AI in English Education

  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

  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!

  Some people think of ChatGPT as something that has surpassed humans and is becoming better than us in writing. But, is it true? In their article,  How To Turn ChatGPT Into Your Ultimate Personal Writing Assistant , Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole remind us that the one big mistake we can make when turning to the chatbot is treating it as if it could think. It is capable of a lot of things, it can generate long text within seconds, but that is exactly what it does: it generates text based on input we give it. If we use it the proper way, by feeding it exact scenarios, well phrased questions and ask for a specific format for the output, we might just be able to turn ChatGPT into our personal writing assistant. Among other things, the chatbot can be great at helping with generating ideas, listing and summarizing sources, as well as helping with organizing ideas based on just some keywords. The secret? You must build every scenario for every chat session from scratch. Some alre...

   Lin and Chang offer a study about developing and using a chatbot in post-secondary composition instruction in Canada, published in the Educational Technology & Society . What is most intriguing about it is that they published their article in 2020, two years before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Obviously, their chatbot is nowhere near as developed as ChatGPT, but the study shows that the idea of chatbots, as well as incorporating them into education is not new. Ling and Chang used the chatbot to help them deliver writing instructions when teaching students how to develop a thesis statement for an argumentative essay. Their research results show that the majority of participating students had a positive learning experience, and gained new knowledge while using the bot. On the other hand the study was limited, and further research is required. The full article is available here: https://www.j-ets.net/collection/published-issues/23_1 and here: https://www.jstor.or...

  Everyone is concentrating on how AI will revolutionize writing in most fields. But there is at least one other aspect that could help students, educators, and scholars alike: it can help with reading. As Christopher Brennan explains it in his article, The real value of large language models like GPT-4 isn’t in writing, it’s reading : When working on any type of research, we of course need to search for relevant information in the scholarship, which can take a long time. Some of the articles we read will be absolutely useful, others not so much. When someone is limited on time, ChatGPT can help by summarizing articles, chapters, or even whole books, so that we can decide whether it is helpful in our work. Once these data points are in front of us, we can decide which source we want to read in full to be used in our research. This can be really helpful in trying to narrow down dozens of potential sources. Have you thought about using the chatbot this way before? Find the wh...