Co-authoring a school assignment with AI
Submitted by:
Anna-Lena Godhe
Abstract:
Currently, great attention is given to what AI tools may mean for educational practices,
not least when it comes to writing. Since tools like ChatGPT have proved to create texts of
good quality when prompted to create common school tasks, questions arise about how
algorithmic collaborations, and authorship will play out in the writing process
(Henrickson 2021).
This presentation builds on an analysis of Swedish teenagers writing stories about Futures together with AI tools (Lindberg & Haglind 2024) and a forthcoming chapter (Lindberg, Godhe & Bäcke in press) where the writing process is analysed with a post-humanist (cf Haraway 2016) and postdigital perspective (cf Jandrić et al. 2018). The analysis revealed three phases of the co-authoring process involving humans and AI-tools. In the first phase, the students were in a discursive closure (Markham 2022) that tied them to the present practices and technology, keeping them at a distance from futures imagination. The second phase gave rise to collaborative intra-actions (Barad 2007) where prompts facilitated communication between humans and technology. In this phase, authorship, writing practices, and narratives were reshaped due to the coming together of students’ agency and computational creativity (Sweeney 2023). The entanglement of the creative process came into focus in the third phase when students attended to stylistic differences in the co-created text. Writing within a school assignment, the students were aware of rules and regulations that made them re-write the co-written text to adhere to the evaluated position as sole authors.
Referenses
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham. NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Henrickson, L. (2021). Reading Computer-generated Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108906463.
Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital Science and Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000.
Lindberg, Y., Godhe, A.- L. & Bäcke, M. (in press). The Unbearable Lightness of Imagination in a GenAI Era. Changing Creative Writing Practices in School. In Jandrić, P., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H., & Teräs, M. (in press). Postdigital Imaginations: Critiques, Methods, and Interventions. Cham: Springer.
Lindberg, Y., & Haglind, T. (2024). Who Holds the Future? Value Enactment through Futures Framing by Upper Secondary School Teachers. In A. Buch, Y. Lindberg, & T. Cerratto Pargman (Eds.), Framing Futures in Postdigital Education: Critical Concepts for Data-driven Practices (pp. 21–37). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-58622-4_2.
Markham, A. (2021). The Limits of the Imaginary: Challenges to Intervening in Future Speculations of Memory, Data, and Algorithms. New Media & Society, 23(2), 382-405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322.
Sweeny, R. W. (2023). Digital and Postdigital Media in Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 64(4), 401–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2023.2273706.