Last night, I recorded this final exam review for my Introduction to Language and Technology ENG1710 students. These are the slides that I’m using in the background. The following are the readings that my students and I discussed over the past 14 weeks that comprise the exam review:
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
Victoria Fromkin, “What is Language?” from An Introduction to Language
Stephen Jay Klein, “What is Technology?”
Salikoko S. Mufwene, “Language as Technology: Some Questions That Evolutionary Linguistics Should Address”
Walter J. Ong, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition,
Bruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity”
Jacques Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chapter 1: “Toward Embodied Virtuality”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1: “The Medium is the Message”
Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone Film Typewriter”
J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, “Remediation”
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, “Introduction”
Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community”
Lev Manovich, Language of New Media, Chapter 1: What is New Media?”
Alexander Galloway, “What is New Media? Ten Years After The Language of New Media”
Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction”
Anil Dash, “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media”
David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerald Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960”
Marie Hicks, Introduction to Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”
William Hart-Davidson, “On Writing, Technical Communication and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication”
Dan Milmo, Seán Clarke, and Garry Blight, “How AI Chatbots Like ChatGPT or Bard Work—Visual Explainer”
Alan F. Blackwell, “Are You Paying Attention?” from Moral Codes
Lorena O’Neil, “These Women Warned of AI’s Dangers and Risks Long Before ChatGPT”
Maria Christoforaki and Oya Beyan, “AI Ethics—A Bird’s Eye View”
In any given year as we approach the end of the spring semester, I feel almost skeletal. My animating flesh gives way under responsibilities, deadlines, and stress. I tell my students to hang in there through the end as much to encourage them as myself.
Yesterday, about twenty faculty and students gathered in BMCC’s Fiterman Hall room 1304 to discuss the effects of Generative AI on college writing, higher education, and society-in-general for the Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum. I was honored to have been invited to participate.
For my part in the conversation, I came at the issue from four vectors: as a science fiction scholar, a writing instructor, a technical communication instructor, and computer hobbyist. My desire to learn how Generative AI works and to pass on what I have learned to my students is informed by my adherence to William Gibson’s axiom, “the street finds its own use for things,” which is coupled with Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and claiming the tools of technology for our own purposes to build the network, community, and world that we want.
While it was scheduled for only two hours, we ran over by 20 minutes–something the organizers said hadn’t happened before. I think that if time hadn’t been called, we might still be there into the wee hours.
The BMCC students in attendance demonstrated their engagement and concern about these technologies in the classroom and their everyday lives.
I closed my comments in response to a question about how we might use Generative AI to fight back against authoritarianism. I offered an assemblage of open source generative AI, a bit of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985).
Besides the substance of the discussion, I think meeting colleagues at BMCC might have opened doors for further work on AI matters and the annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. Stay tuned!
