Policies

• Attendance
• Children in Class
• Inclusion and Access
  • Disability Services
• Title IX and Mandatory Reporting
• Academic Integrity
  • Avoiding Plagiarism
• On Artificial Intelligence
• Feedback, Assessment, and Grades

Attendance

This class meets only once a week, and at least one of those weeks will fall on a holiday, when we will not meet as a group at all. In a small seminar such as this one, the loss of even a single member of the class can have a major impact on the work we’re able to do and the insights we’re able to reach. I therefore expect everyone to be present whenever class is in session.

That said, I know life is complex, and we have a lot going on – including conferences, illnesses, families, and other legitimate claims on our time and energy. If you know in advance that you will not be able to attend, please let me know and we can try to arrange an alternative form of participation. If you must be absent unexpectedly, please try to reach out to me and your classmates as soon as you’re able. It won’t be the same as if you were here, but something may yet be gleaned as we try to catch you up.

Children in Class

Along those lines, I know that sometimes childcare becomes unavailable at the last minute. Children are welcome in this class when your role as a caregiver overlaps with your role as a student. While this is not meant to be a long-term childcare solution, occasionally bringing a child to class in order to cover gaps in care is perfectly acceptable. I ask that you sit close to the door so that if your little one needs special attention and is disrupting learning for other students, you may step outside until their need has been met. Depending on the child, you may also wish to bring supplies to keep them entertained while we work.

If a child is sick, however, please do not bring them to class—instead, please contact me directly about alternative arrangements such as videoconferencing or visiting office hours.

If you have any other parenting or caregiving needs, please feel free to approach me so that we can work together towards a solution. While I maintain the same high expectations for all students regardless of caregiving status, I am happy to problem solve with you in a way that makes you feel supported as you strive for school-parenting balance.

Inclusion and Access

I strive to set you up for success. If there are circumstances that may affect your performance in this class, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work together to develop strategies for succeeding, which might include adapting assignments to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course.

I ask everyone in the class to help ensure that we can all learn in a supportive and respectful environment, including by using gender-inclusive language.

Disability Services

If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both me and the Office of Disability Resources and Services, 140 William Pitt Union, 412-648-7890 / drsrecep@pitt.edu / (412) 228-5347 for P3 ASL users, as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and help determine reasonable accommodations for this course. For more information, visit www.wellbeing.pitt.edu/disability-access-accommodations.

For my part, I will work to ensure multiple ways of accessing class materials, including written lesson plans in screen-reader compliant html, alternative text for images, and transcriptions for recorded videos. Because proofreading the latter can be particularly time-consuming, I ask that you please let me know early in the semester if you will be relying primarily on transcriptions to access the videos your classmates will produce: I can introduce digital tools like otter.ai and rev.com that may help with the first draft.

Email

While we’re on the subject of email, I am obligated to include the standard statement on using your University-issued email address:

Title IX and Mandatory Reporting

The University is committed to combatting sexual misconduct. As a result, University faculty and staff members are required to report any instances of sexual misconduct – including harassment and sexual violence – to the University’ s Title IX office, both so that the victim may be provided appropriate resources/support options and so that the office can attempt to keep track of repeat offenders or other patterns of behavior on or around campus.

What this means is that as your instructor, I am required to report any incidents of sexual misconduct that are directly reported to me, or of which I am somehow made aware.

There are two important exceptions: a list of the designated University employees who, as counselors and medical professionals, do not have this reporting responsibility and can maintain confidentiality, can be found at www.titleix.pitt.edu/report/confidentiality. An important exemption to the reporting requirement exists for academic work: disclosures about sexual misconduct that are shared as part of an academic project, classroom discussion, or course assignment are not required to be disclosed to the University’ s Title IX office.

If you are the victim of sexual misconduct, I encourage you to reach out to these resources:

• Title IX Office: 412-648-7860 (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. M–F) or via Pitt Concern Connection
• The University Counseling Center can be reached at 412-648-7930 (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. M–F) and 412-648-7856 (after business hours). They also have additional resources at www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/counseling/get-help-now.
• Pittsburgh Action Against Rape (PAAR; community resource): 1-866-363-7273 (all hours and days)

If you have an immediate safety concern, please contact the University of Pittsburgh Police at 412-624-2121 or dial 911.

If you come to talk to me and I feel like it might be something I am required to report, I will say, “I am happy to listen and support you, but this discussion might fall under mandated reporting. Is that okay?’ The Title IX office aims to be very nice and, even if I report something you discussed with me as required, Title IX cannot force you to do anything. They will ask to talk with you, then they will present you with options: one will be to report behavior experienced against you; one will be to request through the University to keep said person who committed that behavior far away from you; and one will be to do nothing. They will also most likely inform you of our on-campus therapists’ office.

