AI-Enhanced Learning with Pary Fassihi

I talked recently with Pary Fassihi, senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, about her use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly in her writing and research courses. I’ve known Pary a long time… She’s in my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, about using clickers in the language instruction courses she was teaching back around 2007. These days, she still teaches some language courses, but most of her teaching is for the writing program at Boston. And she’s been sharing some very interesting things on LinkedIn about the ways she has integrated generative AI in her courses! In the interview, she talks about using AI-generated images with her students, having ChatGPT play the role of peer reviewer for student work, getting AI to help students with course readings, and much more.

Episode Resources

Pary Fassihi on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pary-fassihi/ 

Pary’s Human vs. AI-Generated Summary and Response assignment, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NxkqM8yrLJAPLwYdEB8gcng8qqJZP9AzCEpkj8fTfZQ/edit 

Pary’s Peer Review Papers with ChatGPT assignment, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1db1_LtM2d5ijGx25unLFcxHbfpPjCl2iOB1DoL_gqT0/edit

Pary's AI-Inspired Art Creation activity, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SkVtwGKwqF0M4rzlOYo-xyesseTotkNfZy4uNi2MVN8/edit

Boston's AI-Intensive Writing, Research, and Inquiry Courses, https://www.bu.edu/dli/projects/ai-intensive-writing-research-inquiry-courses/

Adobe Firefly, https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html 

Claire Silver, AI collaborative artist, https://www.clairesilver.com/

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Chapters

• 1:50 Meet the Educator
• 10:15 AI Image Generators
• 16:32 Writing Revision with AI
• 24:11 AI and Reading
• 29:34 Ethics of AI and Art
• 32:57 Advice for Faculty
• 38:37 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:06
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. Surprise. I have a new episode for you this week. Usually I aim for new episodes every other Tuesday, but I've been talking to too many interesting people lately. I'm taking intentional teaching weekly for the month of April to catch up on my backlog of interviews, and I have a fantastic interview for you today. I talked recently with Pary Fassihi,senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences writing program at Boston University about her use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly in her writing and research courses. I've known Pary a long time, actually. She's in my first book teaching with classroom response systems, about using clickers in language instruction way back around 2007. These days, she still teaches some language courses, but most of her teaching is for the writing program at Boston, and she's been sharing some really interesting things on LinkedIn about the way she has integrated, generative AI in her courses. In the interview, Pary talks about using AI generated images with her students having chat. GPT play the role of peer reviewer for student work, getting A.I. to help students with course readings and much more. Before I share the interview, I'd like to mention one thing. I usually say this at the end of each episode, but I figure not all of you listen that long. If you found this or any episode of Intentional teaching useful, would you do me a favor and share it with a colleague or maybe post about it on social media that would help me grow the audience for the thoughtful, creative educators whose work I share here on the podcast. Okay, Now for my conversation with Pary Fassihi. 

Welcome to the podcast. Pary I'm very excited to talk with you today about generative AI and how you've been experimenting with it in your courses this spring. Welcome to the podcast. 

Pary Fassihi 2:02
Thank you so much, Derek. Happy to be here. 

Derek Bruff 2:04
And I believe you're a listener of the podcast, so you may know my first question that I'm going to ask you. 

Pary Fassihi 2:10
Yes, I do. 

