Had a blast yesterday on the Adobe Digital Literacy Café, engaging in conversation with Melody Buckner, Shelly Rodrigo, and Todd Taylor about designing and assessing GenAI assignments. While the conversation covered far more than that, three things that really stood out to me were: 

• This is the first time in the history of higher education where every faculty member needs some level of professional development to prepare for the shifting landscape with GenAI
• We are all, in some fashion, very much in an “in progress” mode for how we are approaching / dealing with GenAI in the classroom (more on my approach below).
• There is a concern about what happens when the GenAI platforms start training themselves on their own creations. That is, what happens when they start evolving in an echo-chamber kind of way (i.e., scraping web content created/co-authored by their own tools). But it seems to me that this practice will, at some point, weaken the effectiveness of the platforms and, in turn, lessen their value in the world (impacting the potential value and, thus, their financial value). Meaning, by necessity, these companies will start to limit this practice or create a solution for this problem because to not do so will negatively impact their bottom line.

My own “in-progress” share was related to how I am using (and/or planning to use) reflection / reflective writing as a key approach to GenAI based assigments. In particulate, I ask students to turn in a reflection / project evaluation that (a) explains / explores not only HOW they are using GenAI on the assignment, but (b) WHY they felt it was valuable and (c) HOW THEY KNOW it was effective for their goals for the project. As I said, this is very much “in progress” thinking – something I’m building explicitly for next Fall’s course, but I started with this generic chart + reflection (PDF here) just to help clarify my own thinking/approach.