Academic Integrity

Students in this course will be expected to comply with the University of Pittsburgh’s Policy on Academic Integrity. Any student suspected of violating this obligation for any reason during the semester will be required to participate in the procedural process, initiated at the instructor level, as outlined in the University Guidelines on Academic Integrity. This may include, but is not limited to, the confiscation of the examination of any individual suspected of violating University Policy. Furthermore, no student may bring any unauthorized materials to an exam, including dictionaries and programmable calculators.

To learn more about Academic Integrity, visit the Academic Integrity Guide for an overview of the topic. For hands- on practice, complete the Academic Integrity Modules.

Avoiding Plagiarism

This is a collaborative class, in which we offer each other suggestions and constructive criticism. However, the goal of all this collaboration is to clarify the expression of original ideas – never to substitute someone else’s ideas for our own, or to impose our ideas on someone else.

To misrepresent the origins of an idea is plagiarism, and it is a problem both for your own learning and for the well-being of the community, which depends on mutual trust.

If you want to incorporate materials that others have created, you can do so if you give credit to your source. At a minimum, readers of your work should be able to get back to the original, so be sure to provide at least the author’s identity; the original title; the publication venue; the date of publication and/or access; and a URL if appropriate. The English department has some useful resources at www.english.pitt.edu/undergraduate/plagiarism.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask, because Pitt takes a very hard stance on plagiarism. It could get you expelled. Here’s an excerpt from the official Policy on Academic Integrity, to give you the flavor:

A student has an obligation to exhibit honesty and to respect the ethical standards of the profession in carrying out his or her academic assignments. Without limiting the application of this principle, a student may be found to have violated this obligation if he or she: […]

8. Depends on the aid of others in a manner expressly prohibited by the faculty member, in the research, preparation, creation, writing, performing, or publication of work to be submitted for academic credit or evaluation.
9. Provides aid to another person, knowing such aid is expressly prohibited by the faculty member, in the research, preparation, creation, writing, performing, or publication of work to be submitted for academic credit or evaluation.
10. Presents as one's own, for academic evaluation, the ideas, representations, or words of another person or persons without customary and proper acknowledgment of sources.
11. Submits the work of another person in a manner which represents the work to be one's own.
12. Knowingly permits one's work to be submitted by another person without the faculty member's authorization.

You have the right to a fair hearing, and I’ll talk to you before I talk to anyone else, but it’s far easier just to avoid plagiarism in the first place. All clear cases of deliberate plagiarism will be referred to the appropriate Dean for disciplinary action, including an Academic Integrity Board hearing. For the University’s full policy on Academic Integrity and the adjudication process for infringements, including plagiarism, go to https://www.provost.pitt.edu/academic-integrity-guidelines.

On Artificial Intelligence

In this class, you are responsible for the integrity and accuracy of anything you turn in; if you draw on an outside source, I expect you to provide a citation that would allow me and other readers to return to that source and understand its context. Note that so far, I haven’t said anything specific to AI: this is just a standard statement about academic honesty and courtesy.

In the case of a generative AI, including both large language models (LLMs) like GPT/ChatGPT, BERT, or Sudowrite and image generators like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E, an element of randomness means we can’t go back directly to the original and see the same thing you saw. Even so, the knowledge that you consulted such a model as part of your process adds important context to your work, much as a citation does, and our understanding of that context is further improved if you can share the prompt you submitted. (In some cases, it may even make sense to save the transcript, e.g. to make it available as an appendix or upon request.)

I do not believe LLMs spell the end of writing as part of education – for one thing, the epistemic process of trying to figure out what you mean by trying to put it in language is often the greatest benefit of writing in the first place (see Perl; Vee), and LLMs’ outputs aren’t designed for that kind of learning. Working to find the right prompt, though, has some potential for writing-to-learn, and so does figuring out what doesn’t work for you in an LLM-generated response. These are still early days, and AI-assisted writing isn’t going away; rather, how to learn and teach writing alongside AI is an open question that I’m genuinely curious about.

Therefore, I will allow AI-assisted submissions in this class, provided that you agree to the following:

1. Along with your submission, you will acknowledge and name the AI tool you used, and describe what you used it for. If you are copying text or an image directly from the model’s output, include the text of your prompt in an appendix or footnote.

