GenAI is changing how professors teach writing. This faculty member has built a place to talk about “the conundrums that plague me.”

erep meagan malone 550px Meagan Malone, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of English, has created a website and blog called Composing in the Age of GenAI . In addition to resources, including classroom activities, assignments and rubrics from her first-year composition and professional writing courses, the site aims to connect practitioners.Few of the millions of students who enter college each year will graduate without completing a writing course. But composition is about more than teaching students to write, says Meagan Malone, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of English . “Much of my first-year writing courses are about helping students to think through their reading process,” Malone said. “There is all this research in the field that backs that up, that reading helps the writing process because they are two sides of the same coin. One of the main purposes of a writing class is to go through the process of thinking.” But how should you teach composition, or careful reading, when the shortcut of instant writing and slick-sounding summaries are suddenly available to anyone through generative AI tools such as ChatGPT? That is a topic that Malone has not been able to stop thinking about for the past 18 months. Last year about this time, the emergence of genAI had the field of writing instruction in crisis, Malone says. Now, most universities, including UAB, have empowered individual instructors (in all departments) to determine how they want to handle genAI. (ChatGPT remains the most well-known tool; but others include Claude, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is UAB’s approved genAI writing tool . Keep up with all things AI at UAB at uab.edu/ai .) Composing in the Age of GenAI At UAB, faculty can choose to allow students to use genAI, with restrictions (such as an explicit acknowledgment from students when they have used it). Or faculty can prohibit their students from using genAI altogether. “We are all trying out what we have, but we are also now all on our own” in this experimentation, Malone said. She recently launched one way of sharing the search for […]

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