ASSESSING WRITING IN AN AL WORLD

 There will be huge challenges for authentication and assessment in a competitive education system. This could usher in a new era of education with a strengthened focus on learning, responsive to the real-world and future-focused needs of students. Or it could create a renewed and intensified emphasis on tightly prescribed, unseen, handwritten, and exam assessed writing tasks that reject the possibilities of working collaboratively with AI. If it is the latter, schooling will become even more divorced from the real world and from the working futures and citizenship commitments of students.

AI has exciting potential for idea generation, for research, for stunning efficiencies, for making ideas available to diverse audiences in diverse forms and for augmenting human capacities at almost every stage of the writing process. This goes way beyond archaic notions of ‘cheating’, to a posthuman future in which machines and humans merge in writing assemblages. If we try to insulate schools and writing programs from AI, we are likely to be denying students a meaningful education. And if education does invest in AI, it will be essential to ensure that all students have fair and equitable access to its exciting potentials, as further services with inevitable costs become available.