Short Essay Assignments for How AI is Changing Higher Education

Aug 14, 2025

This is material related to my teaching about AI. For more, see AI Log teaches.

Short Essay Assignments for How AI is Changing Higher Education

Short Essay #1

Who is your guide?

In the section "Find your guides" on page 270 of More Than Words, John Warner writes about "outsourcing the keeping track" of developments related to generative AI to writers he has found online. The question of who your guides are when it comes to AI and higher education is something we'll talk and write about in class. In fact, identifying an online writer who will help you think about AI is the first major task you'll complete as part of this class.

For this assignment, write about someone who serves as your guide. This can be guide for using AI, but it can also be a guide to another aspect of your life. We cannot become expert in all things that are important to us. Our decisions about health, money, education—any important dimension of life—are complex, too complex for us to deeply research every question we might have.

The question is who is one of your guides and how did you choose them?

Write an essay of at least 700 words. The essay should be informal and conversational, like a blog post or a short talk to a group of friends. You can interpret the question as broadly or specifically as you like.

Short Essay #2

In your first essay, you wrote generally about guides. In this assignment, I invite you to writing about finding a specific guide in the sense John Warner writes about in "Find your guides" on page 270 of More Than Words. Choose one writer whose work helps you make sense of how AI is changing higher education, and write about what this person offers you, and potentially your classmates, in terms of expertise and insights. There are a lot of people out there writing about AI and education. What makes this writer valuable to you?

Short Essay #3

To complete this assignment, you must choose whether to write about how AI is changing writing in higher education by responding to More Than Words or by responding to AI Snake Oil.

Here is the prompt for the first option: More Than Words offers a view that "writing as thinking" and argues that we risk loosing something of great educational value if ChatGPT leads us to no longer write. On page 68, he considers that not everyone finds writing fulfilling and asks "What's wrong with others who do not enjoy this tedium finding relief in a tool" that does the work for them? Consider Warner's arguments for the educational value of writing. If you agree that writing is valuable, how does Warner's account help or hinder efforts to understand how AI is changing higher education. If you disagree with his premise, what are alternatives to Warner's approach to AI and writing that you find interesting or compelling?

Here is the prompt for the second option: AI Snake Oil presents a skeptical view of "predictive AI" as it is being used in a wide range of human activity including higher education. How should we respond to the failures of predictive AI as describe in the book? Specifically, is the idea of "embracing randomness" as described on pages 265-268 in admissions process a viable approach to addressing the problem? If not, what are some other approaches to limiting the harms or reforming higher education in light of AI's impact?

Write an essay of at least 1400 words. The essay should be informal and conversational, like a blog post or a short talk to a group of friends.

Short Essay #4

Write an essay of at least 700 words about what you think the most important issue or problem about how AI is changing higher education. You may treat this as a warm up for organizing into groups for the workshops, but it is also an opportunity for you to explore your ideas apart from that group work.

If you are not sure where to begin, think about the most important or interesting idea you found in More Than Words or AI Snake Oil. Write about why you think that idea is important or interesting.

The essay should be informal and conversational, like a blog post or a short talk to a group of friends. You can interpret the question as broadly or specifically as you like.

Short Essay #5

We have been thinking, talking, and writing about how AI is changing higher education. The important question is what do we do about it? Taking either or both of the concluding sections of More Than Words and AI Snake Oil as a starting place, write about how you think we—your classmates and your peers—should approach the work of shaping the use of AI in higher education.

This question is directly related to the next phase of the course, which is to develop and present a workshop for your classmates and peers guide their thinking about what is most important about how AI is changing education and how they might respond. You can interpret the question as broadly or specifically as you like, but think of this as how you might introduce the overall theme of the workshop or your group's topic at the workshop.

Write an essay of at least 1400 words. The essay should be informal and conversational, like a blog post or a short talk to a group of friends.

Short Essay #6

Write an essay of 1400 words reflecting about the experience of completing the workshop. How did the process of developing and presenting on the topic change how you understood it? What would you do differently if you had the chance to present it to a larger audience in January? How did the task of creating an educational chatbot change how you understand the value of educational chatbots.

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𝐀𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐠 speaks

I talk with people about what AI means for higher education. Find out more about these talks and how we might arrange one.