My fearless padlet by Agnès Prüm

Use of AI for brainstorming/idea generation:

2025-07-01 13:25:41 UTC

This easily becomes replacement for coming up with research questions (I teach students how to write their first historical research paper). As a result they do not learn how to do this themselves.

unacknowledged use of AI

lsteveker — 2025-07-01 13:27:39 UTC

student submits a text that is clearly AI generated, but we need them to admit having used AI -- This is frustrating and feels like a waste of time.

lack of general knowledge

2025-07-01 13:27:52 UTC

Students have difficulties in distinguishing between reliable sources and unreliable sources/content

Experimenting AI with them, to show them chatbot's limitations.

2025-07-01 13:27:53 UTC

Using image generation might be useful as well as text generation platforms (it shows graphically how clichés answers from chatbots are).

They usually are surprised how bad it is.

(when I say how bad it is: how bad their – and ours – uses of AI is bad).

mistrust

2025-07-01 13:28:20 UTC

When students perform significantly better on their homework (scoring 16) than on the exam (scoring 5), despite both containing the same type of questions, I begin to question the authenticity of the work submitted from home.

2025-07-01 13:28:59 UTC

Mere copy and pasting, brazen, to the extent that you can see font changes, missing punctuation etc. Initially, it seemed easy to detect but I would even fear that some students add mistakes on purpose to make it look “genuine”. The other issue is that you’re more likely to detect a chatbot in the language you write in; however, when that is not the case, it gets trickier. In longer pieces, it seems all the trickier to me to detect the usage, because here students are more likely to use grammarly or deepl, which is fine, but it blurs the line between the AI and the student.

including session on using AI in the syllabus

lsteveker — 2025-07-01 13:29:10 UTC

discussing possible ways of using AI tools (e.g. Elicit for bibliographical research) & encouraging students to experiment with them

discussing the pros and cons of these tools

Save exam browser exams at the end of the course to see what they took home (doing this in the global history course)

2025-07-01 13:29:24 UTC

Generally accepted?

2025-07-01 13:29:29 UTC

I don't believe that the points listed under ‘Generally acceptable use of AI’

Content development (brainstorming, idea generation, condensing information)
Language and communication support (help with grammar, style, spelling; paraphrasing; translation)
Conceptual support (clarifying terminology, theory, complex reasoning)
are really accepted by all of us to this extent.
At least not by me.

Using chatbots (or more specifically LLMs) for research

2025-07-01 13:30:07 UTC

Because it's a very different use of LLMs (and not chatbots), and much more clever than asking a chatbot to write a lazy essay.

Students' written expression has improved. Their work is more understandable and easier to read, as they often ask AI tools to help them rephrase and refine their language.

2025-07-01 13:30:08 UTC

Challenges

2025-07-01 13:30:57 UTC

Information: Students are not informed in which way they are allowed to use AI

Grades: They have used it in school and are not aware that this could be now a problem at University; question of better grades received by students using AI

Writing: Students use AI to formulate whole texts based on their notes

Reading competences: They do not read whole texts but use AI to identify important passages

Analytical competences: They do not stucture texts any more

no fear of the white paper

2025-07-01 13:31:40 UTC

It can be used to start off with ideas they can lateron develop academically

combining written assignments with oral exams

lsteveker — 2025-07-01 13:31:42 UTC

I asked my students to submit a research proposal at the end of the semester. They were allowed to use AI (with proper documentation). The following oral exams focused on the research proposals, which proved to be a good way of engaging them in discussions about the seminar topics and checking if they had actively engaged with the AI content they included in their research proposals.

2025-07-01 13:33:00 UTC

Give more space to oral assessments or supervised written tasks in class. However, this requires time, which is taken away from teaching.

Written expression

2025-07-01 13:33:11 UTC

Some of the texts have much improved

Grammar and language

2025-07-01 13:33:19 UTC

It improves significantly but do they actually learn to become better at it? I think it depends if you use deepl or grammarly and go through the thing word by word, but if you just hammer it through chatGPT to make it sound better, you’re unlikely to improve your command of any language. Maybe recommend grammarly and deepl but advise not to copy and paste into a chatbot.

Limitations

2025-07-01 13:34:11 UTC

By experimenting with AI, students could clearly see the limitations - very general, superficial information

Teaching AI for Humanists

2025-07-01 13:36:33 UTC

But really teaching AI and not only generative AI:

its history and the history of AI-related discourses (including political discourses on AI)
the different kinds of AI (symbolic, connectionist, etc)
differences between chatbots between them, and chatbots on one side, LLM/diffusion systems on the other
showing their limitations
etc.

explaining IA use instead of History

2025-07-01 13:36:34 UTC

I would have to spend more time in class talking to students about the responsible use of AI than focusing on the subject content and disciplinary skills—where they already have major gaps.

Main challenge

2025-07-01 13:39:58 UTC

The student stops doing the all the steps that the process of writing an argumentative essay consists in: reading, re-constructing arguments, assessing arguments, thinking of something new and putting it into your own words.

All these steps take time (a long time). And for the student, confronted with many essays in a short period of time, it is very tempting to simply let the LLM generate the text for him.

In the end, all those skills that you get by practicing the above activities are never acquired.