September 6, 2023: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing I

[This weekmarks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year atFitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, thistime focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my currentbook project!]

I don’timagine the First-Year Writing challenge I’m going to highlight here will comeas a surprise to anyone who’s been connected to the news over the last year orso. Few if any subjects have dominated those current events conversations morethan the rapid evolution of AI,and certainly few if any subjects have dominatedhigher ed debates more than ChatGPT and its ilk. For a long time, I saidand meant that I wasn’t interested in those debates—I’ve never wanted to be apoliceman in the classroom, and have always believed in giving students thebenefit of the doubt and then responding if and when there are instances ofplagiarism. All of that’s still unquestionably the case, but alsounquestionable is the ready and attractive availability of such AI programs forstudent writers (and I know from my two high school-age sons how frequentlystudents take advantage of those programs). So I do plan to talk briefly aboutChatGPT on the first day, and mainly to say this: as with literally everythingelse, I hope students will talk to me about it, about when and how they might thinkabout using it, about what it seems to offer as well as its limitations, abouthow we navigate this new layer to our moment. That’s about the only answer tothis challenge that I’ve got, but I can’t imagine a better one.

Nextpreview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Fall previews you’d share?