Derek Bruff 2:12
Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Pary Fassihi 2:17
Sure. It's a very long story, so I will keep it very short, I promise. So my teaching journey actually started when I was really, really young. I was in fact, I've been teaching for about 27 years now, so I was 16 when I started. Now you can do the math and figure out my age, which is totally fine. I do come from a family who has a strong background in education. My parents came to the US from Iran at a very young age and were both in higher ed. So I was immersed in in teaching and just higher education and I felt like it was just in my genes. But interestingly enough, I really didn't want to be a teacher. And and I have always wanted to go into the medical field, but given my Persian backgrounds and you know that my family was from Iran, we would go back and forth to Iran quite frequently. And so one of the summers I was sixteen years old. We travel and we over there I go into a language and English language institute, and I'm like, you know what? I miss speaking English to folks, so I'm just going to go sign up so I could speak English to the teachers and practice my English a little bit there. And so I go in and the director who's doing the placement test goes, Well, you know, you're a native speaker. You really don't need any classes. Do you want to teach some classes here? So and it had some really good money. So I'm like, why not? I was hesitant,I was very shy. You know, my mom was a big motivator there. She was like, No, go ahead, you know, do it. It's good for you. So I go in, they they have a one week teacher training course for me. And I they teach me basically how to teach in a week, which was a very much traditional way of teaching. So I go in and you ask me about the moment that, you know, I knew that I wanted to become an educator. Was that the adrenaline rush you get when you step outside of the classroom, that very first class that you're teaching? And so I go into the classroom, all my students, they give me three classes, and all my students were two of my classes. The students were much older than me, college age. And so I go and I fake my age. I don't tell them how old I am. I teach the class. I come out and I'm like, Is there anything better in this world than teaching? So I that's and I never looked back at the medical field. I wanted to be a pediatrician, and I've been teaching nonstop ever since. So for me, the experience came before the education. So when we came back to the U.S., I taught at the YMCA in Boston for a while to Russian citizens. And so, you know, all over I felt like I need to keep at it. And and so the experience came before that education, which was in a way sort of trial or error for me. You know, my poor students. But but, you know, it's a lot of it was. And I feel like that enabled me to take risks in the classroom now because I'm not afraid of trying things out and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But but yeah, that's that's how I started. 

Derek Bruff 5:22
I love that story. Man 16 What a transformative moment. That's amazing. Yes. 

Pary Fassihi 5:27
Yeah, It changed my life forever, that's for sure. 

Derek Bruff 5:30
Yeah. Now, I know you were a language teacher for a long time, but that's not what you're teaching right now, right? Yeah. You're teaching some writing courses that involve a lot of generative AI. So tell us about those courses and and maybe what motivated you to kind of jump all in on the generative A.I., this spring? 

Pary Fassihi 5:48
Yeah, sure. So I started off my background is in language education and teaching English language learners. So for quite a few years I've been teaching those courses, especially in the context of writing. But then since I joined the writing program at Boston University for the past ten years or so, I've been very involved with teaching courses that are a little bit more topic specific. So I still work a great deal with English language learners, but I also teach courses that are our first year writing seminar courses and our research courses as well. And so for those courses we have, we get to pick our own topics, which is amazing, the topics that we have experience in and an expertise in. And we get to design the course that way and teach a writing course within that context. And so a couple of the topics that I love teaching is one of them is digital media, and it is to our first year students who need to take the writing requirement for BU. And the digital media, of course, really touches on that. Apart from students learning how to write, obviously they we focus on our on a variety of topics such as multimodal communication. We talk about the potentials and challenges of digital media in this world. We start off with the history of the Internet, where we were, where we are. Students talk about we just we do a lot of discussion around social media. We evaluate their own digital media and social media usage in the classroom. They reflect on it. And so a range of topics. And then more recently, I have added AI to that course as well. And the same with my writing research and inquiry course, which is a higher level course, which also that one I can tell you a little bit more about later, but that's also a course that that's very specifically tied to the topic of AI and we explore AI from many different angles and that course. 

Yeah, so, so with the digital media course so you asked why, why AI and why I am implementing it. I am really I mean it's the time, right? It's the time to make sure that we all know how to use it. But I think ultimately it's, you know, even pre pre A.I. digital literacy was almost always at the heart of every course that I taught. And so that has been regardless of the topic and regardless of what I was teaching, I always felt that students need to have that digital literacy and at different times, the digital literacy obviously has looked very different. Right? And so pre-COVID, I remember instructors would say, and I do work with a lot of faculty, by the way, and I do faculty consultations at the university. And so pre-COVID, I remember, you know, faculty would get frustrated and they would be like, Oh, I don't want to use this tool in my class. And remember clickers Derek. So, so like this. And we'd be like, Clickers. No, why do we need clickers? You know, students could raise their hands. And it was like, Yeah, but you know, here are the benefits to it. And so I feel like it's a very different time now. And I and I tell faculty that it's AI is not just an extra tool that we're adding. It's going to be students are all using it. Whereas in the past it was very different. You might have had a tool that students had no clue what it was and you were using it to enhance your teaching. But right now students are all using it. So we all need that AI literacy. And when when I when I think of AI literacy, it's not just for the students, it's for myself, too. So I you know, it's more like, what am I? Because I can't claim that I know everything, right? So what am I learning in the process? I'm learning a ton from my students. They teach me about these tools. Then my oh my gosh, I had no clue about it. And so I'm learning from them constantly and I feel like the more trans parent we are about A.I. and how we're using it, the more we can learn from each other. So that was a very long answer to your question. 

