus on writing. In fact, I don’t even mention GenAI until the closing discussion. Instead, I start by asking participants to use materials I provided (i.e., blank paper, markers, colored pencils) to draw any task they perform in which several paths could lead to the same result. Here are a few memorable examples from my first workshop which occurred at the 2024 Writing Innovation Symposium, held at Marquette University. Thoughtful participants drew multiple ways to learn a new language, different methods for preparing rice, and various paths to explore inside an open-world game, just to name a few. Wesley Fryer - EdTechSR Ep 308 Exploring AI in Education After drawing, participants share in small groups to kick off the discussion. This is a great time to “work the room” and see which drawings might be best shared with the entire group. The resulting conversation opens a dialogue in which participants analyze their own writing process and how it might compare to one of the “paths” in the drawing. The conversation is not meant to imply a favoritism for a certain method or path (helicopters are certainly useful machines, as is Duolingo), but to increase the critical way students consider the writing process. It’s the first step toward engaging with the most essential question at the close of the workshop–What might happen if change my writing process to include GenAI? On my campus, most FYC students are familiar with process-oriented pedagogy from prewriting and drafting, to revising, editing, and finally “publishing” or submitting their work. Our students might imagine each of the steps the hiker must complete before the summit is reached, just as they might imagine the work that is placed into completing a final draft. However, we know the hike to the top of a mountain is rarely, if ever, a straight line–and our writing processes aren’t straightforward either. Just as the hiker may need to navigate a blocked trail, so, too, the writer must negotiate struggles in completing a draft. As we close our discussion, I return to one of my favorite examples. At my first workshop, one participant drew the creative choices players make in open world games. He charted several “mini-bosses” and side quests, which we might imagine as rounds of peer revisions, writing center visits, or conducting additional research while writing a large paper. If a GenAI tool could take the gamer straight to the credits, clearly much would be forfeited. Similarly, there’s much to be lost when a writer uses ChatGPT to create a “final” draft. The example also illustrates how a post-process approach to writing is highly contextual and social, two areas where GenAI just isn’t as helpful. The workshop ends with reflective writing concerning our shared discoveries through discussion. I have been encouraged to hear how quickly FYC students identify the critical human element they wish to retain in writing. Most participants agree that LLMs can be useful for some writing tasks, but preserving agency over their personal writing often remains at the center of student concern. Are you interested in fostering conversations about process and GenAI tools in the classroom? I would encourage you to try my exercise in your own classroom and to let students discover for themselves how the most memorable processes are ones that meander and land in unexpected places. I often recall an exasperated FYC student that lamented, “It took forever to write this paper!” I quickly responded, “Lucky you!” because I knew this student had gained so much learning in that work. To follow C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka,” I reminded her of the opening line—“As you set out for Ithaka, hope your journey is a long one.” A writing process full of discovery, invention, and reinvention is one I encourage in my FYC course—and although GenAI can be helpful on a step of that iterative journey toward destinations unknown, the understanding of what “these Ithakas” mean is only known to the writer who writes them. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

Jeanne Beatrix Law is a Professor of English and Director of Composition at Kennesaw State University, focusing on generative AI (genAI) and digital civil rights histography. Her AI literacy work has global reach, including multiple presentations of her Rhetorical Prompt Engineering Framework at conferences like Open Educa Berlin and the Suny Council on Writing. She has led workshops on ethical genAI for diverse institutions and disciplines at Eastern Michigan, Kent State, and CUNY’s AI Subgroup. She and her students have authored publications on student perceptions of AI in professional writing. Jeanne also co-authored The Writer's Loop: A Guide to College Writing and contributed to the Instructor's Guide for Andrea Lunsford's Everyday Writer. She has authored eight Coursera courses on genAI and advocates for ethical AI integration in educational spaces in both secondary and higher education spaces as a faculty mentor for the AAC&U’s AI Pedagogy Institute.   In my inaugural post a couple of weeks ago, I began with November 2022, which is when the public first gained access to ChatGPT. Today, I want to fast-forward to August 2023 and report out some data that our Kennesaw State University research team conducted. As the Chief P.I. for the project, I led a team seeking to measure first-year students’ attitudes towards generative AI (genAI) use in their academic and personal writing.