Welcome to the WJETT blog
What is WJETT?
The WJETT blog or Warwick Journal of Education - Transforming Teaching blog is designed to encourage staff and students to disseminate good practice and to engage with their peers on academic cultural critique or areas of research that they find interesting. With the increased focus on ‘teachers as researchers’ in the sector, many qualified teachers are expected to publish the outcomes of any action research projects they undertake. The WJETT blog can be the first step on your journey towards publishing and enables you to experience publishing and reviewing in a friendly and supportive environment.
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Building knowledge on the pedagogy of using generative AI in the classroom and in assessments
Matt Lucas is a Senior Product Manager at IBM, and Isabel Fischer is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Information Systems at WBS (Warwick Business School). Isabel also co-convenes an IATL (Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning) module. This blog represents their own opinions and not those of their employers.
After two terms of including generative AI (GenAI) in my teaching and for assessments I am still building my knowledge and understanding around the pedagogy of using GenAI. Students seem to like the entertainment of playing around with musicLink opens in a new window and artLink opens in a new window (e.g. DALL.E 2Link opens in a new window and midjourneyLink opens in a new window), creating images and also memesLink opens in a new window, with all of these being user-friendly for big screens and also for huddling around one laptop as part of teamwork. Text-outputs seems less intuitive for ‘collective use’: There does not seem to be yet an app available that allows for hands-on collaborative refinement of prompts (e.g. similar to students working on the same Google doc). And displaying a string of words on a shared screen clearly does not have the same entertainment value for students as ‘customers and consumers’.
In addition to a lack of entertainment value I also found that students seem to actually appreciate word-based GenAI (e.g. ChatGPT and Bard) as ‘their secret tool’ at their disposal and for them to use. They appear to appreciate it, if lecturers show them the exact prompts that they can copy that allows them to make the most of ‘their secret tool’. They seem less keen about having to be transparent about using the tool themselves and having to justify and critically reflect on usage. It not only means additional work, more importantly, they dislike the thought of the tool’s hidden power being exposed. They appear even less keen for lecturers to use GenAI for the lesson preparation and to be transparent about it because otherwise, what is the ‘perceived added value’ of attending the lecture if they could have just reviewed GenAI?
With this in mind, what are the skills that students can learn from using GenAI in the classroom and in assessments?
In the attached blogLink opens in a new window Matt Lucas and I suggest that by including innovative aspects into assessments, students can learn and practise four skills that are relevant for their future careers in a world disrupted by AI:
- Cognitive flexibility, abstraction and simplification
- Curiosity, including prompt engineering
- Personalisation, reflection and empathising to adapt to different audiences
- Critical evaluation of AI
For each of the four skills we explain in the attached blog the relevance for student learning with some illustrative examples, before outlining how we have incorporated these four skills into students’ assessments in the recent term.
Writing guidance
Can I write about anything in my blog post?
Yes pretty much. Academic cultural critique (Thomson and Mewburn, 2013) is always a good source of content for academic blogs. This can include (but is not limited to) comments and reflections on funding; higher education policy or academic life. You might also want to consider blogging about:
- Academic practice (Saper, 2006)
- Information and/or self-help advice
- Technical, teaching and careers advice
- Your research or practice
- How you’ve undertaken research
- The impact of research on your practice
- An area of research/practice that interests you
- Your teaching experiences/reflections
How long can my blog post be?
Each individual blog post should be no longer than 500 words. Long blocks of text are sometimes hard for readers to digest. Break up your content into shorter paragraphs, bullet points and lists whenever possible. Also include a list of keywords or tags as this makes it easier for Google to find your work.
Do I need to use citations?
No, this is a reflective piece so it does not need to include citations (but you obviously can include them if they are relevant).
Can I include links or images?
We would encourage you to include links to any articles that you have considered whilst writing your blog post. We also welcome the use of images (as long as you have permission to use them) as they can often help to illustrate a point and obviously will not be included in the word limit. Please remember this is a public site so if you want to include images of your students in your classes then you will need permission to do this.
What is the process for submitting a piece of work?
Your blog post should be emailed to A.Ball.1@warwick.ac.uk. Once the submission has been reviewed it will either be uploaded at the beginning of the next available week or sent back to you for editing if it requires amendments. You should then send the amended work to me once again and I will then upload it.