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Table of Contents
Why an AI Classroom Policy?
With large language models like ChatGPT playing a growing role in our lives, professors are trying to adapt and develop classroom policies for the acceptable use of AI in projects and assignments. While one approach is simply to ban the use of AI in student work, the practicality of policing A.I. is difficult and fraught with challenges. Professors have found themselves in an unwinnable cat and mouse game. But the game is shifting. In this post, I’ll share the AI classroom policy I implemented this semester to try and guide and manage student AI use opposed to banning it.
Teach ChatGPT and NotebookLM in a PR Writing Class Series—Post 2: Brainstorming
In this post, we will continue to explore the use of artificial intelligence LLMs (large language models) such as ChatGPT in a college promotional writing class. We will also explore Google’s AI-powered research tool, NotebookLM. We will look at ways in which A.I. can help with brainstorming ideas for a content marketing writing assignment (Did you miss the first post in this series using ChatGPT to assist with writing style and tone?).
Overview
I have a content marketing assignment in my Writing Across Platforms class that requires students, in part, to write a blog post inspired by a real local tourism business. The students are to imagine that they are writing for the business’ blog. The assignment requires students to research the business, its competitors, and its target audience. Students conduct SEO research as part of the assignment.
After reviewing the assignment, I show students the content themes that the blog’s content typically falls under, using real-world examples from other tourism blogs.
Students are then tasked with brainstorming topic ideas for the client’s blog in consideration of the information they have been provided. I find students often struggle with what to write about and how that might tie into SEO. I’ve started encouraging students to use LLMs like ChatGPT to assist in the brainstorming process.
Topic brainstorming with ChatGPT
One commonly suggested way to think of ideas to write about is to explore frequently asked questions. We may be able to address common questions people want answers to.
Topic brainstorming ChatGPT Prompts
Here are some starter prompts:
What are frequently asked questions about [Insert Topic]? Please give me a list of 10. Example:
What are frequently asked questions about splitting firewood with a maul? Please give me a list of 10.
I’m creating a blog for a [topic] business. What are some topic ideas I could write about?
Another way to approach a brainstorming session with a large language model is to specifically mention SEO purposes and to note where the audience is in the buyer’s journey. I have my students focus on keywords that indicate buyer’s intent. Here’s a prompt:
Please give me 5 topic ideas to write about the topic [topic] for SEO purposes. I want to find niche ideas where the person searching has purchase intent.
Refining Your Prompt: Adding Context
It’s, of course, vital that we always think critically about what ChatGPT spits back at us. For example, I used the above prompt with the topic of ‘watch repair.’ One suggestion I got was: ‘DIY Watch Battery Replacement: A Step-by-Step Guide.’
On the one hand, this is a great topic and it solves a need for consumers. It’s also a topic that aligns closely with purchase intent: our consumer needs a new battery.
On the other hand, a new battery watch is a fairly inexpensive purchase. So we want to get our students to think about context: is writing about this topic is the best use of their time and resources? Asking this question makes for an interesting conversation.
I like to show all of the above prompts and some good and bad examples that I received from ChatGPT. I use this to help students start to enhance their prompt engineering. The more context they can provide ChatGPT, the better the suggestions they will get.
That is, the more the student is prepared, the better ChatGPT is at helping them.
An ehancement on Prompt 3 above is below.
Enhanced topic brainstorming ChatGPT Prompt
I am creating a blog targeted at business executives who enjoy luxury, unique experiences while they are traveling for business events. The blog will promote hotels, restaurants, sightseeing experiences, and related opportunities that business executives may enjoy. I make money through advertising and commissions I receive when users book services through my website. Please provide 5 ideas for blog topics I can write about aimed at my target audience that create opportunities for me to make money.
Note that I have specifically stated my audience—business executives who enjoy…—the types of content the blog focuses on, and the business purpose of the blog—that is, how I make money. I then ask ChatGPT specifically for ideas that will please my audience and help me achieve my business goal.
