Narrating a research journey

While we were teaching... lots of questions writing instruction, especially in digital environments.

As I always say, I'm not playing cops and robbers with my students, but we have to be responsible; we have to keep sharpening the way we approach writing assignments. Much like we always should be doing, we've got to use common sense to help students do their best work. AI is just the latest temptation for them not to do so.

Sources are an issue. Since search engines have evolved, there has always been an opportunity for students to come up with wild sources: Where did some of these things come from? 

Aside from the well-established "hallucination" issues that come up when we use AI as a research tool--and remember, that type of search is not what LLMs are primarily designed for or good at--it can also dig up/create material from who knows where.

A way to help combat this is a twist on the annotated bibliography: Ask students, using plain language and perhaps images, to narrate the research path they've taken. I'll frame it like this for students:

Tell me for each source in your bibliography/references/works cited:

1. What tools or apps you used for the search, or, alternatively, who you talked to.
2. What prompts you used to generate your references: Reproduce them verbatim.
3. How much did you each resource when choosing to add it to your resource list?
• This is a shame-free zone: Did you read the abstract? Glance through it for a key word, author, or quote? 
• Reflect on what you did: This will be of interest not just to me but I imagine to you as well.
4. How did you extract information into your project?
• Did you use quotes, paraphrased material, data? 
5. How did you create the citation?

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, and this is not necessarily something you would use only in OWCs, but because of the text-heavy environment of the OWC, a "research narrative" might be particularly useful there.

On the novelty scale, this approach is pretty tame, but it provides--in what I would argue is a constructive, reflective way--an overt learning strategy for students to describe how they are interacting with AI and search tools to generate the sources and knowledge that form the basis for much of their writing projects.