The second of many Teaching in Higher Ed episodes regarding artificial intelligence aired on January 19, 2023. John Warner was the guest for Episode 449 and shared about how to teach writing in an age of AI. John is a writer, editor, speaker, researcher, consultant, and author of eight books, including Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (Johns Hopkins UP) and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing (Penguin), which is widely used in writing classrooms from middle school through college.
With 20 years of college teaching experience and ten years as a contributor to Inside Higher Ed (via his “Just Visiting” blog), John has become a national voice on issues of faculty labor, institutional values, and writing pedagogy. He also works as a writer and advisor for Educational Endeavors, a provider of extra-curricular academic enrichment services, and writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune about books and writing. Affiliate faculty at the College of Charleston, his most recent book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education (Belt) is now available.
- Why They Can’t Write, by John Warner
- The Writer’s Practice, by John Warner
- Freaking Out About ChatGPT (Part I), by John Warner for Inside Higher Ed
- ChatGTP
- Craft app
- Tessie McMillan Cottom’s newsletter for New York Times subscribers
- Clippy (Microsoft Office Assistant)
- Words against strangers
Related Episodes
John has been a guest on Teaching in Higher Ed many times before. Each prior conversation has been rich with wisdom and practical approaches to align our values with our teaching. Prior episodes with John Warner include:
- Episode 172: John Warner shares about values, interdisciplinary knowledge, and pedagogy
- Episode 233: John Warner discusses his book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities
- Episode 243: John Warner has a conversation with me regarding The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing
Recommended
Browse the treasure trove of articles on the Zotero ChatGPT Group, started by Lee Skallerup Bessette, PhD. You don’t need a Zotero account or to otherwise use that particular references manager in order to view the sources that have been added.
The phenomenal Breana Bayraktar posted one of her tips articles in late January, this time regarding ChatGPT. I appreciate her transparency about how she’s still working out her personal views on the topic, not to mention the curated resources she shares in the article.
Quotable Words
John Warner writes on The Biblioracle Recommends: ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving:
Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.