Fall 2024 Book Circle:

Spoiler Alert! Our fall book circle isn’t a book! This research paper, made available by a partnership between the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and SSRN, offers seven frameworks for incorporating AI into writing assignments. Coming in at nearly fifty pages, it’s a great starter text for a conversation about teaching with writing in the AI era.

Mollick and Mollick’s’ paper describes seven strategies for incorporating AI in instruction, showing how to craft precise prompt language to encourage effective results, and including examples of generated output to illustrate the pedagogical value of AI interactions. The Mollicks clearly recognize the many limitations of large language models and consider these risks and pitfalls as it introduces possibilities for using AI outputs toward pedagogical ends. Rather than using AI to generate written products that could be turned in for assessment, each of these strategies highlights how AI can supplement students' writing processes and provide opportunities for expansion, extension, and revision.

Because our reading load is reduced, we encourage book circle participants to follow along with the seven approaches and design their own AI activities for a hypothetical future course. Participants will have access to a shared space for reviewing each other's materials in progress. Participation in this activity is not required, and the Writing Across the Curriculum team does not recommend or endorse any particular AI platform or tool.

The reading group (book circle) will meet every three weeks on Wednesday mornings (9 a.m.) for the fall semester via Zoom. 

Schedule:

• September 18th: LLMs: Prompts and Risks/AI as Mentor

• October 2: AI as Tutor/AI as Coach

• October 23: AI as Teammate/AI as student

• November 13: AI as Simulator/AI as Tool

• December 4: Conclusion and Showcase

Download this paper:
Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

About the authors:

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship, and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. His papers have been published in top journals and his book on AI, Co-Intelligence, is a New York Times bestseller. His research is highly cited by other academics, and has been covered by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and other leading publications. (From UPenn)

Lilach Mollick is the Director of Pedagogy at Wharton Interactive. Her work focuses on the development of pedagogical strategies that include artificial intelligence and interactive methodologies. She has worked with Wharton Interactive to develop a wide range of educational tools and games used in classrooms worldwide. Lilach is a featured speaker on AI and education and has written several papers on the uses of AI for teaching and training, and her work on AI has been discussed in publications including The New York Times and Vox. (From LinkedIn)

Registration closed.