Category Archives: teaching

Artificial Intelligence—does it live up to the hype?

The above definition was “written” by the ChatGPT interface, an artificial intelligence.

I had the idea to use AI after reading a book on how to generate passive income. I played with it a bit and decided to see if I could do what the book suggested, let AI generate a year’s worth of blog posts in a week to free up some of my time. I soon learned that this was easier said than done.

There is a pattern to the way AI—and ChatGPT in particular—formulates its blog posts. For example, the structure of most posts it generates is the same, beginning with an introduction, providing a list of three to five items complete with subtitles, and ending with a conclusion that says virtually the same thing as the introduction. If you don’t like what the AI produces for you, it can be regenerated, but there is no guarantee the new content will be significantly different.

It took me close to two weeks to generate enough content for 52 blog posts for my sister site, largely because I had to rewrite, revise, and pad most of the blog posts. Rumour has it that Google won’t index blogs it thinks use AI, so I had to do some heavy editing to make the text sound more like me than directly copied and pasted from the AI interface. I did, however, do a few plagiarism checks using Grammarly, but there was no indication that the AI had written anything that might be considered plagiarized.

From generating blog posts, I switched focus to having the AI generate an entire book for me. I decided to create a writing journal-type book with 365 writing prompts. I call it 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts. This took me three weeks to generate enough unique and doable prompts. I learned that AI likes fantasy. Both ChatGPT and Boo.ai sites seemed to default to prompts about people time travelling, losing their memories, inheriting haunted places, travelling to alternate realities, or writing from the point of inanimate objects, which was frustrating. I witnessed the machine learning aspect of AI firsthand when, after more than a week and getting prompts close to what I was looking for, I cleared the list of questions I had asked ChatGPT, and it stopped giving me answers I liked. It took a few days to re-train it to give me get good results again.

As for the question of whether AI lives up to the hype? The jury is hung on this one. It is a great tool for writing blog posts and outlines or getting ideas when you have writer’s block (it can outline whole novels for you if you ask it to and work with it long enough). It’s also good for writing advertising copy after a good revision and edit.

Could students use AI to outline their essays for them? Probably. Will they be good enough to pass teacher scrutiny? Not likely. AI writing tends to be superficial at best. For example, when I asked it to write advertising copy for this website, it took keywords I used in my last few posts and extrapolated that to write the blurb. According to it, I have written all sorts of books in genres I have never attempted (like romance). It also lists book titles I have never written and states that one of my books is a series when it is a standalone book.

In my opinion, the kind of text written by AI is limited. It cannot generate unique ideas, but it can repackage old ones. If you use AI to assist you in outlining your book, it might help you to get started on your writing journey, but if you plan to use it to flesh out your book in its entirety? I will let ChatGPT answer that question for you:

AI-generated writing is typically based on patterns and algorithms that the machine has learned from a large amount of input data. This means that the output is often formulaic and lacks the creativity and originality of human writing. Additionally, AI may not be able to capture the nuances and complexities of human emotions and experiences that are often the hallmark of great fiction.

Moreover, using AI to write an entire fiction novel raises ethical questions around intellectual property and authorship. It is unclear who would own the rights to an AI-generated novel, and whether it would be considered original work or plagiarism.

Happy writing!

One more way to teach context in literature

When performing a close read, it is difficult to get students to read between the lines to go beyond plot and character recap to do some real analysis. This represents a huge paradigm shift for grades nine and ten students who are used to doing book reports, summarizing what they read and what they think about it. A contextual analysis of a piece of literature forces students to engage critical thinking skills, formulate and answer critical inquiry questions, and make in-depth connections to which they may not be used.

What is context in literature?

Context refers to any external factors that have influenced authors as they write, focusing on the questions “Are events or places from the [author’s] life reflected in the [text]? Are people or relationships from the [author’s] life reflected in the [text]? Are the [author’s] ideas or beliefs reflected in the [text]?“

Context has become a huge teaching point in my practice, simply because, to me, it seems like such a simple context, but the students struggle. Every semester I teach or review context as a concept, I change my approach, and every semester it is met with varying success. This prompted me to embark on a critical inquiry quest of my own, to discover a way to teach context that is student-centred, inquiry-based, and engaging. The results of my quest are codified in 15 Practical Ideas for Teaching Context in Literature, available on Amazon. Using one of the ideas in that collection, I taught a successful and engaging lesson on context, that was probably the best one of my career!

 If you’re in a pinch…

Some of the activities in my book can be time-consuming, taking up three or more days of class, and while getting the concept across is well worth the time, you might find that  you don’t have the time to give over to some of these activities, particularly toward the end of the semester. Fear not. Here is a way you can do it in one or two periods.

The lesson plan I am sharing with you here is for teaching context in Macbeth in grade ten. It is focused more on connections with the play rather than Shakespeare himself, as it is assumed that students would have already had an introduction to Shakespeare in grade nine.  To be sure students are following along with the lesson, I create a note-taking template for students to complete during the presentation with the caveat that the slide deck will not be shared at a later date, removing the excuse that they do not have to pay attention because they can make the notes later. I had great success with this method in my grade nine class and hope it will work as well with my grade tens.

The lesson begins with a series of videos and slides with which students are prompted to make notes and includes a critical inquiry activity in which students compare five different portrayals of the witches to discuss their effectiveness. We watch the Patrick Stewart version of the play, and the unit culminates with students creating a portfolio of five writing activities selected from a choice board—a combination of fiction and non-fiction pieces—from which they choose three to polish and submit for evaluation. All of the context was selected with this in mind so that once they begin the portfolio, most of the concepts covered should have already been introduced.

Materials needed for the lesson in context are: