| Class | Semester | Instructor | Department | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21st Century Feelings | Spring 2026 | Alfred E. Guy Jr. | English, Humanities, Poorvu Center | None |
Learning Objectives
- Some new ideas and challenges to their ideas from a chatbot that has the readings
- More grounded sense of the difference between human and AI feedback
- Some soft polling about what students experience when engaging AIs about writing
Overview
Students gave a completed essay to a chatbot, engaged it for 10 minutes, and then wrote a reflection on the experience. The download gives the system prompt I used to direct the chatbot’s responses. What follows here is the prompt to students for writing their reflection afterwards:
In 300 or so words, reflect on the experience of working with Boodlebot to think more about your essay. Any thoughtful reflections are welcome, positive or negative. Please comment on how it felt, and feel free to comment on affect training: how the language or the exchange seems to work on you at the level below conscious feeling or thought. I have three specific suggestions below, but please don’t feel bound by these and certainly include any other themes or approaches that capture what this was like for you. Please do not copy/paste or try to type out anything directly from the chat into your reflection—your impressions and synthesis are what’s valuable in this assignment.
Identify one moment in your conversation with the bot where your thinking shifted—where you saw your argument differently, or where a new question emerged. Describe what changed and whether this shift felt like an enhancement of your ideas or something else. What questions does this leave you with?
Reflect on the intellectual “space” of this conversation. Where did the bot’s questions or language give you more room to think, and where (if anywhere) did you feel crowded or constrained by its framing?
Do you feel more interested in the topic of your essay, more like you would want to keep thinking about it? Or was there something exhausting in the process?
***After you’ve written your reflection, but before you submit your assignment, please copy and paste the entire chat into your text. As I will discuss in class, I will not be reading or evaluating your individual session. But I am going to ask Boodlebox to look at the batch of chats and make suggestions about how I should retrain the bot for next time. Thank you for handling this irony!
Reflections
About 1/2 the student reflections were somewhat negative. Some of these were explicitly philosophical, others implicitly so (complaints about the bot’s tone). Of the positive 1/2, 1/2 of those described rich engagements that I think match my own experience of chatbots at their best. I used the feedback to revise the bot instructions and will be doing a second round of these engagements next week, after I’ve returned their second essays. I liked learning from students what they think of the potential role of AIs in their writing process, and I liked seeing that some students found the bot’s directness helpful. They singled out the prompt: “What is the strongest objection to my paper?” as particularly rich.
Tools
Boodlebox (see “AI Tools”)
Readings and Resources
The custom bot had the instructions I already attached and it also had pdfs of four secondary sources (all essays of critical theory) that students were eligible to use in their essays.