Boldly Learning AI Together
Not all St. Lawrence faculty have incorporated AI into their teaching—or permit students to use it in their scholarship. But Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs Ronnie Olesker, a self-described early adopter of new technology, says she is “comfortable with uncomfortableness.”
In early 2023, Olesker, who also holds the Michael W. Ranger ’80 and Virginia R. Ranger P’17 Professorship in Government, was preparing to teach a writing-intensive course on international relations when the emergence of ChatGPT presented an unexpected challenge.
“I had an existential crisis,” she recalls. “There I was getting ready to teach students how to write, and here’s this thing that writes for them.” She spent her winter break experimenting with AI, and after it generated a “very solid” syllabus in less than 5 seconds, she quickly realized that the genie was out of the bottle—there was no going back. “I could see that this was going to take hold and change how we do things in the same way that the Internet or the calculator were disrupters,” she explains.
She decided to introduce ChatGPT to her students, not as a forbidden tool, but as a subject of critical engagement.
“I decided I was going to introduce it in the confines of the learning goals of the course,” she continues. “I could bring them into a conversation about what this means for humanity and how we are going to use this ethically and still learn.”
By the fall of 2023, Olesker was innovating new lesson plans that incorporated AI. One exercise involved having students use ChatGPT to generate arguments and then compare the AI-generated arguments with their own.
“If they assessed the AI-generated one as better, I’d ask them to write a reflection on why,” she says, adding that the exercise improved their understanding of argument structure.
In a course on terrorism and human rights, she had students use AI to create the crisis simulations she would traditionally have designed herself. The exercise underscored the importance of creating a prompt for ChatGPT that contained enough specificity, rooted in knowledge of the subject matter, for the resulting simulation to be realistic—a skill generally referred to as “prompt design.”
Olseker adds: “Slowly, as they engage with the technology, they learn more and more of what they need to feed it in order to get better results.” The exercise also revealed the biases inherent in AI-generated content. “All the terrorists had Arab-sounding names and were men, while the human rights activists had Latina-sounding names and were women,” she notes. “The Secretary General of the United Nations was always a man, but all the people doing humanitarian work were women. They could see the bias built into the system.”
Olseker teaches students that now, more than ever, “it’s important to be critical consumers of information.”
Melody Denny, director of the Word Studio writing lab, who is spending time this summer planning a course she’ll teach on AI communication in the fall, also emphasizes the practice of “collaborating with AI, rather than thinking AI will do all the work.”
In her multimedia course, she’ll lead students in learning to prompt the AI clearly, then refine and iterate with AI to achieve the results they want. Finally, her students will need to critically evaluate the AI’s output and enhance it with their own ideas and voice.
“AI provides a base level of work, but human co-creation is essential to elevate it,” she says. AI can be especially useful to writers to overcome their dread of “the blank page,” she says. Beyond that, it’s helpful to think of tools like ChatGPT as a writing partner, or even an intern whose work will most definitely need editing and revision.
Olesker says University-wide guidelines for AI will be developed as more is understood about best practices for its use in academic settings. In the meantime, as associate dean, she advises faculty to learn along with their students as the technology continues to evolve at warp speed.
“AI is not the future of education, it’s the present,” Denny says, “And how we choose to integrate AI into what we do will shape the future of learning.”
Read More Stories About Artificial Intelligence at St. Lawrence
