Dynamic Subspace

Tag: New Media

  • Generative AI for College Students Series: Outlines and Structures

    an anthropomorphic tuxedo cat wearing an orange sweatshirt, sitting at a desk in a library writing in a notebook
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Please keep in mind that new technology like Generative AI (Gen AI) shouldn’t simply make your thinking or work easier, much less take the place of the uniquely singular abilities of human beings to grow cognitively, think creatively, or evaluate critically. If you use Gen AI to simply avoid work, you are doing it wrong. Instead, using Gen AI in the spirit of Douglas Engelbart’s “augmenting human intelligence” and Donna Haraway’s configuration of the cyborg point the way to beneficial heightening of human possibility instead of harmful erasure of the cognitive distinctions of humanity. If you use Gen AI, use it wisely and use it well. This is the second post in this series.

    Gen AI can be a powerful ally when it comes to organizing ideas into a coherent structure. By creating outlines for essays, presentations, or projects, Gen AI provides a framework that students can refine and personalize. This process reflects the cyborg’s ability to integrate technology into their workflow, enhancing productivity without sacrificing creativity.

    For example, a student tasked with writing a research paper on artificial intelligence ethics could ask an AI tool to generate several outline versions, each prioritizing different aspects of the topic. They might compare these structures and then decide which one aligns best with their arguments and evidence. If the student hasn’t yet done the requisite beginning research, these outlines can point them toward the kinds of resources that they should find and read via their library.

    The key is to treat AI-generated outlines as a starting point rather than a rigid template. Students should feel free to modify, discard, or combine elements to suit their unique voice and vision. And importantly, one can return to the planning stage after learning more and adding that to their query to the Gen AI to further refine the organization of their project.

  • Generative AI for College Students Series: Brainstorming

    an anthropomorphic tuxedo cat wearing a sweatshirt and writing in a notebook in a library
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Please keep in mind that new technology like Generative AI (Gen AI) shouldn’t simply make your thinking or work easier, much less take the place of the uniquely singular abilities of human beings to grow cognitively, think creatively, or evaluate critically. If you use Gen AI to simply avoid work, you are doing it wrong. Instead, using Gen AI in the spirit of Douglas Engelbart’s “augmenting human intelligence” and Donna Haraway’s configuration of the cyborg point the way to beneficial heightening of human possibility instead of harmful erasure of the cognitive distinctions of humanity. If you use Gen AI, use it wisely and use it well. This post is the first in this series.

    Generative AI (Gen AI) offers a fascinating tool for brainstorming. It can be used as a kind of digital muse to spark ideas and explore concepts. By inputting keywords or questions, students can generate a list of possibilities and then narrow down those options to a topic that resonates with them.

    However, the real value of AI in brainstorming lies not in replacing human creativity but in expanding it. Entering into a dialog with Gen AI, students can use the conversation to uncover angles or connections they might not have considered on their own. Then, taking the leads uncovered through brainstorming, the student gains keywords and concepts that they can follow up on through their campus library’s catalog and databases.

    This collaboration between human curiosity and AI’s analytical power creates a cyborg-like synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Today, students are becoming cyborg writers by using generative AI to enhance their creative processes. This collaboration doesn’t replace human creativity but amplifies it, offering a digital lens to view ideas from fresh perspectives.

    Though, AI should be seen as a catalyst, not a replacement, for human imagination. By embracing this hybrid approach, students can harness the best of both worlds to do more with this new tool.

  • Video of Final Exam Review for My Spring 2025 Introduction to Language and Technology Class

    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:

    1. Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
    2. Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
    3. Victoria Fromkin, “What is Language?” from An Introduction to Language
    4. Stephen Jay Klein, “What is Technology?”
    5. Salikoko S. Mufwene, “Language as Technology: Some Questions That Evolutionary Linguistics Should Address”
    6. Walter J. Ong, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition,
    7. Bruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity”
    8. Jacques Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
    9. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
    10. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chapter 1: “Toward Embodied Virtuality”
    11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1: “The Medium is the Message”
    12. Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone Film Typewriter”
    13. J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, “Remediation”
    14. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, “Introduction”
    15. Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community”
    16. Lev Manovich, Language of New Media, Chapter 1: What is New Media?”
    17. Alexander Galloway, “What is New Media? Ten Years After The Language of New Media”
    18. Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction”
    19. Anil Dash, “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media”
    20. David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerald Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960”
    21. Marie Hicks, Introduction to Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
    22. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”
    23. William Hart-Davidson, “On Writing, Technical Communication and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication”
    24. Dan Milmo, Seán Clarke, and Garry Blight, “How AI Chatbots Like ChatGPT or Bard Work—Visual Explainer”
    25. Alan F. Blackwell, “Are You Paying Attention?” from Moral Codes
    26. Lorena O’Neil, “These Women Warned of AI’s Dangers and Risks Long Before ChatGPT”
    27. Maria Christoforaki and Oya Beyan, “AI Ethics—A Bird’s Eye View”

  • Forum on Generated Text and the Future of College Writing at BMCC, April 2, 2-4pm

    decorative flyer, text in body

    I’ll be speaking on a discussion panel about Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and College Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY (BMCC), Fiterman Hall 1304 on Wednesday, April 2 from 2-4 PM. If you’re free, it would be great if you could join us for what I think will be a lively in-person conversation. Details are below and the event flyer is posted above and below.

