Learning to Reflect in the Age of AI

 

This semester I am aiming to take a tentative step into AI for teaching. This will be in three workshops planned at ANU, for the computer project student's capstone e-portfolio for the ANU Techlauncher program. The students have to prepare a portfolio in the form of an application for a real job. The question was: do we try to ban students from using generative AI to help them with this, or do we show them how to use it effectively and ethically? I will attempt to do the latter. 

The ANU now provides Microsoft Copilot, as part of the Office suite. This provides the opportunity to take studnts through exercises to use it, to help with their writing. I have not used Copilot, but have explored the technology it is based on since 2022. The idea is to get the students in workshop groups to ask a career related question of Copilot, then critique & improve the answer.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a two-day Symposium at USyd on using AI this way, with team-based learning. One tip given at the symposium to stop students simply relying on the answers given by the AI. The idea is to prompt students with a very localized question, which the AI model can only answer with generalities: 

Last week I attended an ANU AI Assessment Question Drop In Session. The impression I got was that the ANU would not be averse to using AI this way. One of the other people who dropped in for advice was already proposing to run some team-based AI sessions along these lines.