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Welcome!

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This blog is intended as a repository for English teachers who would like to know more about Artificial Intelligence (especially ChatGPT) and how it could be used as a helpful tool in the classroom. My focus is on utilizing this futuristic tool in the community college composition classroom, but I hope that teachers at other levels will also find it useful. You may ask why. Let me ask for a little bit of help to explain. The above video? I asked an AI to create it in less than 10 seconds after finding the platform in a simple web search. I am sharing it here as an example of how AI is already taking over aspects of our life in ways we would not have thought of before. As the AI generated person states in the video, AI is here to stay. If we decide not to learn with it, we will get left behind by those who do. The goal of this repository is to help you find your way in the fast-growing new world of AI and AI assisted technology as being introduced to education, especially, but ...
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Ethical Questions to Ask

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Even when we are looking forward to the various benefits of AI based tools in education and elsewhere, we must not forget that there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how we should treat these applications and the results they provide. There are various ethical questions to be asked about when and how to use it, who should be using it and what results we are expecting from them. Elena Zeide was already raising these concerns and questions in 2019 in her article Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Applications,Promise and Perils, and Ethical Questions published in the Educause Review and they are more relevant today than ever. The full article is available at  https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/8/artificial-intelligence-in-higher-education-applications-promise-and-perils-and-ethical-questions  
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The AI Dilemma

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  The above video is a (more than an hour long) presentation on the AI Dilemma, in which Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss questions like how the currently existing and available AI tools could pose “catastrophic risks to a functional society”. While it has a rather negative tone about AI, it is definitely worth watching to help you think about not only the positives these new tools have to offer but also the question marks about their impact.
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Pros and Cons of AI in the Classroom

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  When deciding whether we want to use AI in our classroom or not, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of it. Every classroom is different, and we must look at our and our students’ needs. At the same time someone else’s pros and cons list can help to ensure we include every important aspect before we make our decision. Here is a pros and cons of artificial intelligence in the classroom as a starting point: 15 Pros and 6 Cons of Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom   Here is another list of advantages and disadvantages: Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence in Education I hope some of these give you useful ideas on whether and how to implement AI in your teaching.
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The Carbon Footprint of ChatGPT

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  When we sit in front of our computer we hardly ever think about the carbon footprint of what we are doing even though our computers run on electricity, just to mention the most immediate factor in its impact. Therefore, it is obvious that we also don’t ask the same question when we jump at the chance to ask ChatGPT for a summary or a new recipe. But maybe we should ask the question and some people already have. According to an estimate calculated inDecember 2022 , ChatGPT’s daily carbon footprint was at least 23.04 kgCO2e. Is it too much? Is it acceptable? I will leave that decision to the reader. Read the full article here:    https://towardsdatascience.com/the-carbon-footprint-of-chatgpt-66932314627d
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"Seeing and Feeling With Machines"

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  Megan E. Eatman published an article in Computers and Composition under the title Unsettling Vision: Seeing and Feeling With Machines . She argued more than two years ago that AI (at the time she had Google’s AI Experiments as her base to work with, which is an image based AI tool) would be exclusionary, depending on the user’s cultural literacy, resources, and abilities. Some of her ideas on how to use these tools in the classroom could be useful even today, when most people talk about the text based AI, ChatGPT, as long as we view it as a supportive tool, instead of a replacement tool. Read the whole article here:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461520300414?via%3Dihub      
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AI in College Classrooms

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  It is no surprise that there are already several college professors who are adopting ChatGPT just as quickly as their students do. Some of them use this opportunity to have students work out the boundaries of academic freedom and censorship, others are emphasizing its benefits as a personal tutor, while still others are encouraging students to use ChatGPT in every single assignment they turn it. How would you utilize this new tool in your classroom? Is there a too far here? And how far would that be? Read more here:  https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/02/why-college-professors-are-adopting-chatgpt-ai-as-quickly-as-students.html
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Prompt Engineering

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  There are a lot of videos out there talking about ChatGPT and promising to teach you how to use the chatbot. Many of them are good, too. But here is one by "Obscurious"  that will explain to you how prompt-engineering works and why it is important if you want to get better results from your chat sessions. The better questions one asks, the better answer the bot can give, and the more useful the result will be for your work. Designing prompts could even work as a potential assignment in the composition classroom!
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