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3/26: Class Canceled
Due to illness, I’m cancelling class today.
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3/21: Composing Our A.I. Statement
Synthesizing Texts You’ll be placed in new groups today to continue working on one of the questions from last class in the service of our A.I. Statement. Use Metz’s and Marantz’s articles to develop additional answers to your group’s question. We’ll share out to the class after you’re done. Take time to do the following: Drafting Our Statement You noted in last week’s Google doc that syllabus statements have multiple parts, often denoted with headings. Some statements function to set rules imposed by the instructor and reinforce power an instructor or institution has over students. You also noted that there is often a lack of clarity around the instructor’s role…
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3/19: Gallery Walk to Invent Our A.I. Statement
Briefly review the A.I. Statement assignment to reorient ourselves to our context. Review Readings Take the first 5-10 minutes of class reviewing our recent assigned texts on artificial intelligence: Doyal et al.’s “ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in Medical Writing,” Morrison’s “Meta-Writing: A.I. and Writing,” “How to Cite ChatGPT” & “How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style?” After you’ve reviewed these texts, move on to the Gallery Walk! Gallery Walk Working more or less on your own, move around the room spending some time at each poster in our gallery. Try to address the question on each poster and try to add a quotation from one of the texts…
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3/14: Introducing the A.I. Syllabus Statement
What is the genre of a syllabus statement? Take a look at our course’s syllabus to identify some statements. How would you describe syllabus statements as a genre of writing? What are the “parts” of a statement? What does it do? Who is the audience? Who is the author? Group Work In groups, you’ll work in this Google doc. Indicate your group members’ names alongside your group’s contributions. After we discuss your findings, we’ll narrow our task to looking for syllabus statements specifically regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing. I invite you to ask a large language model (LLM) to help you with this task. Report…
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3/12: Playing with AI (or) Rethinking What We Think We Know About Plagiarism
Ghostwriting, Artificial Intelligence, and Academic Writing First, have your notes accessible from last class. You’ll be adding to them today. As a profession, ghostwriters serve many needs. According to Brandt, a ghostwriter could be “a researcher, knowledge producer, and/or knowledge analyst” for leaders and established professionals (38). Private citizens often hire ghostwriters to supplement skills or knowledge they don’t have, as when a person might hire a lawyer to submit a petition to a court. You want to add some of your answers to the above questions to your notes from last class. Let’s Play All this talk of power and authority in ghostwriting (I think) relates to our current…
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3/7: Ghostwriting and Agency
Deborah Brandt is a historian and scholar of writing. In her recent book The Rise of Writing, she studies the history of power as related to writing and how that history has changed over time. Brandt defines ghostwriting as a kind of professional writing where an author takes on “substantial parts part of a composing process for which someone else […] will be credited” (Brandt 31). Ghostwriting is controversial because it destabilizes a traditional idea of authorship; namely, we are often taught that the author who originates a text has some kind of power, at the very least in their association with a text they produced. Ghostwriting works in the…
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3/5: Intra-action between Human and Nonhuman Agents
Intra-Action in Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” We’ll return to our collaborative document from last time to reorient ourselves to Cooper’s text. Look closely at pages 129-130 in Cooper and try to define her term intra-action. Later in her chapter, Cooper closely reads then-candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign speech delivered in Philadelphia to explain how agents intra-act to create agency. Obama’s exigence–or the need to which he is responding–involves controversial comments made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a now-retired pastor of a church that President Obama once attended. Cooper describes the collaborative process that Obama, his speechwriter Jonathan Favreau, and Obama’s aides participated in to compose the speech (143). We will…
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2/29: Agents/Agency of Collaboration
Defining Our Terms The words “agents” and “agency” are probably familiar language to all of you. We’ll start by tracking popular definitions of these terms and then move to defining their specialized understanding in the fields of writing studies, composition, and rhetoric. Access our collaborative document where we will define terms. We will expand our definitions by first looking at an excerpt of Nowacek’s Agents of Integration. Marilyn Cooper’s definitions of agents and agency in her book The Animal Who Writes are even more complex than Nowacek’s, in that Cooper puts these terms into a historical and disciplinary context. Cooper begins by offering a definition to create a starting point…
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2/27: Collaborative Assessment
Create a Collaboratively Authored Rubric Our goal today is to come to a mutual agreement on what is a reasonable rubric for the Collaborative Learning History Project. Looking together at the draft rubric I’ll distribute, you will review each component I’ve described for accuracy, decide how many points each component is worth, and consider if I missed anything. You’ll also be given the chance to update your work based on the revised rubric. Here’s what to consider as you offer feedback on the rubric: You should have time in class to discuss any revisions you need to make. How much time do you need to really complete this assignment? ACCESS…
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2/20: Revisit Your Plan
Get into Your Groups Revisit your group’s task schedule and straw document today. You have all class period to make progress on your Collaborative Learning History Project that is due on Tuesday, 2/27 as a new page to your blog. I’ll show you how to create that page today. I will also introduce Nowacek’s and Cooper’s texts that you will read for homework. Homework COMPLETE the Collaborative Learning History Project due on Tuesday 2/27. READ Nowacek & Cooper excerpts (Bb). THURS 2/22 IS A MONDAY SCHEDULE. Our class does not meet, but go to your Monday classes on Th 2/22.
