Unfinished Thoughts
Field Notes from the Front Lines in the AI Era
As a community college writing instructor and English department chair at Ventura College, I've witnessed over three decades of technological evolution in writing instruction. Since 1991, I've seen waves of digital tools reshape how we teach writing: spell-check transformed basic editing, Wikipedia disrupted research practices, Turnitin.com changed how we discuss academic integrity, and Grammarly introduced AI-powered writing assistance. Each innovation brought both promise and concern to the writing classroom.
In 1999, I taught my first fully online writing course. The tools were basic—clunky discussion boards, limited collaboration features—but even then, technology was reshaping writing instruction in fundamental ways. Each new tool required us to rethink our approaches, adapt our methods, and help students navigate an increasingly digital writing landscape.
But the shift brought by today's generative AI tools like ChatGPT represents something fundamentally different—a deeper, more radical transformation of writing itself. I saw this coming in October 2022, when I emailed my department about AI tools that could produce near-college-level writing. A month later, ChatGPT launched, and what had been a theoretical concern became an urgent reality. This isn't just another technological innovation in the classroom; it's a fundamental reimagining of what it means to write. As Andrea Lunsford notes, writing instructors must be at the forefront of grappling with these changes.
Why Field Notes?
This Substack will be my research notebook, capturing observations and insights as they emerge. Field notes are inherently tentative—they document thoughts in progress, record unexpected discoveries, and raise new questions. They're meant to be immediate rather than polished, exploratory rather than conclusive.
I'll admit: this format makes me somewhat uncomfortable. In English departments, we're trained to present only polished, perfected work. We read carefully crafted papers at conferences. We publish meticulously revised articles. The idea of sharing rough drafts of thinking feels foreign, even risky.
What I want to do instead is track my thinking in all its incompleteness, imperfection, and changeability. The landscape of AI and writing is shifting so rapidly that waiting for perfect answers means always being three steps behind. These posts will be my field notes from the front lines—immediate, unpolished, and evolving. I'm inviting you into my thinking process as it unfolds, with all its uncertainties and revisions.
Starting Points
Here's what I know so far: AI will be woven into the fabric of how our students write and think—not just as a tool they might pick up, but as an active participant in their writing process. Whether we embrace this reality or resist it, our students will engage with AI in complex ways as they write, research, and learn. Rather than taking a defensive stance, I'm curious about how we might thoughtfully explore this new relationship between human writers and artificial intelligence.
In a 2021 interview with Ezra Klein, Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind, offered a particularly relevant insight: "[T]hinking better is not about working the brain ever harder. It's about creating a space and a set of capacities wherein you have more and better resources from which to assemble your thought processes." Perhaps AI offers us exactly this—not a replacement for human thinking but an expansion of our cognitive resources.
Here's another core premise of this project: AI's ability to generate polished, near-perfect writing creates an unprecedented opportunity to do what writing teachers have long advocated: truly prioritize process over product. When AI can quickly produce a seemingly finished piece, we're compelled to dig deeper into the messy, human aspects of writing—the thinking, the revising, the questioning. We can let go of our fixation on the final product precisely because AI has made "perfect" prose accessible to everyone.
Some questions I'm exploring:
How might this shift away from polished products change how we teach writing?
What does responsible AI integration look like in writing instruction?
How can we teach students to think critically about AI while leveraging its capabilities?
What to Expect
Each post in this series will follow a consistent structure designed to balance theory with practical application:
Opening Reflection: I'll start with a story, observation, or question that sparked my thinking. These might come from classroom experiences, conversations with colleagues, or my own experiments with AI.
Current Exploration: You'll get a window into what I'm actively investigating - the questions I'm wrestling with and the ideas I'm testing.
Practical Application: Every post will include at least one concrete strategy or activity you can try in your own classroom. These won't just be theoretical - they'll be approaches I'm developing and refining for my return to teaching in fall 2025.
Reflections: I'll share honest thoughts about what worked, what didn't, and where I'm skeptical. This section will explore both benefits and challenges of each approach.
Collaboration: Each post will end with an invitation for you to share your experiences and insights. Your perspective matters, and I hope these posts spark rich discussions.
As an added resource, I'll create Canvas-ready activities that you can import directly into your courses. I hope these will evolve through our collective experimentation and feedback, creating a repository of AI-adjacent class assignments we can all draw from.
A Note About Process
In the spirit of transparency: I'm not just studying AI - I'm actively experimenting with it. These posts will be co-written with AI tools, much like I expect my students might work with them. Every idea and argument is shaped by my experience and judgment, but I'm open to AI as a collaborator in the writing process.
This approach makes me somewhat uncomfortable, but that's precisely why it feels necessary. How can I guide students in critically engaging with AI if I haven't wrestled with these questions myself?
I invite you to join me in this exploration. Your perspectives - whether you're a fellow educator, a student, or someone curious about the intersection of AI and writing - will enrich this conversation.
These field notes won't always be polished, but they will be honest. And perhaps in that honesty, we can find new ways forward in teaching writing in the AI era.
This post was created in collaboration with AI tools, reflecting my commitment to understanding both the potential and limitations of AI in writing instruction.
Looking forward to following along. As a lover of AI and pretty much all you mentioned - especially Wikipedia - I grapple with how to manage it. I just make sure that I don’t lose me - the way I write and talk - in the process.