Thank you to Dr. Ellen Cushman for her insightful feedback in crafting the early stages of this project and for graciously allowing me to visit her class to conduct the pilot workshop. The full version of this paper is available on APSA Preprints.
The disruptive presence of AI in higher education has given rise to disconnects between students and instructors on perceptions of appropriate AI use. While challenging, these disconnects present an opportunity to engage in conversation with students about ethics and technology. To help facilitate and structure these conversations, this paper presents a student-centered workshop where students collaboratively draw a flowchart that clarifies shared understandings of ethical priorities regarding AI and then applies these to determine appropriate AI use (if any) for a particular learning goal.
The first half of the workshop consists of a brief overview of AI and its limitations, and a discussion of common ethical concerns pertaining to AI. In the second half of the workshop, students collaboratively develop a flowchart around the below guiding questions:
- What is our learning goal?
- What are the attributes of this learning goal?
- What are potential AI use cases?
- What are our shared ethical priorities?
- How might using AI impact us?
- How might using AI impact the world?
- How might our shared ethical priorities impact AI use?
After placing answers under each of these questions, students link answers across questions and discuss how particular ethical priorities relate to certain use cases associated with the learning goal.
This workshop was piloted in Dr. Ellen Cushman’s Writing Cultures course at Northeastern University. It focused on the learning goal of conducting a literature review. Figure 1 displays the final flowchart developed by the students. This example is shared with the permission of the instructor.
This exercise sparked a constructive conversation with students about the quality of information generated by AI and the negative impacts of AI-generated content on language and expression, as well as using AI mindfully and intentionally. Instructors wishing to run this workshop can access the slides and Google Drawings template at the below links:
Using these materials in Google Drive requires you to have a Google account. If you do not have a Google account you can download them instead. To edit the slides, please save a copy in your Google Drive or download the slides. To edit the drawing template, please save a copy in your Google Drive. To allow students to edit the Google Drawing, go to Share then choose Anyone with the link: Editor, then share the link with students. To avoid irrelevant or unintentional changes, I suggest changing the sharing settings to Anyone with the link: Viewer directly after the exercise is finished.
The role of AI in education is quickly evolving and expanding. Open conversations around ethics and technology are particularly important at this moment as the pace of AI development requires both tailored and flexible policies to lay the foundation of how students learn to think critically about AI ethics.
Robot image credit: Mvolz, Wikimedia Commons