Prompts such as those noted above can help students start to think about SEO and the buyer’s journey early on when brainstorming topic ideas. The information may be helpful when students start to do a little SEO work.
Topic brainstorming with NotebookLM
AI has the potential to be a remarkable tool for conducting research for writing projects. While tools like ChatGPT have their place, newer applications such as NotebookLM can be leveraged with greater precision.
Below, I’ve gathered some thoughts on how I might use NotebookLM this semester in my Writing Across Platforms class.
For the purpose of this post, we want to use NotebookLM to brainstorm topic ideas and the like.
The big benefit that NotebookLM brings is it’s ability for the user to provide the sources the artificial intelligence relies on when the user interacts with it. In this way, each notebook focuses on a specific topic based on the sources the user provides (the current limit of data a notebook can contain is 500,000 words).
To get started, a user goes to the NotebookLM website, logs in with a Google account, and creates a new notebook. Next, a user adds sources. These can include documents, websites, pasted text, YouTube videos and Google Docs and Google Slides.
How might we use NotebookLM for our content marketing blog post?
Students could gather their sources into a notebook. For example, a notebook could comprise sources such as websites and documents about a client. It could comprise such sources about its competitors. A notebook could include sources about a subject area, such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and articles about a type of product or service (e.g., watch repair). The key here is to have students vet sources and determine which sources are appropriate.
Topic brainstorming NotebookLM Prompts
NotebookLM has presets to generate FAQs, study guides, timelines, and more. Thus, no prompt is needed to generate an FAQ; simply click the button.
But there is also a great chat window where users can ask questions. Some of the above-mentioned prompts could be modified and used to brainstorm topic ideas. Unlike ChatGPT, the answers the user will get are based on the sources provided.
For illustrative purposes, I have loaded a public domain copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise into a NotebookLM notebook. Let’s imagine I am seeking to write a blog post for a website that sells bookish lifestyle products like clothes, bookmarks, coffee mugs and such for book lovers.
I’ve modified the Enhanced topic ChatGPT prompt to fit this scenario. Here it is:
I am creating a blog targeted at readers who love the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The blog will promote clothes, coffee mugs, bookmarks, journals, and other products that lovers of F. Scott Fitzgerald may enjoy. I make money through selling products. Please provide 5 ideas for blog topics I can write about aimed at my target audience that create opportunities for me to make money. Be sure to use your knowledge of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the book This Side of Paradise in generating your ideas.
Of the responses I got, there were several that I liked. The below 2 fit very well with how I described my hypothetical blog and business and could be great for a This Side of Paradise themed blog and product series. These gave me some great product ideas, too.
The footnote links take me to passages in the novel that support the suggestion provided. Imagine if I had added other books by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I could have gotten suggestions based on his wider works.
NotebookLM Tone and Style Language Suggestion Prompts
It’s not hard to begin to envision the many uses of NotebookLM for crafting compelling content. For one example, let’s return to the focus on my previous blog post, style and tone. But, let’s ramp it up a bit.
Let’s ask NotebookLM to give us some creative language suggestions. Imagine we are going to write up the two blog posts NotebookLM suggested above. In those blog posts, we want to use language that is evocative of Fitzgerald and the novel so that our readers will feel the connection to the author and the piece. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for a re-read of the book. Here’s a prompt:
Please analyze the writing style and tone of F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise and suggests terms and phrases that I could incorporate in a fun way into my blog post about the book to honor the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Below is the response NotebookLM provided. I like some more than others and could see the potential to play with such phrases as “symphony of color,” “golden, golden is the air,” “the age of the slicker,” and “lyrical outpourings.”
