Awardee: Kathleen Hart
Semester of Award: Uncategorized
Materials Awarded: Temporary access to ChatGPTPlus and PerplexityPro
Project Description:
I evaluated the respective capabilities of ChatGPTPlus and PerplexityPro, in order to 1) develop strategies for using AI assistants to help cultivate student interpretive, critical thinking, translation and verbal skills, and 2) devise more self-exploratory and perspective-sharing activities that preserve the quest for understanding oneself and others so crucial to a liberal arts education. I redesigned the departmental senior translation and first-year writing seminars to emphasize human competencies while showing how AI can supplement learning. Some of that learning is about AI itself: students critique as well as report on what they learned from AI-generated translations. Eventually I determined that Gemini could satisfactorily serve these pedagogical goals while ensuring equal access and data protection. Without replacing professors or person-to-person interaction, AI assistants offer new opportunities for practice. After trying out custom chatbot tutors created with ChatGPT and Perplexity, I created French and English chatbot tutors with Gemini. Chatbot tutors refuse to correct work or supply answers but as students observed, they can be inefficient. I am now experimenting further to determine whether it is better to arm students with a set of strategies for appropriately soliciting input from Gemini directly.
