Students and AI Literacy with Annette Vee

How do students feel about generative AI and learning? What kind of guidance are they looking to their instructors for? How can we be understand our students so that we can together figure out how to adapt to a world with generative AI?

This week on the podcast, I talk with Annette Vee, associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Annette and her colleagues have talked to a lot of students at Pittsburgh about AI, and she has a lot to say about how conflicted students are about the role of AI in higher education. And about how to have open, productive conversations about a topic that can be hard to talk about.

It was a delight to talk with Annette for the podcast, in part because I feel like most of our working relationship is built on comments in the margins of Google documents! Annette and I are co-authors, with Marc Watkins, on the forthcoming Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching. The three of us have filled our last few months with writing and reviewing and editing. Turning a book around on the time table we're pursuing isn't easy for authors or publishers! I had Marc on the podcast in 2024, and I wanted to feature Annette and her work on the show before having the three of us on to talk about the book closer to its release date.

Like Marc, Annette was experimenting with large language models before any of us had heard about ChatGPT. Her research is at the intersection of computation and writing, and her first book was Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing (MIT Press, 2017). That interdisciplinary background led her to explore a variety of forms of artificial writing, including AI-generated text. She was directing the composition program at Pittsburgh when ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and she's been helping colleagues at Pittsburgh and elsewhere practice what she calls AI-aware teaching every since.

Annette and I cover a lot of ground in our conversation: how computational literacy is changing in light of AI, whether there is such a thing as “AI literacy,” what she has learned from talking to hundreds of students about AI, and why AI needs to be on the college curriculum. And we follow a short rabbit trail about our own programming experiences with BASIC and Logo back in the 80s!

​You can listen to my conversation with Annette Vee here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

New on the UVA Teaching Hub

I haven't shared lately here in the newsletter about the University of Virginia Teaching Hub, but my colleagues at UVA and elsewhere have been busy curating new collections of resources on a variety of teaching topics. Here are a few of the collections we've published lately:

• ​Essentials for Collaborative Learning - This collection by UVA's Lynn Mandeltort and Lindsay Wheeler features their favorite resources for supporting students through group work, whether that's in-class informal groups or out-of-class group projects.
• ​Dialogue & Deliberation Across Difference - Bethany Morrison is back on the Teaching Hub with a new collection featuring principles and practices for engaging students in productive and respectful discourse when they hold different values, identities, and opinions.
• ​Creating a Classroom Environment in Which Civil Discourse Can Thrive - This collection was built by a group of educators from Washing & Lee University and the University of Richmond led by JT Torres and Kylie Korsnack. It features very concrete strategies for the first two weeks of class.
• ​Assessing Student-AI Collaboration: Innovative Grading & Rubric Strategies - How does assessment change when students can produce work in collaboration with AI that they couldn't have produced on their own? UVA's Kiera Allison's collection features perspectives and potential solutions.

We're up to 119 curated collections of resources on the Teaching Hub, so take a few minutes to tool around the site and see what's there that might be useful for your teaching. And if you're interested in putting together a collection to share on the Teaching Hub, please reach out. We're always welcoming new curators to the project.

Thanks for reading!

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