Thinking About Teaching Even Newer Writing 16 Years Later, After Leaving the K-12 Classroom and Entering Higher Education

There is a revolution upon us. New tools. New platforms. Alternative ways to help young people to share with others what they know and for graying folk like me, it's hard to keep up.

But I try.

In 2009, I published "Senior Boards: Multimedia presentations from year-long research and community-based projects. In A. Herrington, K. Hogsdon, & C. Moran (Eds.), Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment (pp. 107–123). Teachers College Press. At the time, I addressed the ways that Powerpoint, I-Movie, Audio, and yearlong projects changed the ways I needed to approach how I taught English.

This was at the beginning of blogging, YouTube, social media outlets, Canva, and other tools available to our writers. In assessing work this semester, I'm realizing the tools have become craftier and I'm amazed by the ways young people can share their ideas with others. This includes Padlet, which has been such a great tool for multimedia presentations.

What is also new is AI support, and the reality that kids can create content by piecing together questions to essays so they don't have to do much thinking, but piece together responses they find by using such tools. I can't blame them. It's fast and mildly efficient, but the voice is robotic, it's sort of unethical (if not all the way unethical), and without personality. 

I only had a couple of students who turned in work that was highly AI-oriented and I see that as a fault in my teaching and not their contribution. They resorted to it because they didn't have the writing instruction I should have provided earlier (because I have avoided the need to address it). 

I most definitely will be addressing it in the future, as I imagine more and more kids will use tools to compose for themselves, rather than to write from an authentically intellectual standpoint. 

This all has me spinning around how fast so much of this has changed (we're running to chase a moving train) and how it will definitely impact our future instruction. I'm late to game, but need to get on it, as AI really is a nuisance. 

Why can't we simply be us? Ah, but finding a way to cheat our systems is absolutely us.

And of course I write this, with exhaustive gunk in my eye, because I've been staring at my computer screen for 14-hours grading. Such is life.