AI Use Guidelines – Capricious Connections

For every class, I create a page in Canvas called “AI Use Guidelines”. It changes a bit as we learn more, but here is the current version.

You are encouraged to use AI in this course. But:

Think carefully about how you use AI–review this blog post to help you think through what is appropriate for your learning.

Purposefully: Use AI for a specific task or purpose (start with a goal)
Mindfully: Practice critical thinking, skepticism, and reflection on both its responses and your thoughts and feelings
Socially: Discuss your AI use with others (online or in person), including your observations on how it responds
Creatively: Try out new ideas and approaches, don’t be afraid to play!

Ethan Mollick provides a good overview of prompt writing here: Working with AI: Two paths to prompting – by Ethan Mollick.
When you write a prompt, assign the chatbot a role. For example, you might say “You are a creative instructional designer who is an expert at creating effective, accessible, and student-centered learning environments.” This will key the chatbot into the language it should use in its response.
Some research is showing that emphasizing the importance of your project results in better outcomes. Emphasize your desires with emotional words, such as “It is very important to me that students feel accepted and safe in the course.”
Part of using GenAI successfully comes from clarifying your own thinking, including what your goals are. You can use chatbots to help you clarify what you want, but stay focused on your goals and intention and don’t let it pull you in a direction you don’t want to go.
If you are struggling with writing a prompt that will get the response you want, you can always try asking the chatbot to write a prompt for you—ask “What prompt could I use to get you to do…” You can also try the prompt creator prompt given here.
Role-play with AI! Ask it to take on the role of a student and then ask it questions, feedback, reactions, etc. Sometimes this takes some prompt refinement to get it to stay in the student role; ask it to help you create and refine a prompt that will work.