    The Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum

    Wednesday April 2 Fiterman Hall 1304 (245 Greenwich St.) 2-4 pm

    A Step Toward the Unified Macro-Mind or a Cybernetic Lawnmower in the Groves of Academia? :
    Generated Text and the Future of College Writing

    Recently, Large Language Models and generated texts have sent shockwaves through the academic community. Do they represent the initial glimmerings on a new horizon of transhuman creativity or are they, in Noam Chomsky’s phrase, merely “glorified autofill,” a “high-tech plagiarism” based on a self-cannibalizing database? Where old-fashioned plagiarism now seems like a relatively simple matter of ethics and originality, Artificial Intelligence and the looming specter of the Literary Chatbot bring a whole host of more tangled issues of Perception, Knowledge, Autonomy, and Class Warfare into the classroom.

    Many believe the neural net models of cognition don’t begin to pierce the mystery of the mind—Roger Penrose and others remain unconvinced that human thinking can be reduced meat-puppet computation, while John Searle’s Chinese Room parable undermines the idea that mere symbol-juggling can ever result in emergent consciousness. Still, techno-optimists believe we are at the precipice of an age of cyborg enhancements in which human potential will be radically expanded and the primate mind will be uploaded into Cloud-dwelling immortality.

    We will be discussing these issues and many others in an open symposium with CUNY professors Jason Ellis, Carlos Hernandez, Lisa Sarti, and Shane Snipes. We encourage our colleagues to come to voice their concerns and hopes on this increasingly crucial and urgent matter.

    pictures of four scholars speaking at the event

    The event is named in memory of Robert Lapides, a past English department professor at BMCC. Reading his obituary, you get the sense that he did good work that saved voices from the past from erasure, and created space for voices in the present to carry the work forward.

    “Robert Lapides, professor emeritus in the English Department, husband of Professor Diane Dowling, died on January 1, 2021. At BMCC for over 40 years, Professor Lapides will be remembered for his passion, his life-long fight for social, economic, and racial justice, and his commitment to building communities where differences can be expressed. Never afraid to speak up or ask questions, he was genuinely interested in his students and colleagues. His intense curiosity about people, places, politics, history, literature, psychology, religion–about what it means to be human–informed all his efforts. He encouraged his students to embrace their humanity, including the parts of themselves they felt they needed to hide, building their courage to write honestly. His legacy can be found in his influence on the many students and colleagues he worked with, the online communities he created, in his faculty magazine Hudson River, and for editing Lodz Ghetto, collected writings left behind by Jews confined to the Lodz Ghetto in WWII. Until the end, he was working on his book about the creative development of Charles Dickens, which will be published posthumously” (from Ellen Moody’s Under the Sign of Sylvia blog, 25 Mar. 2021).

  • Neil Gaiman’s “Goliath”

    I’ve been considering writing a paper to submit to the 2007 Short Story Conference at Edge Hill University. This year’s theme is, “‘The Story Shall Be Changed’: Tales and Re-tellings in the Short Story.” I knew that Neil Gaiman had done this sort of thing with some of his novels such as American Gods and Anansi Boys, but I wasn’t sure where to start with his short stories. Luckily, Gaiman provides ‘liner notes’ in the introduction for each story and poem in his collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. One story grabbed my attention in Fragile Things, called “Goliath.”

    He originally wrote it after reading the script to The Matrix for inclusion on the movie’s official website (read it here). The story is set in the machine world future of The Matrix, and it’s about one human being selected to protect Earth from an alien intruder in nearby space. What makes this story special is that Gaiman inverts the David and Goliath story in his retelling of the tale. I’ve only just begun my research on this, but I think it will lead to a promising essay.

    If you haven’t read this cyberpunk story, I recommend you check it out. Even though SF isn’t Gaiman’s modus operandi, it’s a well developed story that evokes the feel and detailed imagery of The Matrix.

    For more information about Gaiman’s “Goliath” story and its genesis, see The Matrix Wiki here.

    Updated link to “Goliath,” 12 Aug. 2023. -JWE

    Added link to The Matrix Wiki, 22 May 2024. -JWE