Bowen, José Antonio, and C. Edward Watson. 2024. Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Bowen and Watson’s work has the mixed blessing of being a first attempt to explore an emerging field. These initial works have the opportunity to suggest some of the things that are important to think about, but also the responsibility to do a good deal of explanation within the domain. The authors foreground the rapid expansion of AI into multiple areas of human life and work, arguing that academia has both an opportunity and an obligation to consider this rapidly evolving technology. The book’s 12 chapters cover everything from basic definitions to specific applications. 

It’s appropriate and necessary to elucidate the concepts of AI to support the book, and the authors devote the first two chapters to explaining both the technology and the industry. Readers who don’t really have a background in computing or technology may struggle here. The many approaches to training academics and to inquiry within the disciplines make it difficult to write explanations that will satisfy all, and some faculty may find the initial chapters too complicated and others too basic. Although the authors spend part of a chapter identifying the industry players who were creating AI implementations at the time of publishing, those players are rapidly evolving. It would have been helpful to spend time on how to better follow or understand this changing industry. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of the book was the section on creativity. There’s a lot of chatter from academics on social media about how AI-produced documents sometimes seem to be well-done expression of banal or even vacuous thoughts. The authors argue that AI systems can actually enhance creativity because they aren’t bound by human judgment issues such as anchoring and adjusting that can cause people to stop considering the best ideas. As they do throughout the book, the authors suggest some specific prompts here that might be useful for students and faculty in ideation with AI. 

With AI turns out to be central to the book. The authors return several times to the idea that students and faculty can become intentional partners with generative technologies in ways that can make tasks faster and, in some cases, better. They also spend quite a bit of time on the difficulties of assessing this kind of human-machine partnership. Ultimately, they suggest that evaluating the process needs to be central in any kind of assessment of student work, and they provide ideas for developing rubrics that foreground that process. They suggest that students be required to submit transcripts of their sessions with AI as a part of the writing process. 

Breaking new ground, as this book attempts to do, is a difficult task and foresight is easier than hindsight. The authors had only a small amount of previous work to use in building their arguments. The pace of AI tool and application development means that some references to specific tools and attributes are already outdated. And the authors deliberately pay little attention to ethical and equity considerations, which they explain in the introduction. Regardless, this may disappoint readers looking for a more critical examination of these crucial aspects.

Overall, the book does a good job of providing some food for thought about different issues that these technologies will bring up as industry and society jump into experimentation and expectation while academia’s preference for thoughtful exploration pulls back. It would be a good option for centers for teaching and learning to use with faculty communities of practice or book clubs.

About the Author

Amanda Sturgill, Associate Professor of Journalism at Elon University, is the 2024-2026 CEL Scholar, focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and engaged learning in higher education. Connect with her at asturgil@elon.edu.

How to Cite this Post

Sturgill, Amanda. 2024. “Book Review: Teaching with AI.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. September 19, 2024. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/book-review-teaching-with-ai/.