Derek Bruff 9:55
No, no. But it's it's it's important, right? I'm in the same boat where I don't understand it all, but I do think that it's going to stick around and continue to affect a lot of different areas of work and academic areas. And and yeah, I think it's incumbent on us to get a handle on it. 

Pary Fassihi 10:15
Right, Exactly. 

Derek Bruff 10:17
So what are I've been following you on LinkedIn where you've been sharing some of your experiments. So I have a little sense as to how you might answer this question, but what are some of the assignments or activities you've been using to help you and your students explore generative A.I. this spring? 

Pary Fassihi 10:32
Sure. And so with my I'll start with my digital media course, and that is a lower level. It's the basic first year course that students take. I'll start with that one. And then that course specifically we want. We are an Adobe Creative Cloud campus. And so that means that all students have access to all the Adobe tools. And so we try in some of these courses. Sure. 

Derek Bruff 10:56
So that would mean things like Photoshop, Lightroom. Yes, those are the only two that I think of. 

Pary Fassihi 11:03
Right? So Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Rush for Video, Adobe Premiere Pro for video, Adobe Firefly for Image Generation, Adobe Express for a whole bunch of things. So so we're very fortunate to have that access. And, and I love using those tools in the classroom because I tell students, you know, once you graduate from here, you can add these all to your CV and you have expertise in them and, and later on in the workforce, you, you have these tools under your belt. And so we I tried to incorporate these tools in some of the assignments that we do, but as part of the course. So for example, we start off the semester with having students in actually both my courses, because my other course also has a digital multimedia component to it. And so what I ask students to do in both of those courses is I have them send me an introduction email telling me about themselves, their backgrounds, and I love to get to know them a little bit more about why they took the course. And then as part of these courses, I have them remediate that email. So a big part of the course in general is having them write a traditional essay, either whether it's a research paper or whether it's an argumentative analysis. And then towards the end of the semester or midway through the semester, we have them start working on some kind of remediation process in different courses that remediation looks differently. So in my digital media course, for example, they're going to be they're going to have an option of creating either a video essay or a poster out of that paper. And so in order to get them ready for those types of assignments that are coming later on and you know, it's towards the end of the semester, they're going to have another midterms that they're dealing with. I want them to I want to familiarize them a little bit with that process of remediation on a much lower stakes assignment so that we can also practice with the tool. So I ask them, you know, send me this email and now I need you to remediate this email into a video, email into a video, an introduction video for a different audience. And that audience is going to be your classmates. So they remediate that email into a one minute video video for their classmates, and then they show it in that process. So we have a little mini lesson about that process of remediation. So the rhetorical choices that they're making, how are those rhetorical choices different than when they were writing their their email to me? And so what are how are they pausing? Are they do they have voice over what images are they using? And as part of that now this semester, I added that they could use AI generated images. So it's interesting how far they went with that. And and the results we got. They were creating avatars of themselves in their vision of what where they want to be or what they want to do in the future. And some really good stuff came out of it and they had a ton of fun with it. But all the at at the same time, we were looking at these images and we were talking about, okay, why did you what was the prompt you gave it? What were the some of the choices that you made? Why this what did it give you initially? How did you change it? How did you go back and forth? And so so that's one thing that I start off both classes with that I feel like is is valuable. It gets them comfortable in the classroom. 

Derek Bruff 14:26
I'm guessing Adobe Firefly, it works a bit like DALL-E or mid Journey or the other image generators where you can give it a prompt and it will generate maybe some some images to pick from and you can refine it. 

Pary Fassihi 14:39
It does, except that Adobe Firefly does not have a chat bot. So with with platforms like DALL-E, for example, you go back and forth like ChatGPT, right? You, you go back and forth and have that conversation and ask it to refine with Adobe Firefly, you, you give it the prompt and then if you don't like what you see, you go back and you edit that same prompt. So it's not, it doesn't have that conversation style to it, but the quality of it I feel like is, is very different in terms of because Adobe focuses a lot on art right, and digital art. And so the pool of images that it gets, it's it's data from is they're all copyrighted and safer in my opinion if we're talking about thinking about ethics and so so you know so that's that's one way I like to gear my students towards. 

Derek Bruff 15:36
And just to clarify, because I know whenever we start talking about AI I know my listeners come from a lot of different backgrounds, so the Adobe Firefly tool was trained on bazillions of images. 

Pary Fassihi 15:52
Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 15:53
But Adobe has made efforts to make sure that they had legal and appropriate access to those. 

Pary Fassihi 15:59
Exactly. 

Derek Bruff 16:00
For this purpose. Right. 

Pary Fassihi 16:01
Exactly. 

Derek Bruff 16:02
Which is different than how some of the other tools are trained on images that were scraped off the internet, perhaps without permission. And we don't have to decide the copyright status right now. But I'm just flagging that as a difference. 

Pary Fassihi 16:14
Yeah. Yes, exactly. That's why I personally, I feel more comfortable having students use tools like Adobe Firefly with their projects. And and we've talked a lot about those differences and where those images come from. That's part of our discussions when we do these projects. 

Yeah. And then and then another activity that I, you know, a whole bunch of them, but another one that I really like that I've also used in my with my ELL students, specifically in the lower level of courses that we have is human versus AI generated summary and response. And so we were for example in this course we were talking about Tim Berners-Lee vision of the Internet when he first created it and what the direction that he hoped it would go and what has happened since then. And so we've watched, we've read a lot of articles, watched videos on his more recent opinions. And so students were tasked to summarize his opinions and and respond to that. And analyze and respond. And so I had them create this was an in-class activity where I felt like, okay, this is going to be a moment where we can really take AI's language and dissect it and compare it with students own response. So I have students write their own paragraphs initially, and then I have them feed that into AI and in this case ChatGPT the free version. And I told students to there is an option where they can go in if they're not. I always give the students an option to opt out, not in my other course, which is an AI intensive course, which I'll talk about, but in this course I give them the option to opt out because some may not be comfortable putting in their their work into into ChatGPT or other platforms. In this case, though, ChatGPT does have an option where you can go into the settings and you can hide the history and also ask it to not use anything that you've entered as part of its training. And so I give students that option as well. I could say almost none of them use that option, that that setting. But it's good, it's good to tell them about. And so they know and they put in there their summaries and then they I ask them to give specific prompts. So we work on these prompts like, don't tell AI to make my paper sound better or make my paragraph sound better. Don't tell it to make it sound academic because we know what it's going to do there. But give it give it very specific prompts. So can you check maybe my verb tenses? Or if I have a verb tense problem, can you help me fix it? And can I? How can you learn from it? Basically. So very intentional, prompt engineering that I give them and they they take that and then they they take ChatGPT's output. 

Derek Bruff 19:12
So if I give a paragraph essay to ChatGPT and ask it to make it better, it will come back with a new version. All right. 

Pary Fassihi 19:22
Yeah, but. 

Derek Bruff 19:22
Is that is the question there that I don't know as a student, I wouldn't know how it made it better. 

Pary Fassihi 19:28
Yes, right. Exactly. 

Derek Bruff 19:30
What part of the writing is it? Is it changing? If I use, I open it, whereas I give it a more specific prompt, I can now then kind of associate this change with this this aspect of writing. 

Pary Fassihi 19:44
Exactly. And unless you ask it to explain, it will explain. Right. But I in this case, I wanted students to identify and mostly to go through that process of comparing. So now they have two paragraphs, they're comparing with each other, and I ask them to highlight those changes so that they're going through that metacognitive process and that they're reflecting on those changes. And then I ask them to write an AI enhanced version of of their paragraph. So I knew and it was interesting because some students were like, I want to keep this, this is really good. And I said, Well, but is it really? Let's sit down and take a look at this. Would you use this language in your regular conversation? And I don't think so. And so this is especially a great opportunity for working with English language learners. I feel like native, native English speakers would immediately pick up on the flowery language of it or over the top. But with English language learners, the connotations of words that then come into play and we get a lot out of that. So by the end of activity, a lot of times I have students who say, No, I'm keeping my own, I don't want to use AI's version, I don't want to enhance it with AI And then some have a harder time letting go. But I'll just say that it brings out that AI literacy. So what are the limitations of AI? What can we do with it? What can we not do? What is it good at? And we have a ton of. So this this activity itself took an hour and 15 minutes and that's the entire class duration. So that's that's one thing that you know in other activities. Well. 

Derek Bruff 21:21
You know, one of the things I've been saying for a while now is that it's something we have to figure out as instructors is where can we use AI tools to help students learn skills and where will the use of AI essentially shortcut that skill building? 