[i] I had experimented with AI-infused teaching already, but this was a first attempt at systematic inquiry into how students might be using generative AI in their writing. A Disclaimer I completely understand the challenge of translating data into actionable steps, especially when introducing generative AI into college classrooms. We’re all navigating new ground here, working to sift through what the data tells us and how it aligns with the dynamic needs of our students and teaching goals. It’s a learning curve, but together, we can explore strategies that are both data-informed and practically applicable. Engaging with data-rich content can often feel overwhelming, especially when every point seems crucial. Recognizing this, my aim here is to distill the most significant insights for clarity and relevance. Rather than inundating readers with exhaustive detail, I’ll focus on the key elements that reveal meaningful trends and implications. Let’s approach this data thoughtfully, with a critical eye on the broader narrative it suggests. What We Did & What We Found We surveyed students in the fall and spring semesters and distributed digital surveys through instructors in Composition I and Composition II courses. Around 1,550 students answered the surveys. Some of our findings were expected; for example, more than 92% of students reported being aware of generative AI. Many of our findings, however, surprised us. Almost 40% of students (average of fall and spring collections) reported that they use genAI tools in their personal writing, while 35% reported using genAI in their academic writing. More than 75% of students surveyed believe that genAI is the future of writing. Even more so, the qualitative sentiment analysis gave us deeper insights into the nuanced understandings and writing practices of these students. You can read more about preliminary (2023) insights in the DRC Blog Carnival. Students felt that generative AI (genAI) was helpful for brainstorming and idea generation and was beneficial for generating ideas, structuring thoughts, and helping overcome writer's block. They further appreciated genAI's ability to provide different perspectives or suggestions which can be developed further. GenAI was commonly mentioned by students as a useful tool for grammar corrections and refining sentence structure. They seemed to view this practice as analogous to other writing aids that do not compromise academic integrity. Several responses highlighted the utility of genAI in quickly gathering preliminary research or understanding basic concepts, which can be helpful in laying groundwork for more in-depth investigation. On the flipside, students reported negative sentiments towards genAI as well. Their responses indicated that they considered genAI use as cheating when it was used to replace personal effort. A significant concern was that using genAI to write essays or complete assignments was also cheating. Students emphasized that submitting work generated by genAI as one's own undermines the purpose of education and diminished individual understanding and effort. There is a widespread belief that AI impedes the creative process and that relying on genAI for academic tasks can lead to a decline in students' own creative and critical thinking skills. Many students saw the use of genAI in academic settings as a moral issue, arguing that it promotes laziness and dishonesty. The concern is that it allows students to bypass learning and understanding, leading to a lack of genuine academic growth. The trends in sentiments led us to speculate that, while students did find ethical use cases for generative AI, they also understood its limitations. For us, this was an “a-ha” moment, where the lore around many faculty campfires that told a narrative of “rampant student cheating” simply wasn’t accurate. The students we surveyed demonstrated deeper understandings and uses of generative AI and sought guidance from faculty. In fact, more than one third of students we surveyed wanted to learn more about genAI and would take a class on it. Preliminary Takeaways Initial analysis indicates that students need guidance on ethical AI use, and that faculty have opportunity for key input to: help students scale ethical generative AI use; help students understand the human-centered ethics of AI outputs; cultivate students’ digital literacies and prepare them to thrive in AI-infused workplaces. It’s important to note that what motivated our research team was workplace and industry data showing trends in generative AI demands and how teens are interacting with generative AI tools. What’s Next? In my next post, I will dig deeper into what we have used this data for so far. A preview: supporting students in their AI literacy journeys through rhetorical prompt engineering and OER custom GPTs. Stay tuned; thanks for reading.    [i] Our initial research team included: Dr. John Havard, Dr. Laura Palmer, James Blakely, and myself. We have since added Dr. Tammy Powell, Ahlan Filtrup, and Serenity Hill Our IRB#: FY23-559 ... View more

