Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does. "Language in fact bears the same relationship to the concept of parliament," says Jonathan Miller: "it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performances." Much the same might be said of writing -- it is concrete performance -- but when the word is instantiated in paper or stone, it takes on a separate existnece as artifice. It is a product of tools, and it is a tool.
As we consider the impact of generative AI on instruction, we have to focus on the mind first. What is the student thinking? What ideas are they trying to express?
Well before the intrusion of AI, we knew that when a student didn't have something to say, the writing wouldn't hang together, even if the grammar was correct and the required structures were all present. AI is doing the same thing. It doesn't have anything to say. So, how do we build assignments so that students have something to say? My potentially controversial take: avoid hot topics. Yes, let them choose, but don't let them default to traditional paper topics. If the general idea is to examine a local problem and consider solutions, that's a step in the right direction. But what if that problem wasn't homelessness or affordable housing (paper topics)? What if, instead, they were writing about the problem of all the Krystal's in town claiming their milkshake machine was broken? Or the way the gas pumps are so slow at the station by their house? Or what if they were encouraged to write about their job at Publix and how many people refuse to return their grocery cart? I can hear student voice more fully in those assignments than in ones asking them to have opinions on issues they'd never considered before.
I wonder what would happen if we step outside of academia and move students into questions of identity and taste and values. Make the assignment about their voice. They want to be heard. Give them a concrete performance where they are doing more than just learning someone else's choreography.
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