Pary Fassihi 21:38
Yes, right. 

Derek Bruff 21:38
And so if I have the AI, just revise my paper and then I don't do that metacognitive piece, then I haven't learned anything about writing. Right. I may have a better output, but I haven't learned anything about writing. Whereas this more targeted approach, you're actually targeting specific writing skills and using the AI essentially as kind of a 

it's like a practice and feedback loop, right? But it's customized for that. Student Yeah. 

Pary Fassihi 22:04
Exactly. And the same with along the same lines with peer review. So I have designed an activity where I have very actually happened because we happen to have a snow day in Boston and, and it ended up not snowing at all. Well, a little bit, but not as much. But classes got canceled. And so I was like, okay, we were going to do a peer review in class, so now let's do it was ChatGPT. So it ended up being a really nice back up. And in fact, so I had them give, very specific prompts based on the criteria and guidelines of the paper. So I asked them to go in and put in their paper and ask it to give feedback according to these criteria. But don't forget, I asked students not to list all the criteria, and there were five or six of them, but to really go one by one and engage in a conversation about each of those criteria. And so they go in and eventually I had to ask them to share the link to the chat with me. And I had also asked them at the very end to reflect and highlight the changes that they made on their paper. So anything that was AI generated, but they actually ended up changing but was direct from AI to turn into a blue font and then anything that they've, they've sort of taken by, you know, want to maybe like make some adjustments with language and grammar to highlight that for me and then write a reflection about the whole process, share the link to the chat with ChaTGPT and it was incredible. I do not think that they have ever done a human human peer review that much involved. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I really don't. Because peer reviews in class, I mean, they could go really well and they could go horribly wrong. So if students don't interact, if they don't have the guidelines and at the most maybe they spend like 15, 20 minutes talking and they're like, Oh yeah, we're done. It looks good. But in this case, that that reflective process, again, going back to the metacognitive process, it really helps them with with learning and getting feedback. 

Derek Bruff 24:12
We've talked about image generation. We've talked about a kind of conversation with a ChatGPT, right, as a kind of writing revision process. I saw you posted something about the use of generative AI in reading, which is not something I hear a lot about from instructors. What what have you learned about that topic? 

Pary Fassihi 24:35
Yes. So with reading, it's it's very interesting. And we are doing this mostly in my writing research and inquiry course and the. 

Derek Bruff 24:45
Is that the AI intensive course?

Pary Fassihi 24:47
Yes, that is that the AI intensive course that is actually part of a pilot we're running in the writing program and a couple of our colleagues got a grant for this course where we and then a couple of us faculty got on board as well. And so we are a group of faculty who are teaching AI and teaching this writing research and inquiry course in a very AI intensive, crazy way. So we are taking AI in the class. We are through the grant. Our students have subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus and we have AI affiliates in the classroom who are actually undergrad students themselves. So each of us have sort of like a t a but for the AI component. So we are learning a lot from these AI affiliates who come in and also train the students. And these are students who are the AI affiliates are folks who have some background with working with AI and we work together and design activities together. And so as so it's pretty intense now. It's hopefully a research study will be coming out of it. So stay tuned. But we're super excited about it because we are learning a lot with AI and writing and again, all of it is trial and error, but we're doing our best. And in that course I've experimented with because we have a lot of readings and that course focuses again, mine is not not only is it AI intensive, but it's also on the topic of AI. So these courses all have a theme and a topic and in that course we explore topics like AI and ethics, AI and art and love, AI and in the industry. 

Derek Bruff 26:30
I'm sorry. Did you say love? 

Pary Fassihi 26:31
Yes, love. 

