thunderfish

 Intentional Writing, Attentive Reading, Purposeful Living (blunter title: the NOMO/STFU curriculum) THEME: Identity and Belonging in the 21st Century (blunter: You are special! And you are also not the only snowflake in the sky! // Your experience is part of a larger web of meaning) Threshold Concepts We are all writers (and readers) // We are enveloped by written language (and other multimedia compositions) Language use is diverse // Using language well involves knowing your options within contexts. Composing is a process // Composing processes are diverse. Composing is part of a social conversation // Writing allows humans to travel across time and space. Writing is an opportunity for exploration and learning. // Writing (class) is a laboratory for knowledge-making.  Language is rhetorical, not literal; meaning can be contested. Written composition is always material and increasingly digitally mediated. Writing products are only a part of writing as activity; writing is gre...

  A colleague asked me for information about how other programs are integrating AI into their FYW courses. I don't yet know of a really good synthesis, but here are some various frameworks I'm finding: From Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (via RIT )  1.  "Talk directly and specifically with students about how your assignments are meant to work.  Our students are not, by and large, looking for opportunities to cheat or take shortcuts. The vast majority, in fact, are just as concerned to determine the ethical and responsible use of AI as are their instructors. The primary challenge posed by generative AI is not that, in making cheating easy it will, therefore, make it rampant, but rather that its utility will blur the lines for even our most scrupulous students between seeking help or brainstorming ideas, on the one hand, and soliciting an unacceptable degree of assistance, on the other.” 2.  “Disaggregate process from product, and render it v...

 A colleague of mine thinks that in our first-year writing program we should engage students in reading about  but not using  AI. I am trying to work out why I don't think this is an appropriate stance, and I'm struck on this analogy, which feels both apt and problematic: Imagine you're teaching a class in transportation. Your students are excited not only to learn about  various modes of transportation but also to learn how  to transport themselves around their campus, their communities, their world. Since personal vehicles are a common form of transportation, they assume some part of the course will include learning about driving and practicing  driving cars. When students get to class, their instructor tells them that because there are a number of ethical problems with driving--environmental and natural resource impacts, contributions to sprawling development, negative impacts to the nuclear family (since cars increase the distance people can travel from...