Right now our team is doing a lot of reading and thinking about the new generative technologies impacting the work of staff and students across Higher Education. This is the fourth (and final, for now) of a series of short posts that aim to highlight a piece of writing on the topic that we’ve found in some way thought-provoking, and our team’s response(s) to it. We want to highlight that these are our developing thoughts within a developing situation, and we are always subject to fluctuation and new influences as we continue to learn.
In her post for the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) blog, “We tried to kill the essay – now let’s resurrect it” Alicja Syska argues that essay-writing cannot be made AI-proof, but that doesn’t now make it useless. It is still, she suggests, an important vehicle (especially in the Humanities) to “take us on a journey to knowing.”
However, Syska suggests that the approach we often take to essays in HE reduces them to a product or transaction – “an essay for a grade” – rather than a process, and therefore we need to find a way to “harness technology in ways that empower us as agents in our own learning.” And while Syska suggests that AI tools might be a part of that, it is the idea that outsourcing the writing to GenAI could deprive us of an opportunity to develop our thoughts that drew the most discussion in our team.
We began to reflect on how we use writing to develop our own thinking. In particular, Syska’s mention that the origin of the word “essay” is “to attempt,” or try – which highlights that learning how to write an essay and practicing can be a valuable opportunity to take risks in your thinking and articulation, and that failing is an important part of the learning process.
Similarly, our GenAI Reading Club blog post series is part of our team’s attempts to grapple with the issues GenAI has been surfacing for us. We could have written these posts using GenAI in some measure, it could potentially have sped up the process a great deal and we still might have engaged with all of the ideas in them. However, this would have reduced the valuable time we spent struggling with these ideas as we wrote and revised. Similar ideas have been discussed lately by Leon Furze – who advocates for the value of friction for writing – and Dave White, who echoes Syska’s point in a recently written post on agency vs efficiency when it comes to AI in learning: “the process of learning itself is not primarily interested in efficiency in producing an academic or creative output.”
Syska also suggests writing “collaboratively and with students in the classroom so they appreciate writing as a social activity, in contrast with the more individual nature of assessment.” In our own context we have found writing these posts collaboratively as a team has helped us to further our understanding by incorporating others’ perspectives and strengthening where our thinking or communication was less developed. This echoes Syska’s suggestion that “meaningful learning happens through human connection.”
In fact, the process of waiting for and then acting on feedback from colleagues before publishing these posts is the antithesis of the speedy AI-generated essay, but when it comes to thinking, we’re finding there is value in time – spending time thinking, but also the time between giving something attention, like thoughts sometimes need a bit of space to breathe…
That’s all for this series of posts for now – do let us if you’ve found any of them helpful, had your own responses to the readings, or want to share an important reading with us – we’d love to hear from you. A good way to connect is through our Bluesky account.
Author: Rosemary Pearce
Learning Development Manager
Learning and Teaching Support Unit (LTSU)
School of Arts and Humanities
Nottingham Trent University
