The Question Economy

So, nowadays, it's tough to come up with an original start when writing about AI and writing instruction. It's all, "As we know, doom, gloom..." etc. And if you don't face the woe from the go, you can easily be accused of being so tech bro.

Clear challenges lie in front of us, especially those of us who teach in online spaces, particularly asynchronous online spaces. Students can use AI in egregious ways to cheat and create inauthentic work in most disciplinary areas and most assessment modalities, e.g., computer coding, math problems, written essays. As has been well documented, AI can complete some entire courses.

People want to give up! I get it, but I still believe there is plenty for students learn, and that of course means there is plenty for us to teach. As I look at incorporating AI into my instruction, critical thinking just pops to the top. What could be more cliche? But in the face of AI, especially those of us who've taught for years with digital tools in general and online specifically, there is opportunity in front of us because of the core of our pedagogy.

Lately, I've been trying to articulate this as "The Question Economy": Framing students' educational experiences explicitly around deep, recursive questioning and inquiry. Of course, versions of critical thinking and questions are what we have done for a long time, all the way back to Socrates through Freirean "critical pedagogy," about which Gerald Graff says "answers the needs of general education by providing access to the unified cultural tradition that was felt to be latent in the great literary texts beneath or above the merely fragmentary and incoherent flux of history and historical knowledge" (1).

With this idea of The Question Economy, I'm saying that we can re-organize (and maybe re-brand) what we're doing as helping students unite into active, critical learning environments, where, in direct response to AI, they are relentlessly, incessantly asking questions, especially in writing and, more broadly, humanities classrooms. 

The Question Economy is not only about questioning each other and our shared texts but learning to work rhetorically with AI agents. Students as writers must learn to interact with the machine in ways not thought of even five years ago, and I'm suggesting by taking this head-on we are not teaching them to prompt themselves out of jobs but instead learn how they will use these knowledge tools to work more provocatively--and excitingly--on bigger problems. The calculator is a classic but still good example of this, as, in many ways, is the word processor: Tools that moved us past fundamental processes into more more complex problem-solving.

In The Question Economy, students refine their critical thinking skills through a curriculum that discourages academic/intellectual passivity. Richard Feynman said “there is a difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something" and discussed "the pleasure of finding things out" (2). Prompting with/to the machine is a way to valorize the knowledge search, helping students to learn to ask the right questions, the appropriate questions as they travel on their thinking/intellectual journey and to maintain--find? secure?--a humanistic place in time of AI.

Notes 

1) Graff, Professing Literature, p. 163.

 2) Feynman interview: https://videos.cern.ch/record/1055846.