2. Whenever possible, you will avoid the temptation to accept a single default output, instead requesting multiple responses from the model and selecting or remixing among them. This will require you to draw on your own discernment and allow you to write reflectively about your choices.

3. You must recognize that LLMs are not search engines: they hallucinate and fabricate citation-like structures without regard to their actual existence – even when they come attached to hyperlinks. Any references, as well as article or book summaries, should be checked for accuracy.

4. The work you submit is ultimately your responsibility, and should serve your goals in light of your understanding of your task and your audience. Therefore, you should review and edit any AI-generated output to ensure you feel satisfied that it represents your views, your voice, and your learning goals.

I’m also happy to talk more about any of this!

Feedback, Assessment, and Grades

Adapted from Alison Langmead’s 2022 fall syllabus for DSAM 3000.

As composition theorist Peter Elbow has written in a number of places (see especially his “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking”), grades are a surprisingly crude way of measuring or producing learning: they reduce complex phenomena to a single letter or number, and thus obscure the differences between, say, public speaking skills and ability to support an argument. Some teachers might try to get around this by assigning percentages of their grades to particular skill-sets, but I find I can’t know, in advance, what any one of you will need to work on: I want us to be free to give more targeted feedback, and set more targeted goals, than any pre-set percentage allows us to do. As I see it, each of you is here to do more than you could before, not be better than anyone else. Grades distract from that, and distract from the particular reactions and suggestions that can help you improve and grow.

Assessment, though, is more than grading. Throughout the semester, you will be assessing your own work, through your Mindful Practice Journals and reflections on what you were aiming for and what you achieved; you will be offering feedback to each other at presentation time and in conversation; and I will be offering my own formative guidance, based on years in the profession, as you iteratively develop your projects. In short, you will have plentiful moments of evaluation, even as you will not have specific grades ranking your success on any particular assignment against some putative norm.

Nevertheless, at the end of the term, I will be required to submit letter grades to the Registrar. Instead of a fixed rubric or calculation, these final grades will be based on meeting certain shared specifications, which we can discuss and refine together: a first draft is below. In brief, though, to the extent you can point to evidence of course engagement and learning, you can succeed in this class, regardless of where your project stands in the grand scheme of projects.

I am more than happy to talk through what it means to produce this kind of self-assessment, with each of you individually or together as a group, but at the heart of it is a reflection that looks both forward (what do I want to achieve?) and backward (what have I achieved?), recursively.

One set of goals can come from me, in that I have requested specific types of course engagement and deliverables from you. These have all been chosen to guide you through a process of learning what it means to use digital computers mindfully in the context of the humanities and allied social sciences. In a way, my work-requests aspire to be tools for learning in and of themselves, and can serve as signposts of worthwhile engagement. I have offered some metacognitive questions below to help you think through how the work of this course forms a coherent pedagogical point of view and set of structures for you to inhabit.

You can be confident that you are successfully engaging with this seminar by:

• Contributing respectfully to our weekly topical conversations, whether in class or online.
  • Consider: What is the purpose of seminar conversation? How do we learn from it? How do we balance speaking up, sitting back, branching out, and listening in, to produce the most effective learning environment for ourselves and others?
• Completing the project iterations as described in the course plan, and on the schedule recommended.
  • Consider: Why is iteration important? Why is the schedule important? How can I be not answering my question and nevertheless succeeding in the context of this seminar?
• Offering a content-rich, public-facing project site that you are proud to share with others.
  • Consider: Why pride? Why do we share our findings publicly at this point in our (different) careers?
• Offering cogent and professional presentations that stay within the requested time limit.
  • Consider: Why is presentation to peers important? Why is the time limit important?
• Writing two peer evaluations after each iteration is due, reflecting back what you notice and what you wonder about your peers’ projects.
  • Consider: Why are these evaluations requested on top of in-class discussion? How can I help someone else improve if I am still unsure of what I am doing? How can evaluating someone else’s work help me improve?
• Working at least 2-4 hours on your project every week, and documenting this effort in your Mindful Practice Journal.
  • Consider: Why is consistency important? Why is documentation important? Why is so much self-reflection a part of this seminar?

You will almost assuredly have other goals of your own! To the extent that these goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, you will have an easier time of articulating just how far you’ve come; but some immeasurable things are also very much worth pursuing, so feel free to name some of those, too.

We’ll talk more about how I’ll read your final reflections as we get closer to the end of the term. For now, just keep taking notes on your goals and your progress in your Mindful Practice Journals, so you’re more likely to have evidence to draw from.