This series of posts is adapted from a keynote address given by Stuart A. Selber for the Teaching Technical Communication and Artificial Intelligence Symposium on March 20, 2024 hosted by Utah Valley University. This is the fifth post in a series exploring five tenets of a Manifesto for Technical Communication Programs: AI is evolutionary, not revolutionary AI both solves and creates problems AI shifts, rather than saves, time and money  AI provides mathematical solutions to human communication problems AI requires students to know more, not less, about technical communication  < You are here To explain this tenet of the Manifesto, I want to share the results of a study I conducted with Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Eric York (Johnson-Eilola, Selber, and York, 2024). In our study, we analyzed the ability of ChatGPT to generate effective instructions for a consequential task: taking a COVID-19 test at home. In our analysis, we compared the output from a commercial prompt for generating these instructions to those provided by the test manufacturer. We also analyzed the input—the prompt itself—to address prompt engineering issues. Although the output from ChatGPT exhibited certain conventions for procedural documentation, the human-authored instructions from the manufacturer were superior in many ways. We therefore concluded that when it comes to creating high-quality, consequential instructions, ChatGPT might be better seen as a collaborator than a competitor with human technical communicators. Let me summarize our results for you. Although the robot did a good job of breaking down the overall task into subtasks and using the imperative voice, it was unsuccessful in several areas, some of them critical to health and safety. For example, the robot numbered headings and bulleted steps instead of numbering steps and using text attributes to build a design hierarchy with headings. You probably recall dividing your stressed-out attention between a test kit and its instructions: Bullets do nothing to help you re-find your place in the instructions as you go. More critically, the robot failed to specify the insertion depth for the nasal swab, and it also got the insertion time wrong. In addition, the robot failed to specify how long the nasal swab should be swirled in the tube or well. These problems could very well lead to incorrect test results, failing to reveal, for instance, that the user contracted COVID-19. There were other problems with the instructions, but these were among the major ones. The output, of course, reflects the input, and the prompt had many problems, too. For example, the prompt did not call for a document title for the instructions, a preview of the task, a list of items that users will need, or safety measures, all common conventions of the genre whose presence produces well-known usability benefits. Possible solutions to these problems are themselves problematic. We might naively assume that the solution to a flawed prompt is simply better prompt engineering, that we should rewrite our purchased prompt to achieve better results. Using our expert knowledge of the conventions of the instruction set genre (and more to the point, the reasons for those conventions), we could write a new prompt to make the numbered steps unnumbered headings and the bulleted substeps numbered (to make them more conventional and thus more usable); make sure the instructions are accurate and inclusive of all information (to account for the missing swab depth), including a clause to double check that the information is accurate (to correct the errors in nasal insertion time and swab swirl time). The problem with this solution is that while we can rely on our expertise to tell us how to effectively rewrite this prompt, novice users cannot do that. And even if users could effectively rewrite this prompt, ChatGPT may not be able to successfully replace the bullets with numbers, correct the insertion times, and so on. The solution to the errors introduced by the AI, then, is not more AI. Quite the opposite, we argued. Making a fully detailed set of instructions to correctly tell ChatGPT how to write instructions seems to defeat the purpose of using the technology. That is, if we can already write instructions that well and have the time and wherewithal to iterate the results until we are satisfied they will not harm anyone, then why have the robot write them for us in the first place? In sum, one danger of AI is not that it can replace highly routine genres but that it seems like it can. And depressingly, this might just be good enough for much of the world.   Reference Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, Stuart A. Selber, and Eric J. York. 2024. “Can Artificial Intelligence Robots Write Effective Instructions?” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 38 (3): 199-212. Conclusion Rather than concluding with a summary of the five tenets—I hope I have been clear enough in discussing them—I will end this series of blog posts with a final point, one that is critical to any and all pedagogical activities in technical communication programs. As we all know, writing is a mode of learning and of meaning-making. Although we must prepare students for the day-to-day work of technical communication, we are doing more than just grading the effectiveness of final projects. As we develop AI activities and assignments, we should always keep our learning goals in mind. With those goals in mind, we can better tackle the “where” of AI, something we address throughout the new edition of Technical Communication. By this I mean where we teach students to use AI in technical communication work. For example, I discourage the use of AI in first drafts because of the crucial role they play in helping students figure out what they want to say and how they want to say it. Where can AI assist learning and where might it create problems for learners? If we want to avoid outsourcing learning to technology, this is a key question for all of us.   ... View more

Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor of English and Digital Writing at Kennesaw State University. She also trains graduate student teachers in composition theory and pedagogy. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning and critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She is a regular contributor to this Multimodal Monday academic blog since 2014. She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy, and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website: Acts of Composition   As a teacher of writing and literature, and as a humanist, banning books is about as bad as it gets.  Book banning has always been a short-sighted strategy attempt to control thinking and access through censorship. As of late, this issue is back with us at an alarming rate, gaining strength and power. The challenged books often focus on issues of race, history, gender identity, and sexuality among others. I think there is an argument for age appropriateness, but I argue that our students need to participate in conversations on controversial topics and issues of identity to understand the society in which they live and as part of their coming-of-age process. Sure, it is uncomfortable at times, but it speaks to specific human perspectives that we can only understand through exposure. Students must have opportunities to critically examine a full range of issues that relate to their human existence. They need to understand what is at stake and have their voices heard. Or, as best put by one of my students, “By banning books, society isn’t just removing paper and ink– it’s silencing stories, ideas, and voices that challenge, provoke, and ultimately teach us lessons” (Breedlove). The American Library Association (ALA) provides some great resources for understanding the complexities of this issue. They have lists of banned and challenged books, maps that show censorship by the numbers, and the Intellectual Freedom Blog that helps “raise awareness of time-sensitive issues related to intellectual freedom, professional ethics, or the mission of the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF).” This group shares data along with legislative action and specific cases.  For example, “OIF documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship, as well as 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials, and resources in 2023." Each year, my department participates in Banned Books Week. We have speakers, activities, and book giveaways. This year, students in my literature class contributed to these efforts through the creation of a Banned Books slideshow. This is a simple but impactful project that raises awareness for my students and others who see it. Once we created the slideshow, it was distributed across campus on closed-circuit TVs and sent out as an instructional supplement for teachers to embed in their LMS.  This kind of project has a public outreach and community engagement component that takes it beyond the classroom, increasing a sense of investment for students. Here’s how my students and I created our Banned Books slideshow: Researching Banned Books: Students started by researching the history and current resources on banned books so that they understood the issues, actions, and challenged books. I shared the ALA site and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) site on intellectual freedom along with lists of banned and challenged books. This allowed them to understand the context behind banning books as well as what is at stake. Choosing a Book: After students reviewed the resources, they chose a book and added it to a spreadsheet. There are so many choices!  I asked students to review the list to avoid duplication. I also encouraged them to review both current and past titles along with the reasons the book was challenged.  Creating the Slideshow:  For this project, I used one of my favorite assignment tools, Google Slides, for creating collaborative presentations. Students easily created the project together. Each slide includes the title, publication year, author, why it was banned, and why they consider it an important text. Students also included an image of the book cover and a citation. I allowed them to design their slide for visual appeal and rhetorical impact.  This project was meaningful for students as they discovered that many of their favorite books and important books are banned. They couldn’t believe some of their beloved childhood books such as Charlotte’s Web (talking animals) or Where the Wild Things Are (child abuse) appeared on the list. They also reflected on the lessons learned from important texts like To Kill a Mockingbird that contribute to our understanding of race and humanity or Gender Queer that teaches about gender identity and LGBTQ+ themes. They also recognized the importance of multicultural texts such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Absolute True Diary of a Part-time Indian by ShermanAlexie, or The Color Purple by Alice Walker which represent a diversity of voices and perspectives. Students learned about the processes for challenging books and participated in the current cultural conversations on this issue. When students completed the project, they felt the potential impact of their voices as their work was distributed to others for awareness and possible change. Students engaged deeply in the project and joined others who stand for the freedom to read.     ... View more

by Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman   Since the inaugural  (WIS) in 2018, folks have been telling us that ours is an event where they feel seen, heard, and valued or, in a word, welcome. As Kaia Simon recalls in Community Literacy Journal, describing her experience at our first WIS: “It was my first year out of graduate school,” and “I remember feeling truly like a guest, likeI had been invited and that my presence mattered.” Comments like these are important to any event organizers, but all of us involved in the WIS couldn’t be more proud because of the priority we place on hosting. In fact, it’s a central part of the WIS mission, and we’ve worked hard to make it one of our hallmarks. In fact, when we started planning WIS ‘22, our first gathering of the COVID era, the importance of hosting was very much on our minds. After a year’s hiatus, we wanted to do more than simply reinstate the WIS. We wanted to amplify our hospitality, although we weren’t sure how. Enter our colleagues from Macmillan Learning. Thanks to Laura Davidson and Joy Fisher Williams, we were able to level up as hosts beyond our original capacity or our initial imaginings. Through our partnership with them, in 2022 we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It offers 3-5 early career colleagues mentorship and need-based financial support to attend the symposium as well as an opportunity to publish here on the Bits Blog. Over 3 years, the program has grown and grown, and in 2024, we welcomed our first international cohort of B/SM WIS Fellows. The roster includes: Abigayle Farrier, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Texas, who delivered the flashtalk, "Who Let the Dog Out?: Therapy Dogs and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy," and shared a poster, "Collaging Humans: Reflecting on the Writing Process." Christina Davidson, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and Assistant Director of Composition at the University of Louisville, who shared her workshop "Collaborative Writing with AI: Utilizing Design Thinking to Improve Classroom Outcomes." Emma Tam, a writer, interdisciplinary educator, and senior undergraduate at Minerva University, who joined the WIS from the UK as an online participant. Saurabh Anand, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and Assistant Writing Center Director at the University of Georgia, who presented his poster "My Queer Heart." Sonakshi Srivastava, a writing tutor at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India, who shared her WIS poster, "What's Attention Got To Do With It: On Reading and Notemaking as Writing Pedagogy," this was also the topic of her 2024 Watson Conference project.   This group attended WIS ‘24, Writing Human/s, both onsite and online, and they made vital contributions as writers, as writing scholars and teachers, and as colleagues. Highlights include the synergy that developed between them and their mentors, all members of the 2024 WIS Steering Committee, including Gitte Frandsen, Jenna Green, Max Gray, Patrick Thomas, and Seán McCarthy. Today, the Macmillan-WIS partnership is one of the brightest spots in the WIS sky. You’ll see what we mean via forthcoming posts by 2024 Fellows Christina Davidson, Saurabh Anand, and Sonakshi Srivastava. We also invite you to follow the tags for WIS and writing innovation, where you’ll find additional insights from past B/SM WIS Fellows and others. Early career colleagues—undergraduates, graduate students, recent graduates, and others who have recently joined the profession—will find information about the latest fellowship opportunities in the WIS ‘25 CFP.  In all, we hope the B/SM WIS Fellowship is a beacon that shines alongside WIS program opportunities, which include workshops, posters, small-scale performances and displays, and large-scale installations as well as flashtalks, flares, and sparks. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

Chloe Cardosi Chloe Cardosi is pursuing her PhD in Public Rhetorics and Community Engagement at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She teaches a variety of courses in writing, including FYC courses, business and technoscience writing, and rhetoric and culture. She has also served as the English 102 coordinator, assisting the Director of Composition in revising curriculum and supporting incoming Graduate Teaching Assistants in their transition to UWM’s English Department and composition program. Her research focuses on linguistic justice, public memory, and cultural rhetorics methodologies. As a first-generation student, she is invested in helping students of all levels and backgrounds finding their voices as writers, and making the space to amplify their work.   How do you ensure your course is inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive? In addition to standard accessibility practices, my main goal for inclusivity in all of my course is fostering a sense of belonging in my students. As a writing teacher, I never want to lose sight of the fact of what an honor it is to work with students so closely and to interact with their voices and perspectives through their work. I believe that my job is not to teach students how to write, but to guide them to recognize how they already write, then get to work in refining their voices so they can compose work that matters to them.  