New Curriculum Resources: Technoskeptical Investigations of AI Tech

By Jacob Pleasants & Julianna Kershen

How are you going to talk with your students about AI?

We are required to have an AI policy in our syllabus. Perhaps your institution requires one as well.

Having a well thought-out AI policy is a great idea. Lance Eaton has compiled a whole bunch of examples if you’d like some inspiration.

But an AI policy is just a set of rules and expectations. A policy doesn’t teach students anything about how they should think about and approach AI technologies. For that, we need to engage our students in conversations about and investigations of AI technologies - preferably critical (technoskeptical) ones.

Over the summer, we received an “AI Pilot Project” grant from our university (much gratitude to The University of Oklahoma!) to develop instructional resources that faculty from across our campus could use with their students. We created a set of technoskeptical inquiries into generative AI technologies that university students are likely to encounter (e.g., Grammarly, various chatbots, Deep Research), and that instructors could readily adapt to their disciplines and contexts. Our goal was to create lessons (and supporting materials) that instructors would find accessible and relevant, and that would encourage thoughtful conversations and reflective practices.

We are in the process of disseminating these materials on our campus, but want to share them here as well. If you have colleagues that you think would find these useful, please pass them along!

You can access all of the materials in this Google Drive Folder (we’ve also added a link on our curriculum page). The best place to start is with the Overview & Introduction document, which lays out our approach and foundational principles.

We welcome comments, feedback, and suggestions!

Hopefully these resources will help move conversations beyond compliance/surveillance on the one hand and hype on the other.