“My choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.” – JCR Licklider, 1960
“We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” – Douglas Engelbart, 1962
Technology should augment us, not handicap us. All too often, I see people, from students to fellow faculty, approach technology with fear. Generative AI tools are generating a lot of fear. We need to make the choice to use them to augment what we’re doing. It’s the human choice about how we use it that matters. We need to teach ourselves as well as our students the right way to steer this technology, not ignore it or ban it.
Faced with the challenge of reinventing my class, I chose the augmentation path for both my work and teaching my students how to augment their own work. It’s amazing how quickly things get better when you use AI to augment what you are doing.
In redesigning my course over the past few weeks, I didn’t just focus on teaching AI as augmentation, I used it to augment my ability to overcome constraints of time and inspiration.
I quite often get responses from colleagues who look at the challenges of AI and throw up their hands and say I don’t have time to deal with this. This has been a recurring topic of discussion on Bryan Alexander‘s Future Trends Forum as well as the Talking with machines podcast that I do with Bryan and Mark Corbett Wilson.
As I confronted getting ready for my summer courses, the idea of a complete reinvention seemed far beyond my means. Whenever you upset the applecart of a carefully designed course, you have to recognize all of the different parts of the system that are likely to become undone. As Douglas Adams said, “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Classes are complicated systems. If you’re trying to get students to do something unfamiliar to them like I do, it’s really easy to see things go haywire. I am usually very conservative when it comes to tinkering with the class structure.
At the same time, I was acutely aware that I was not living up to my own ideals when it came to teaching my students the skills they needed to be successful. I put a light coating of AI onto the class over the last couple of years, but it was always sort of an add-on.
Also, students were abusing it in the way that people often accuse them of. Instead of writing papers they were letting ChatGPT do it for them. They failed because ChatGPT doesn’t really know how to write papers for my class. But failing them is not my goal.
Most of my students are technology illiterate. Sure, they use technology, but they don’t really understand what they’re doing.
Education does a lousy job of teaching students how to use technology to maximize their potential. Usually, when confronted with a new technology, the collective response is to do the equivalent of handing the car keys to a 16-year old and telling them, “You go figure it out for yourself.”
My class is already fairly technology-training intensive. Bear in mind that the subject that I teach is government, not computer science. I already teach them blogging, digital and visual communication, and the final project is a website on a public web service like Google Sites or WordPress.
AI, however, demands something more than that. Properly employed, it is a tool for augmenting yourself, not just augmenting your output. This has the potential for changing our relationship with our tools at a fundamental level.
On the first day of class, I asked them what part of school was most difficult for them. Almost universally, it was writing. As a writer myself, I know the pain of putting things into words so I could relate to that. I’ve used AI to ease that pain, so I decided that a key goal of my AI use in class would be to help them engage with writing more effectively.
But first, I had to solve my own problems, which, ironically, were like those of my students. I needed to rewrite/redesign parts of my course in a short amount of time.
I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really know how to do it. I got some good input from a friend who is a course designer. She gave me some excellent ideas. However, her suggestions were too extensive for me to comfortably implement given the time constraints.
Instead, I grasped for the very tool I was trying to teach my students. I gave Notebook LM and my AI pedagogy library a set of queries based on existing assignments and the goals of the class. Starting with my own text and instructions, it modified assignments so that they folded AI into the process. Using this iterative process with AI simplified the process of modifying my class system without eliminating it entirely.
In short, I developed a sequence of “Blog Prep” assignments. In the first assignment, I have the students query an AI chatbot about how they thought the question should be asked. We then reviewed these live in class. It is very important that they understand what I’m asking them to do as my class is based on learning by doing and if they do it wrong, they miss a lot of the learning.
In the second step, the students found sources to develop their arguments to the question. They could use AI to help them with this or more traditional search tools.
Finally, I had them bring in a rough draft of their first blog post and post it in the discussion. I then ran those through either ChatGPT or Gemini using the same strategies I use for my own writing. Again, this was done in class and was a centerpiece of the discussion that day.
We asked the chatbot what the draft was about to verify that it was clear in what it was trying to say. Then, we asked it to compare with the assignment question and verify whether it had answered that.
Finally, we asked the chatbot for ways we could improve the post. The results generated a surprised reaction from the class. They had never thought of using an AI chatbot in this way before.
JR Licklider in the quote above talks about how he often rejected work because of the clerical infeasibility of it. I realized that that’s exactly what prevented me from changing my course. It is also what my students needed to help them change how they approached the work of learning. In both cases AI removed barriers.
For those of us trying to facilitate change, whether with our students or the process of teaching and learning, time barriers are a major roadblock. In the same way that I use AI to facilitate my writing processes, I was able to use it to facilitate rewriting my course, and as a mechanism to teach my students to do the same.
I know I can solve a lot of problems given enough time, but therein lies the rub: I never seem to have the time. If I can use AI to overcome barriers and save time, I can make a lot more problems solvable. The same logic applies to my colleagues and my students.