The Teaching of Writing in the AI Era
Justin Weinberg,
Daily Nous,
Jan 09, 2025
This article references a Times Literary Supplement article (you can only read the first five paragraphs before it hits you with paywall) saying "Every professor I know wasted countless hours of 2024 in the prevention or detection of AI-powered cheating. It is a miserable war of attrition that seems doomed to defeat. Perhaps the time has come, then, to declare a strategic withdrawal from writing as pedagogy?" There is probably a point there - I mean, we used writing for millennia mostly because we had no other alternative; it's not like there are medieval audio recordings or Roman empire videos available. On the other hand, there's the whole concept of thinking that seems to require reading and writing, that teachers try to discern in their students - "trying to get inside a student's head and guess why they used that inappropriate word or missed this obvious argumentative strategy" - but it begs the question, how much of cognition requires the form and structure of language, and how much of it is done that way just because we had no alternative?
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