CWCR/RCCR

Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2023) Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR The responsibility in using GenAI for academic pursuits in higher education is shared between the user, the tool and, in instances where the tool is part of teaching and learning processes, the institution. As such, to say that students using ChatGPT as a research to bear sole responsibility for the accuracy of the information the tools provides is unethical and unjust. In this case, this is especially the case if the student is directed by an instructor to use the tool. It can be argued that the institution bears responsibility … Read more

Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2023) By Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR On July 20, 2023, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT and Dall·E, stopped offering its GenAI detection tool, AI classifier, saying that it “is not fully reliable” (OpenAI, 2023). There’s a short statement on OpenAI’s website: As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or … Read more

Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2023) By Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/ACCR On August 31, 2021, OpenAI posted to their website, Teaching with AI, described as a guide “to accelerate student learning” using ChatGPT. This guide provides prompts to “help educators get started with” ChatGPT. These include prompts for lesson-planning development, creating analogies and explanations, helping “students learn by teaching,” as well as creating “an AI tutor.” Prompts in ChatGPT are text inputs to generate responses—essentially asking ChatGPT questions. A simple prompt, such as “Write an outline for a five-page essay on sedimentary deposits of soil,” generates responses that are helpful, … Read more

Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 2023) by Clare Bermingham, Director, Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo Note: Part two will provide the framework with some follow up information. A link to the framework will be added to this post at that time. Editor. How institutions and course instructors are managing generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Dall⋅E, has been the focus of both scholarly and public-facing articles (Benuyenah, 2023; Berdahl & Bens, 2023; Cotton et al., 2023; Gecker, 2023; Nikolic et al., 2023; Sayers, 2023; Somoye, 2023), but few articles or resources have addressed students directly. And … Read more

Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer 2023) Christin Wright-Taylor, Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University This term, I seem to be meeting with more students who struggle to start the writing process. I tallied my writing appointments so far and found that 32% of them have been dedicated to helping the student generate writing for their assignments. For me, this has been an increase over previous terms. I’ve enjoyed these appointments, but I’ve also found myself hesitating on the precipice of a guided freewriting prompt, wondering: Do these work? I can report that, yes, they do! However, the experience of guiding … Read more