Abstract
The ongoing literacy crisis, beginning with the trivium’s traditional literacy skills (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), is receiving renewed attention in a time of coexistence of print, digital, and AI- generated textuality. Students’ abilities to assess of a speaker’s authority, appeal efficacy, and a composition’s intention occurs in a situation in which they might struggle to navigate the imitation game. Pedagogs assume these abilities are a matter of rhetorical acumen; with proper training, offered by Liberal Arts curricula, one can be equipped to distinguish among them. But what happens when textual artifacts are (human- or machine-authored) born-digital? Do the same literacy skills apply? Can we use e-literary texts to heuristically investigate future scenarios? Our study proposes to test the actual efficacy of students navigating the imitation game in two settings: (a) print and (b) born-digital textuality. Currently, students from five CSUN classes in English, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Sustainability have been asked to perform a guided rhetorical analysis of paired examples of human-authored and AI-based texts. Sample texts include traditional essays, narratives and poems paired with AI-generated counterparts and born-digital pieces of electronic literature paired with machine-generated equivalents (for which AI’s generated scripts determine the aesthetic/compositional procedure). We hope this study’s results both anticipate the skills that any literate subject will need in this new media landscape and perceive a glimpse of the emerging skills that any citizen of our electrate society is expected to develop while speculating on whether appropriate new training might be possible at this time.
Presenters
Sean PessinStudent, Ph.D. in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States Mauro Carassai
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies and Liberal Studies, California State University Northridge, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Considering Digital Pedagogies
KEYWORDS
Generative AI, Pedagogy, Higher Education, Literacy, Electracy, Skills Transfer
