March 15, 2023
Educators and researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst have released a free, open-access, online ebook to help use AI tools, such a ChatGPT, to teach and learn critical analysis. In their free ebook, Critical Media Literacy and Civic Learning, they offer several tips for using such tools to teach critical media literacy, including in civics or history where students can read political statements from politicians and advocacy groups and compare them to AI-generated statements.
To help students develop their critical media skills in the era of AI writing tools, the researchers have developed a series of critical media literacy guides to accompany the open-access ebook. The Teacher and Student Guide to Analyzing AI Writing Tools (like ChatGPt) resource features prompts that ask students to investigate both the AI writing tool (for example: Who owns the tool? Who designed the tool? Why was it made? How does it make money?) and the text it produces (for example: How well does the text mimic human writing? How is information presented? How credible and reliable is the information?). These questions and more focus students’ attention on both the content of the information and the system that is generating it. Using such tools as a starting point, teachers can design learning activities where students critically interrogate pieces of ChatGPT-generated text.