GenAI and Humanities Teaching Resources

Partly for my own benefit (and not least because I switched the tag from ‘LLMs’ to ‘GenAI’ at some point, so they’re not all easy to find), I thought it made sense to pull together links to the various things I’ve written about GenAI and the teaching of history and classical studies over the last year and a half, including findings from the project I’ve been running.

Introductory Guidance for Colleagues

Since, clearly, the university isn’t going to be adopting this as official guidance any time soon, I don’t think there’s a problem in making it more widely available so long as I credit the fact that the work behind it was funded by the University of Exeter’s Education Incubator scheme: GenAI Guide for Academics

Pieces for other people

Blog post for Royal Historical Society, summarising results of study of how our students are using GenAI: https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2024/07/29/history-students-use-of-gen-ai/

Blog post for Times Higher Education’s Campus Matters on promoting critical engagement with GenAI (August 2024): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/three-ways-promote-critical-engagement-genai

Blog post for Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin on GenAI and classical studies testing (September 2024): https://cucd.blogs.sas.ac.uk/files/2024/09/Morley-AI.pdf

Pieces on this blog:

Automatic For The People (December 2022): my first encounter with ChatGPT, and already it seemed clear that it couldn’t write a decent history essay.

Idiot Wind (January 2023): on idiotic historical chatbots.

Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea (April 2023): my first encounter with essays that were almost certainly GenAI products.

New Kid In Town (May 2023): the biggest problem may not be GenAI but the way universities (over-)react to it.

Automatic Lover (June 2023): Cyrano de Bergerac and ChatGPT

Deeper Understanding (July 2023): part of the problem is the way that we think about and respond to the machines…

Pocket Calculator (August 2023): is GenAI no more dramatic than the impact of pocket calculators on maths exams?

And You Will Know Us By The Endless Appendices (August 2023): an initial attempt at advising students on the use of GenAI

Consequences (August 2023): how Lawrence Durrell illuminates ChatGPT (possibly).

Burn! (May 2024): student use of GenAI essay plans, and how to warn them off.

Trust In Me (June 2024): ChatGPT as bullshit, and the power of its rhetoric

Read ‘Em And Weep (July 2024): what should we learn from the fact that students are turning to GenAI for feedback? Let alone getting it to do the reading?

We Can Read It For You Wholesale (August 2024): on the use of GenAI to summarise scholarship

Substitute (August 2024): on the use of Scholarcy to summarise scholarship.

Song For Whoever (August 2024): is GenAI capable of genuine creativity – and, if not, can it help us think about classical reception?

Speak Like A Child (August 2024): the idea of the AI teacher who is both perfectly responsive to individual student needs and completely consistent

Question..? (September 2024): the idea of ‘computational thinking’ – should we focus on teaching our students to ask the right questions, including setting their own?

True (September 2024): the key aim of humanities education is to learn to discern truth – precisely what bullshitting GenAI is incapable of doing.

Lean On Me (September 2024): on my university’s new guidance, and the idea of ‘AI-supported’ assessment.