Derek Bruff 26:33
Okay, 

Pary Fassihi 26:34
so we explore all possible things. AI And so we what we do in, in, in that specific course is we also do a lot of reading, obviously. So students are tasked with a semester long research project for which, you know, we have some course readings, but then they have to create annotated bibliographies and do their own research. So you can imagine some possible uses of AI there. But we because they have to read a lot and look for these and create these annotated bibliographies and skim through these research studies and these scholarly papers. This is where I feel like I really could help where they're not sitting and reading the entire paper. But yes, reading the abstracts. But maybe they need to know a little bit more than the abstract, and they need to know whether this paper covers that specific topic that they're researching or that's where they can go in. And and in this case, again, we have subscription to GPT plus ChaTGPT Plus, which allows us to use the plug ins. And so we use the PDF reader plug ins to actually summarize the readings. One thing I found that it's been a huge timesaver for reading in the classroom, so before this I would not I would always have students read outside of class, right? And then come in and we talk about it. But now with just them having a lot of homework and I don't want them to read too many articles outside of class, sometimes I have them read it inside the class, so I have them get together. And we were actually reading a Bill Gates article the other day on the risks of A.I. and we were going to do an activity and I said, Well, I haven't assigned this as homework, but why don't you all use ChatGPT and read this based on, you know, the ways that we've been doing it in class? Ask it to give you a set of bullet points, and then we're going to actually because the actual word by word of it wasn't that important. We really wanted to get the gist of it and have a debate on it. And so it was mostly the content, the general content that we were we were going to work with. And so depending on the purpose you have with the article, I feel like if it's not something where you're dissecting the language and the words and the sentence structure, you could definitely go in and use the AI for reading and get a gist of it. It's a huge timesaver for inside the classroom. If you ever need to bring something in for students to read. 

Derek Bruff 29:05
Oh, wow. And I can imagine also if you've got the PDF right there and you have a ChatGPT summary as the discussion unfolds, if you need to follow up with some detail, it's it's there. 

Pary Fassihi 29:16
Exactly. 

Derek Bruff 29:17
You have kind of a roadmap to the to the article. 

Pary Fassihi 29:20
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 29:21
And, you know, we in our various scholarly disciplines, we don't always read every word in an article. Right. In order. Yeah. 

Pary Fassihi 29:31
Who has the time?

Derek Bruff 29:33
Right, right. 

Pary Fassihi 29:35
There's another I don't know if you want me to talk about this, but there's another AI and art activity that I do in this research class that. 

Derek Bruff 29:43
I would love to hear that. 

Pary Fassihi 29:44
We've been recently tapping into. So we've been talking about the ethics of AI and art. And and so we have started students as background have been looking into the works of Claire Silver, who will make who you may have heard about, who is an anonymous AI artist who does a ton of work with A.I.. 

Derek Bruff 30:06
This is a human who uses A.I. to make art. 

Pary Fassihi 30:10
Yes. So this is a human who uses an AI to make art and is claiming that, that and she basically considers Gen AI to be real art and advocates for an update to copyright rules and regulations. And so then there's the other side of the spectrum, right? The artists our beloved artists who are like, Well, no, we're not going to put anything up anymore because we're not going to put anything online because we're fearful that it's going to be taken by AI and it's going to be used. So we have and it's so hard to because when you hear Claire Silver's argument about how she generates art, it's interesting to here. There's still a lot that goes into the process. So it's not just prompt engineering, but then when you hear the artist side, you're like, Yeah, they're right too. So it's you're torn really in between and I don't have a clear answer for it. And so we, we talk and students go back and forth on their opinions all the time with this one. And so we have started these conversations. We watch podcast, we listen to podcasts, we watch videos, read articles, looked into works of different artists. And now what they're doing is they're creating their own art. So I've asked students to create art that is inspired by certain people. And so if you asked, for example ChatGPT, to create art in the style of a famous artist, it's most likely not going to do that. But if you ask it to create art that's inspired by. 

Derek Bruff 31:46
So if you ask it for the style, it won't. Is that because of some kind of safeguard that the. Yes, the tool has. 

Pary Fassihi 31:53
And it's because of a safeguard, which I hope we have more of this coming up. But if you if you're inspired by an artist and say, okay, so I want this certain brush work, for example, or these colors that this artist typically uses, it does do it. So so what students are doing right now is they're taking a theme that we've talked about in A.I. and they are generating images in the style of or inspired by these artists. And we're actually in the process of doing that. So we're following up on Thursday and they're generating this art, but then they're reflecting on, okay, what did it do right? What did it not do? Is this creation of art. So they're basically putting themselves into Claire Silver's shoes and they're doing what she's doing and then talking about because we already we hear both sides of the story. So do you think what you just did is real art or not? And so then they're reflecting by doing so. That's that's coming up. 

Derek Bruff 32:58
You mentioned a little bit earlier that, you know, some faculty are not teaching courses about AI, but they're still, you see a need to to kind of dive into to AI in those cases. What advice would you have for instructors who aren't teaching these courses that are so explicitly about artificial intelligence? I'll just end it there. What advice would you have for those faculty? 

