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Recording available for the Faculty Panel: Reckoning with AI Writing in the Wake of Pandemic Teaching

On Wednesday September 25th, the Hub hosted these four panelists:

  • Jennifer Coon, Director, Mitchell Business Communication Lab; Faculty, Management Studies
  • John Taylor, Writing Center Coordinator
  • Mike MacDonald, Associate Professor of Composition & Rhetoric
  • Shelly Jarenski, Associate Professor of Literature

Here is the recording:

With the panelists’ consent, I asked UM-GPT to summarize the transcript by time code and this is what it generated (with big mistakes in timecodes that I fixed): 

[01:20 – 09:42] Jennifer Coon: Writing as a Cognitive Process

Jennifer discusses the intrinsic link between writing and thinking. She explores how AI can shift the focus from merely producing content to shaping prompts and critically engaging with AI outputs. She also explains why understanding the audience is more crucial than ever in the age of AI.

[09:56 – 18:54] John Taylor: Ethical Considerations

John raises important ethical concerns about using AI in peer review, highlighting potential privacy breaches and trust issues. He also talks about the alarming biases against African American English in AI models, prompting a much-needed conversation on fairness and inclusivity in AI tools.

[19:04 – 27:09] Mike MacDonald: Environmental Impact & Innovative Assignments

Mike sheds light on the environmental footprint of AI tech, from data centers to carbon emissions. He proposes a shift away from traditional essays, offering innovative assignment models that focus on literacy history and critical theorizing.

[27:34 – 34:06] Shelly Jarenski: Rethinking Assessments

Shelly shares her journey toward ungrading and creating more authentic assessments. She emphasizes the need to rethink traditional assignments to prioritize critical and empathic thinking over conventional essay writing.

This is one example when GenAI may help busy faculty. Of course, I had to stop and think  about John’s point, questioning the ethics of students sharing each other’s work in GenAI when they are tasked with peer review.

For anyone unable to attend, having a guide to the recording may make it easier to digest. You could have generated this summary yourself, minus the (wrong) timecodes, by copying and pasting the transcript into a GenAI tool and asking it to summarize. Google Gemini will create summaries of any Youtube video. 

Is this a useful time saving strategy for faculty to assess whether that webinar they were unable to attend is worth a view? Or does it shortcut our thinking? If you are interested in these same kinds of questions applied to student learning, I encourage you to give the 34 minute video a watch and hear your colleagues think through these rapidly changing teaching challenges. 

For more from a few of the panelists, check out:

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay