By: Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter
“Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a survey of forms of alternative scholarly communication—such as comics, GIFs, maps, games, and generative AI—and a pattern book, where patterns serve as starting points that makers can reimagine and remix. Firmly grounded in the humanities and utilizing free tools and platforms (including Twine, Voyant, and Tracery) wherever possible, this engaging and accessible guide to digital methods introduces and puts into practice concepts that are essential to preparing students to navigate a changing landscape of media and information without investing in proprietary software, dedicated lab space, or expensive creative tools.”
“Despite current limitations in the technology outlined by these assignments, it is reasonable to predict that AI capabilities will only improve, certainly in their ability to produce the assignments for our courses, given that we require our students to post their work on their own digital portfolios (only a few choose to password-protect their sites),
providing AI trainers access to more and more online samples from
these and similar courses. These technologies, like others in the past,
push us as faculty to reimagine our approaches to teaching and learning, especially surrounding text-based assignments, as we mentioned
in the introduction. In our Playful Pedagogy book (Johnson and
Salter), we called on faculty to use the chaotic “pivots” of the pandemic
as an impetus to pause and meaningfully reflect on our pedagogical
choices. With AI, we have yet another opportunity to reconsider the
learning intent for each of our assignments. Perhaps we will finally
reach a point of educational disruption like those promised with the
computer and internet.”