Note, it’s important to do a little research here. AI demands we keep our critical thinking hats on. My above prompt did not ask for direct quotes. The use of quotations could give the impression that the phrases provided are direct quotes from This Side of Paradise. In clicking through the footnotes, it is clear that phrases like “the age of the slicker” and “golden, golden is the air” are not direct quotes from the book, but phrases NotebookLM has generated as phrases that are evocative of Fitzgerald’s writing. As shown below, a quick follow-up prompt in NotebookLM expresses what the “slicker” means in the book.
Closing Thoughts
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what NotebookLM could be used for to help writers prepare to write.
It has great potential as a research tool, as well. Imagine taking a webpage as a source and asking NotebookLM to identify common themes to help you craft a pitch. Hopefully, we can cover some of those potentials in a future blog post.
For now, I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the semester! I hope you enjoyed this post.
AI-powered tools like SciSpace, Elicit, and ExplainPaper are making it much easier to discover academic research and engage with it in ways that I could only have dreamed of back in graduate school. While these tools can benefit any researcher, they may be particularly helpful to undergraduates who are developing their familiarity with discovering and making sense of research studies.
In this post, we explore SciSpace, a tool that can help when:
Searching for academic research
Reading and making sense of academic research
Developing new research project ideas
Writing literature reviews
I share two videos I recorder for my undergraduate students to serve as a quick-start guide for using SciSpace. I also provide an activity that asks students to use the “chat with a PDF” feature of SciSpace. While I use these videos and activity for my applied research class, Media & Audience Analytics, I am also incorporating them into other classes where students are dealing with academic research and writing papers.
Using SciSpace’s Chat with a PDF Feature
The first video offers an introduction to SciSpace’s Chat with a PDF tool, which allows users to interact with a PDF copy of a research study. Students can obtain summaries of sections of a paper, identify key takeaways in the paper, and get clear descriptions of esoteric or complex academic writing.
In the video, I reference an activity. Below the video is a copy that activity. It asks students to upload a PDF into SciSpace after creating a free account. They then interact with the PDF in SciSpace to answer a few questions as a way to get familiar with the Chat with a PDF feature.
The research article used in the activity sheet below is a study that I co-authored and that is publicly available. However, I encourage you to modify the activity questions, using a research study that is relevant to your class.
Discover Research for a College Research Project with SciSpace
The second video is a jump around of a number of features within SciSpace that can help users begin to develop an understanding of the existing research in a particular area of study.
SciSpace has a number of tools, such as ‘Literature Review,’ AI agent’ and ‘Find Topic Topic’; features that appear to have some overlap. Each of these tools respond in their own way to a user’s query with summaries and research sources. The platform can generate follow up questions that a user can explore to delve into their research topic. These summaries are great for quickly familiarizing oneself with a body of research and allowing the user to begin thinking about possible gaps in the research.
The tool I like the most is the literature review feature. This feature offers a table with a list of research studies relevant to the user’s search query. It’s easy to view and allows users the ability to quickly compare and contrast studies. Users can add columns to the table to further explore a variety of dimensions including the study’s limitations as well as its objectives, contributions, and practical implications.
While SciSpace has some clear efficiency benefits for any researcher, I do find these tools a little frustrating. One can quickly become over-run by the information that SciSpace can provide with the click of a button. I find myself experiencing knowledge FOMO. I want to keep clicking for more and more. I open new tabs to follow new lines of thought. Stopping and digesting what’s available would be much less overwhelming and probably more productive for me.
Perhaps, then, it is a good thing that a free SciSpace account comes with limits. Each user has a set of coins that they spend each time they use an AI search tool, with deep analysis providing better results but costing more coins. The downside is that free users only get 100 credits per month. So use your free credits wisely. As you’ll see in the video above, I quickly ran out of coins (Note that I had used quite a few of my the month’s credits before making that video).
I hope you found this post helpful in thinking about ways that you could incorporate SciSpace into your students’ research projects.
While I chose SciSpace because I personally found its outputs to be more user-friendly, the features I cover in the videos below may be similar to those available on platforms.
