What happens when a course goes from using AI to unplugged and back again?

Writing in class is a very human activity

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The Important Work is a space for instructors (and occasionally students) at all levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI.

This week’s post is by Mark C. Marino. It was originally published on Medium.

Mark teaches writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. He is author of Critical Code Studies and co-author of Hallucinate This! an authoritized autobotography of ChatGPT, Reading Project, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, the children’s series Mrs. Wobbles & the Tangerine House, and (forthcoming) Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. You can find Mark on Substack here, on Medium here, on his website, and on social media: Twitter: @markcmarino, Bluesky: markcmarino@bsky.social, TikTok: @Mark Marino

If you’re interested in sharing a reflection for The Important Work, you can find information here.—Jane Rosenzweig

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Back in October, I wrote about a new structure to my class, the analog sandwich. Here’s a review of how that went.

tldr: Great!

As a recap, I wanted to offer students in an Advanced Writing course at USC, their final required writing course, some lessons in using AI and a sense of the benefits of writing without it. As classes were going either all analog or various versions of allowable AI, I wanted to have a little of both, perhaps matching my own ambivalence…

The basic idea was to begin the semester by letting students use AI with limitations, to ensure that they all at least had some basic familiarity with what AI could offer their writing process. Then, we moved into a 5-week unplugged unit: no computers, no phones, just paper and pens and books. For the last section of the course, the students were allowed to decide how much AI they would use, albeit still within some constraints (no outright paper generation, for example). In our sandwich analogy: The bread of the sandwich (first and third section) allow for some directed AI use. The middle section of the sandwich, the contents (meat, peanut butter, cheese), is a totally unplugged analog section. It was technically an open-faced sandwich because students could opt to not use AI in the last third.

Preliminary takeaways:

Students appreciated some lessons in AI literacy

From the AI portion, students seemed to benefit from lessons on how generative AI works, how to conduct AI-augmented search, the history of AI, AI ethics, and various exercises like the Perfect Tutor. These were lessons in critical AI literacy. Especially as some students claimed they had never used AI previously, this first part of the class leveled the knowledge playing field a bit before we unplugged.

From the unplugged section, I found even more encouraging results:

Students did not complain of writer’s block.

Despite having five class sessions to write in their of the composition notebooks, there was no day where students spent the class just staring off into the air. While some students wrote faster than others, all students had the option of stopping by my office hours to finish writing to compensate for absences or just slower writing. Everyone kept writing, occasionally pausing to think.

This makes me think maybe writer’s block is not what students call it and is really just a combination of decision fatigue, overwhelm, and perpetual distraction on device. Students seemed happy with the experiment. It was a relief from our digital dystopia. To be constantly assaulted by our to-do notifications and our to-don’t avoidance opportunities is to be constantly ripped out of the headspace of writing.

I think we forget how much distraction comes when writing on our computers, particularly networked devices and — more importantly — how much of our inability to finish writing comes from that feeling of paralysis in the middle of the sea of avoidance entertainments and the million other demands we have on our time.

(Update: In my second go round, one student did spend one class staring into space. She was not sure why. Just was stuck that day. Still, that feels like a low incidence compared to how many students report writer’s block during a typical paper cycle of at-home writing. )

Students enjoyed reading books and printed short stories.

Students (most at least) came to class with books in hand. They seemed to enjoy the tactility of the little volumes. Those of us raised to read in print know the pleasure of a book in hand. The paper was grounding. Paper texts seemed to make our discussions more engaging and interesting, although it was harder for students to hide (behind screens or generated summaries) if they hadn’t done the reading.

Now, one student did say she read the whole book on iPad at home and then had trouble finding pages of quotes, but that seems like a minor inconvenience and maybe a reminder of some modern luxuries. I did enjoy seeing them flip through pages, rather than hit the search bar.

The quality of papers generally matched the distribution in their out-of-class writing.

One of my biggest concerns was that handwriting would put some students at an unnecessary disadvantage. However, since the grade distribution was roughly the same as their take-home, plugged-in essays, writing by hand did not seem to put anyone at disadvantage.

(Note: Any students who needed to type were accommodated.)

When we returned to computers, I felt much more at peace—less distrustful.

I believe it was Maha Bali who said, the biggest damage AI has done in our classrooms is destroy the trust between teachers and students. Now that I had seen their own words in their own handwriting (mostly printing), in an essay they they had worked on over time in front of me, I did not feel that same suspicion, that uncertainty about what was them and what was the machine. I felt okay seeing what they could do with a bit of augmentation.

Best—or at least better—practices

I don’t think all in-class writing is good for students or for writing courses. Setting students up for success made a big difference here.

1. Scaffolding: Because we were writing an APA-style researched essay, students had a structure to follow. I am sure letting them use an outline (which could also be developed in class) would serve the same purpose. But I didn’t want them to generate an outline and bring it in.

2. Low Pressure: The writing occasion was couched as writing time, not a high-stakes test. They were free to revise as they wish, drawing arrows, crossing out paragraphs, adding numbers for me to follow. They could also talk to me or classmates. I kept reminding them that this is not some high-stakes test. That shift removed a lot of the antagonism and trauma-inducing (and unnecessary) pressure of in-class writing.

3. Ergonomics: Writing by hand can be irritating, so we took stretch breaks. Time to get those fingers flexed and wiggling…

4. Humanity: This was a very human activity. Students were free to take breaks, talk with one another, talk with me, and listen to music. I played some low-fi hip hop or background jazz and let students listen to their own music if they preferred. I suppose they could be taking dictation from an AI, but really, why?

5. Revision parachute: Students knew they’d get a chance to revise the paper with a computer for their final portfolio and that I’d be only commenting on these in-class drafts, not grading. That took quite a bit of pressure off. And to be honest, it emphasized what I care about, which is the kind of writing that evolves over time that makes use of all the tools at our disposal.

More results are forthcoming.