Edited by Annette Vee, Tim Laquintano, and Carly Schnitzler
WAC Clearinghouse, Aug 2023
Generative AI is the most influential technology in writing in decades—nothing since the word processor has promised as much impact. Publicly-accessible Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have enabled students, teachers, and professional writers to generate writing indirectly, via prompts, and this writing can be calibrated for different audiences, contexts and genres. At the cusp of this moment defined by AI, TextGenEd collects early experiments in pedagogy with generative text technology, including but not limited to AI. The fully open access and peer-reviewed collection features 34 undergraduate-level assignments to support students' AI literacy, rhetorical and ethical engagements, creative exploration, and professional writing text gen technology, along with an Introduction to guide instructors' understanding and their selection of what to emphasize in their courses. TextGenEd enables teachers to integrate text generation technologies into their courses and respond to this crucial moment.
by Tim Laquintano, Carly Schnitzler, and Annette Vee
Read the collection's CFP and meet the editors.
The AI literacy grouping helps students to develop a crucial suite of critical thinking skills needed to work with emerging technologies: functional awareness, skepticism about claims, and critical evaluation of outputs.
Creative explorations play around the edges of text generation technologies, asking students to consider the technical, ethical, and creative opportunities as well as limitations of using these technologies to create art and literature. Many of these assignments look beyond our contemporary scene of LLM text generation and lend valuable context to our current moment, drawing from earlier technologies or historicizing connections.
In the ethical considerations category, assignments are split between two primary foci—the first engages students in the institutional ethics of using LLMs in undergraduate classrooms and the second attends to the ethical implications of LLMs and their outputs.
This section presents assignments that enable students to understand how computational writing technologies might be integrated into workplace contexts. Unlike academic discourse, professional writing is not grounded in an ethos of truth-seeking and critical inquiry; it tends to be grounded in an ethos of efficacy as well as constraints of legality and workplace ethics.
These assignments ask students to consider how computational machines have already and will become enmeshed in communicative acts and how we work with them to produce symbolic meaning.