Teach ChatGPT in a PR Writing Class Series—Post 1: Style and Tone
Last semester, I started integrating ChatGPT into my promotional writing class, COMM 335: Writing Across Platforms. In the past, I’ve written about using generative AI in my social media class and shared several videos on the topic. Today, I’m excited to share the first post in a multi-part series on how ChatGPT can enhance promotional writing. This post will focus on using ChatGPT to refine style and tone, particularly when considering a brand’s voice and writing style guidelines.
Before we dive in, it’s important to acknowledge a common concern: the fear that students might use AI to write their papers for them. These concerns are valid, but we must also recognize that artificial intelligence is here to stay. Our colleagues in business are already using it to write emails, reports, and other communications. My goal is to teach students how to use these tools to enhance their writing, rather than rely on AI to write for them.
Using ChatGPT to Explore Style and Tone in Writing
In my class, we discuss how brands have distinct voices. Just like a logo or a font, a brand’s “voice” conveys its identity and helps shape consumer perception.
We explore style—the way ideas are expressed—and tone—the mood or attitude of the writing. While tone can vary depending on context, style remains consistent.
One activity I use involves students reading online text and comparing it to an organization’s writing or voice guidelines. For example, I like to have students explore the UK.gov website. They spend five minutes browsing and then describe the voice they perceive from the content. We then compare their observations to the UK.gov voice guidelines (a sample is included below).
A sample of UK.gov’s voice guidelines
Sample of UK.gov’s Voice Guidelines
Playing with Style and Tone in ChatGPT
Next, have your students experiment with ChatGPT to generate responses in a specific style or tone. This exercise not only helps students understand how style and tone can shape text for different contexts and audiences, but it also teaches them how to adjust their own writing to align with a brand’s voice.
ChatGPT Prompt: Getting Started with Style and Tone
Please write a [style] paragraph for [subject].Style examples: inspirational, persuasive, explanatory, analytical.Tone examples: frustrated, happy, bored, panicked, rushed, sleepy, relaxed.Example:
Please write a persuasive argument for why my parents should let me borrow their car. Be sure to mention my straight-A grades.
Can you please suggest a more [style and/or tone] way to phrase this?[Insert text to check]Examples:
Can you suggest a kinder way to phrase this?
Can you suggest a less rushed way to phrase this?
Analyzing Tone and Style with ChatGPT
After experimenting with various styles and tones, encourage students to analyze the voice and style of a specific website. This exercise not only helps students understand how brands communicate but also improves their ability to analyze and refine their own writing.
ChatGPT Tone and Style Analysis Prompt
Please analyze the writing style and tone of the following text. Provide your response in bullet points. [Insert text to analyze]
Once students understand how a brand’s voice is conveyed, have them attempt to mimic that style. Then, they can take their own writing and use the same prompt to assess how closely their text matches the brand’s voice.
Conclusion
That’s all for now! Check back in a few weeks for the next post in this series on using ChatGPT—or your preferred large language model—in promotional writing classes.
Teaching ChatGPT in a Social Media Class: Uses for A.I. in the PR or marketing college classroom
Interest in teaching ChatGPT in social media, public relations and marketing classes is exploding. Some educators are concerned about the implications on education, including students using ChatGPT to write their papers. Others are embracing large language models in the classroom. For example, one of my department colleagues, Professor Larson, is teaching an entire special topics class on artificial intelligence this semester.
This post may contain affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, if you click a link and make a purchase, I will make a commission. Please read my disclosure for details.
Happiness: Media versus Reality Course Overview and Syllabus
This semester I will be teaching Happiness: Media versus Reality, a 400-level special topics course. In recent posts (see here and here), I’ve talked about my growing interest in happiness broadly, and the relationship between happiness and media use specifically. In this post, I will share the course description, course goals, and the class syllabus.
I hope that sharing this information inspires you to discuss happiness and media use in one of your classes or, perhaps, create your own happiness and media class.
A Social Media Education Blog by Matthew J. Kushin, Ph.D.
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