This is a major reason why I welcome and encourage multiple modes of expression and community-engaged research in my assignments. I want students to know that writing is not a skill you learn to make it through a semester and earn a good grade based on whatever idiosyncratic expectations their instructor may have—it’s a tool that will help them express themselves and their ideas, connect with others, and accomplish things in the “real world.” How this tool is wielded depends on the student and what they’re trying to accomplish with their writing. Through the work they do in my class, I want students to see that writing can—and should—look different based on audience, purpose, genre, and so much more.   What is the most important skill you aim to provide to your students? I want my students to feel equipped to write for a variety of rhetorical situations. All too often, students are instructed that “Standard Academic English” is the end-all, be-all way to write, the “neutral” standard all other writing either adheres to or strays from. But let’s be real: “academic” writing is not neutral, and the idea that it’s the standard is a myth to uphold the idea of exclusivity in academia. From the beginning of my classes, I’m very clear with my students that more traditional, “standard” ways of writing in academia is just one way to write, not the way.  Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t simply an “anything goes” approach. I still expect students to compose projects with clarity, careful research, and effective rhetorical choices. This is simply a way to make room for other kinds of writing in the academy, and to instill confidence in students. To do this, I encourage a lot of experimentation when it comes to writing. I try to motivate students to work with topics and genres that excite them but are perhaps unfamiliar to them—like podcasts, TED Talks, creative work, or whatever else they’d like to try. I want whatever students compose in my classes to interest and excite them, and feel like it’s usable beyond the walls of classroom—which is why I use the assignment that I’ll describe below.   Chloe's Assignment That Works Below is a brief synopsis of Chloe's assignment. For the full activity, see the Research Remix assignment prompt. In my College Writing and Research classes, students spend the semester researching a topic or issue in Milwaukee (where our university is located) that matters to them. The second major assignment they complete in the course is a research report on this issue. The course then culminates in their final project: “remixing” their research report into a public-facing project that addresses a specific audience within Milwaukee. Based on the research expertise they’ve gained throughout the semester, students have to decide what information will be most useful to their chosen audience, and what genre is best for presenting that information. Essentially, this project should help students see how the same research can be employed differently to new genres and audiences.  After using this assignment many times over many different sections of College Writing and Research, I’d identify these as the main benefits: Community engagement: This project helps students to see themselves as participating members and stakeholders of the larger community of our city. Creativity: Students get to create an information product that feels more tangible and exciting to them than a more traditional research paper. Recognizing their identity as writers: In allowing/encouraging them to write about something that matters to them and make something they and their audience find useful, students will recognize that their perspective already has value. ... View more

This series of posts is adapted from a keynote address given by Stuart A. Selber for the Teaching Technical Communication and Artificial Intelligence Symposium on March 20, 2024 hosted by Utah Valley University. This is the fourth post in a series exploring five tenets of a Manifesto for Technical Communication Programs: AI is evolutionary, not revolutionary AI both solves and creates problems AI shifts, rather than saves, time and money  AI provides mathematical solutions to human communication problems  < You are here AI requires students to know more, not less, about technical communication At this point, I am guessing that most technical communication teachers know how AI works, at least generally speaking—although it does things that not even developers can always understand. At times, the black box of AI can be hard to explain. AI robots are trained using very large language models (LLMs), which include a corpus of multimodal texts measured in terabytes. Open AI reported that the corpus for ChatGPT totaled 45 terabytes of initial data. How big is one terabyte? According to the website TechTarget.com, one terabyte of data is equivalent to 86 million pages in Microsoft Word or 310,000 photographs or 500 hours of movies. We are talking about a scale for training that defeats the capacity of concrete imagination. At least mine, anyway. In glossing over many technical aspects, what is important for teachers to remember is that the output produced by generative AI is based on statistical probability, on pattern matching, on math for a massive corpus of decontextualized texts. And while the output can be useful and interesting in all sorts of ways, the field has already tried and dismissed mathematical approaches as overarching frameworks for technical communication because they are, in a word, arhetorical. I am referring, of course, to the Shannon and Weaver (1949) mathematical model of communication, which had a