Work enhancement:

I am going to go ahead and be completely honest in this assessment. I found the amount of time researching articles, reading the articles and then putting together a somewhat coherent 3500 word essay in about a two week timespan to be a pretty awful experience. Since these are my last classes, I forged ahead knowing that graduation would only be six weeks away. I knew that the paper I wrote would not be nearly the quality that I would expect of myself. Which clearly left plenty of room for feedback and revision! I took revisions that I felt were the most glaringly obvious ways to improve my paper and worked on those. This included a lot of helping the paper try to flow better, better explaining the connection to educational theory and readings from the class.

3 specific examples from peer review: I was not aware that my personal experience was something that should be included throughout the paper, so I made sure to include that not just in the beginning of the paper but all throughout. Second, my citations and use of APA format was scattered and quite incomplete, so I made sure to focus on that. Last, there were multiple examples of language used that my peer reviewers found to be difficult to follow, so I worked on making sure that they flowed better and were easier to understand.

3 specific examples from AI review:

There were some areas where I did not do well going more into a study’s findings or did poorly explaining it, so I focused on that. Second, I worked on expanding a little bit on the section about what educators can do in the classroom, focusing on Alt’s study about more student centered learning processes and looking at media literacy a little bit more. Third, I worked on expanding the conclusion to do a better job of summarizing the paper.

Knowledge gain:

If I were to be completely honest, I do not think that I would say that the review and revision process was very helpful to me, at least in the sense that it is intended to be. I see the importance of it and can appreciate it but in such a limited amount of time and with the amount of time that I spent researching and writing my paper, my focus was more on doing the amount needed to turn in a product that would get me to a 70 in the class as opposed to looking for knowledge gain. I think if I had more time than the 2-3 hours I averaged daily working on this class, I could have focused more on knowledge gain but I did not have that in me.

AI and peer/human review reflection:

As mentioned above, in the last remaining weeks of class after I had finished the rough draft, my goal was to focus more on revisions needed in order to submit what would get me to the 70 threshold and earn a B. While I found the review process to be tedious, I very much see the value in it, as it forces reviewers to focus on very specific areas and make comments. I found the peer reviews to be much more helpful because they are coming from a place of care and concern. The ability to read in context and suggest meaningful ways to make an improvement so that the average reader can better follow the paper was noticeable. While I preferred the peer reviews, I was actually very surprised at the depth and complexity that the AI review was able to give. There were many great suggestions but I felt that using all of those suggestions would be better for a doctoral dissertation, where it’s literally years of culminating work versus a six week class. I could spend untold hours trying to make the changes AI recommends. I also found some of the recommendations to be contradictory of recommendations AI made in other places.

AI competence reflection:

Overall, I do not think that I feel any more or less comfortable using AI tools. The AI review process was definitely something that “wowed” me in the sense that it could provide the depth and breadth that it did. As I mentioned above, I did feel that there were times that the AI review could contradict itself or be pretty nit-picky but it definitely made me see the promise of AI. I very much feel that even though I may not be any more comfortable using AI tools, I am definitely less judgmental about their potential uses in meaningful ways.

Creating the AI image was pretty much about what I expected. It may not be entirely fair, as I used a free software tool (Pixlr) that was limiting in its ability but I found the process to be pretty generic. I think perhaps that with future use, I would become better about prompts, as there are clearly some really great AI images out there (for better or worse).

I do not see myself going out of my way to use AI tools in the future, as I do not see my profession of a high school social worker as being one that I would trust to ensure AI could write good treatment plans. Perhaps that is more of an old school approach because that is what I am used to but at the end of the day, I trust the personal judgments I make over something created by artificial intelligence.

References:

Abi-Jaoude, E., Naylor, K. T., & Pignatiello, A. (2020). Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 192(6), E136–E141. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.190434

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Alt, D. (2017). Students’ social media engagement and fear of missing out (FoMO) in a diverse classroom. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 29(2), 388–410. “Follow Me and Like My Beautiful Selfies”: Social Media Use and Adolescent Mental Health. (2022). In Center for Public Education.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-017-9149-x