Pary Fassihi 33:24
I honestly, I get this question all the time and I feel like it's again, it's it's we're at a very different era of digital media. And I have I have I'm someone who always has embraced technology in the classroom with it, with, you know, using it with intention. So with meaning and going in and using technology, not for the sake of using technology, but really to engage students and make learning better for the students. And I feel like this is a time where we just we're going to have to embrace it critically, whether we like it or not. So this is a time where we, you know, we it's and I'm not belittling the labor that's going to go into it, because I think a big concern, rightfully so, for a faculty is there's going to be a lot of labor, there's going to be a lot of learning. And I think that honestly is up to our educational institutions to make sure that they have the means for faculty to be able to learn and get up to date with AI implementation and A.I. literacy. So that's in their hands. But I feel like definitely we every activity that we do, everything that we do in the class can use a little layer of AI, even if it's a small dose. Right? So for example, like I said in my assignments, I go in and I've added even if it has nothing to do with A.I., I go in and I add a little blurb at the bottom like, Now put this into ChatGPT and see what it thinks. And that in of itself, something as simple as that. You don't have to revolutionize your assignments, right? Something as simple as that could provide those moments and opportunities to just open up that discussion. And again, and it's important because we especially in in writing, we work with language, right? So language is applied to all of our writing courses, regardless of topic and I think regardless of any of the topics that we all teach, we all work with language. And so so it's really important to bring up those conversations and find opportunities and especially when it comes to biases, I feel like it's, you know, it's something that as educators, regardless of the topic that you're teaching within your disciplines, it should be easy to find some of the biases in each discipline and talk about those. So my biggest advice to faculty is, you know, it's try to weave it in to the assignments because the students are using it. They are all using it. And maybe last year not everyone was, but this year they are. They know a whole lot more than we do, believe me. But also that I feel like if we're transparent about our use, students will be transparent. So I was actually talking to someone about how moving forward I'm going to be adding a little sentence at the bottom. So I'm using AI for creating worksheets, right? It's making my job as a faculty much faster. How do I use it? So for example, last, if I as instructors, we recycle our materials all the time. So I have a worksheet where I have ten sentences where I ask students to evaluate sentences. Are they argumentative claims or not? Right. How could we make it better? I've always wanted to spice up those sentences and come up with new ones, but I never had the time to actually sit down and write ten new sentences. I always use the same ones semester after semester. So I thought, Oh, let me do that. So I give it to ChatGPT. I'm like, Give me ten sentences. I'm like, Oh, like I want to about this topic or that topic. I take it. And obviously I go in and I change it to my liking. And then, well, I have a worksheet in like 10 minutes that I could go in and use. But at the very bottom, I'm starting to write some of these sentences were AI enhanced. So I feel like if I'm transparent with my students, they're not it's not going to be a taboo in class anymore. So now I'm seeing because I have students highlight their papers, places where they've used a I to change their their font to blue color. And so now I'm seeing more blue, which is a good thing because I want them to be transparent. But it's also I also see a lot of black font, which is their own thinking, but they've gone through that metacognitive process of incorporating AI into their writing deliberately. So they've put a lot of thought and effort into that. It's not just like copying and pasting from AI, but it's different. And so and so transparency, AI literacy. But I think with that comes transparency on our part and then making sure that students are transparent, but we have to model that for them. So yeah, Yeah. 

Derek Bruff 38:19
Well, thank you, Pary. This has just been delightful. I know you've given our listeners a lot to think about in terms of assignments and approaches and ethics and working with students around all this. So thank you so much for Thanks. Thanks for being here. 

Pary Fassihi 38:32
Thank you so much for having me. Derek, It's been a pleasure. 

Derek Bruff 38:41
That was Pary Fassihi, senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences writing program at Boston University. I really appreciate how Perry has been such a green light on the use of AI in her courses, and yet brings such nuance to hard conversations about ethical issues related to A.I.. If you'd like to hear more from Pary, I suggest you follow her on LinkedIn, where she posts pretty regular updates. You can also head over to the intentional teaching Patreon, where I'll be posting a few bonus clips from my conversation with Pary about ChatGPT's, accuracy, and the merits of having students beat up on a robot. And if something Pary shared inspires you to do something different in your teaching, with AI. Please let me know about it. 

Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website. The Intetional Teaching newsletter and my Patreon where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.