good run starting in the mid-twentieth century and continues to be influential, at least obliquely, in certain popular settings and STEM contexts (for an overview and critique of this model, see Schneider, 2002; Slack, Miller, and Doak, 1993). As a reminder, this model conceptualizes communication as a linear process involving a sender, who, say, crafts an email message to a reader; an encoder, which converts the email message into binary data; a channel or network, which passes the binary data to its destination; a decoder, which re-assembles the data into an email message; and the reader, who consumes the email message. It is a tidy little circuit. The possibilities for dysfunction in the circuit come from noise, which is anything that can distort the email message. Noise could come from technical difficulties, for example, or it could come from ambient conditions, which, as Thomas Rickert (2013) taught us, can actually be rhetorical. But because Shannon and Weaver separated meaning from information, all we need to do is eliminate the noise and voila, we have success! Our field has struggled with the Shannon and Weaver mathematical model of communication for obvious reasons: it is a one-way communication model, it is a transmission model, and it models the field in very impoverished ways. Under approaches based on the Shannon and Weaver model, technical communicators are not working as meaning makers or knowledge producers in any significant sense. Instead, they are positioned as low-level workers who can probably be replaced by writing robots in some cases. I have not been able to find any mention of the communication models informing the work of AI companies, but their promises often elide the complexities of language and language use. In the communication circuit for AI, the possibilities for noise come from two main sources: the training data for robots and end-user prompts. All we have to do, so the thinking goes, is clean up the training data and teach people how to craft effective prompt sequences. The result will be AI-generated texts that are effective and usable—or at least effective and usable enough, a concern I will return to in the next tenet of the Manifesto. As such, there is little to no acknowledgement of the fundamental limitations of math as a guiding structure for communication or communication products. Put differently, there is little to no acknowledgement of the surplus of meaning in language and language use and of the interpretive capabilities required to make rhetorical sense of writing for work and school.   References Rickert, Thomas. 2013. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schneider, Barbara. 2002. “Clarity in Context: Rethinking Misunderstanding.” Technical Communication 49 (2): 210-218. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Slack, Jennifer Daryl, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. 1993. “The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7 (1): 12-36.   ... View more

Several years ago, I developed a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for the community college where I worked at the time. Our topic was information literacy. Fortunately for us, generative AI was not yet widely known or accessible to students (or to the faculty QEP team). We used the Association of College and Research Library’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as one of our guiding texts. I had already seen how the internet had made information “flat” for many of my students: they did not seem to understand that information made its way to an online source via multiple routes, with varying degrees of transparency and accuracy. In short, for some students, all things lived online in basically the same way—in a flat, two-dimensional information landscape, lacking contour, context, or layers.    The Information Literacy Framework, in contrast, proclaimed that “information creation is a process;” developing information literacy entails strategic evaluation—of why, by whom, for whom, and how—a text, video, purported fact, or image was created and shared.  Fast forward to the present. The advent of widely available generative AI (by which I refer to large-language models that include ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, among many others) has exacerbated the conception of “flat information” in ways that I could not have envisioned.  In fact, a colleague recently commented that in some fields, it really doesn’t matter if an artifact is human or AI-generated; what matters is what students can do with it. I was stunned by that comment.  Granted, this colleague was not speaking of “information” per se; the focus was on products such as reports, posters, datasets, tables, etc. But it raised for me a central question: does it matter whether a product or a piece of information is generated by a machine?  If so, when does that provenance matter? And do I have the right to know when text (and the information in it) is the output of an algorithm or machine learning? The proliferation of fake images and misinformation following Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton has been mind-boggling.  Do my students know how those images and “reports” came to be or how to verify their accuracy?  (Do I?) When students search online and get a coherent answer from Google’s Gemini, do they understand that it was produced based on statistical patterns of language data, not on a search of facts? Do they recognize the disclaimer that follows Gemini’s output?  Do they know they can look at the blue boxes on the right and find Gemini’s sources (which still need to be understood in the context of who, why, how, and for what audience)? Do they distinguish between tools and information sources?  This fall, I am trying to blend a writing-about-writing syllabus with a writing-about-generative-AI syllabus.  I want my students to see that just as their writing is the result of a process (of thinking, collaborating, drafting, using tools, fact-checking, revising, editing, and other things), so also AI came to us via a process, and it has added new layers to the processes of creating and disseminating information. Asking questions about these processes—and recognizing them as processes, not just a landscape of flat products—seems to be a reasonable response to technological changes that I cannot keep up with.  ... View more

by Jenn Fishman This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that Jenn leads as Chief Capacitator. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” OpenAI went public with ChatGPT not even two years ago on November 30, 2022. It’s worth pausing to think about how we, as writers and writing educators, have been affected. For old times’ sake, find a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper, and make a list. Don’t stop to correct yourself or sort the positives from the negatives. Just tell yourself all the ways that AI and GenAI have had an impact on you. Some version of this exercise might be a good question of the day or freewriting topic. It makes me think about how quickly Facebook spread twenty years ago, extending from Harvard to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale in 2004; to other colleges, universities, and high schools in 2005; and to anyone with an email address and access to the internet by the end of the next year. I was a graduate student when Facebook launched, and two years later, while I was navigating the changing face of writing and writing instruction as an assistant professor, Facebook registered its 12 millionth user. The velocity of writing change, both measured and felt, prompted the cross-institutional group of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium or WIS to make 2024 the year of “Writing Human/s.” For us, and perhaps for you too, writing is fundamental to our human being. So we practice it again and again, and we build lives around it. We have favorite writing tools, spaces, and snacks, and if we are lucky we have writing groups that sustain us. There is writing that stays with us, writing we feel compelled to write, and writers it is our privilege to advise, mentor, and teach. To echo Donald Murray (with a dash of Elizabeth Bishop), writers write or (say it!) writers must write, and students and teachers of writing must write, too. With a sense of imperative as well as a sense of play, we gathered online and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Marquette University in the first days of February to affirm, explore, question, and contend with the complexity of being writing human/s in the mid-2020s. The WIS program featured workshops about AI and collaborative writing, autoethnography, mail art, and post-ChatGPT assignment design as well as shimmer stories, the social stakes of peer response, teaching in times of crisis, and ‘zines as sites of radical possibility. We also offered a series of 5-minute flashtalks on topics as varied as robot peer review, climate change, critical making, and the embodiment of emotions, problems, and solutions in writing classrooms. In addition, along with research posters and displays, WIS ‘24 featured more than two dozen flares or 3-minute audio- and video-recorded thinkpieces by undergraduates. The opening workshop, “Multimodal Writing, Drawing, and Listening” led by Tracey Bullington set the scene. Tracey joined us from the doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At WIS, she began with a simple lesson. Observing it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn something if we believe we cannot do it, Tracey led us in a series of drawing exercises inspired, in part, by her teacher, Lynda Barry. Following Tracey’s instructions, we drew breakfast (bacon and eggs) without looking down at our index cards or felt-tipped pens. We drew self-portraits and pictures of ourselves as animals. Then, flush with evidence of our ability, we listened to one another tell stories, and (coached by Tracey) we drew our takeaways. The results were a combination of documentary-style notes, impressions, and embellishments that inscribed what and how we heard what others were saying. We were writing human/s, and we had the pictures to prove it! Our closing activities also featured the writing arts, starting with a spoken word performance by Donnie McClendon, a PhD student in English at the University of South Florida. Through “When 4 is 6,” Donnie taught a complex lesson about remembering and forgetting by telling the story of Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware. They were murdered the same day in 1963 that the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. We listened to their story, and then, we ended the way we began: by drawing our takeaways along with our gratitude.                       In the same spirit, the blogs that follow offer a coda to WIS ‘24 as well as a bridge to WIS ‘25. We hope you’ll join us here on the Bits Blog and in Milwaukee next year. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more