Your final course reflection should be ~1000 words and cover the entire course. Your job is to describe your learning experience and reflect how the course has or has not met its learning objectives.
Describing what you learned means describing what’s now different in your thinking about major themes of the course–AI (obviously), expertise, authority, critical thinking, humanities, technological determinism, etc. If you didn’t learn anything, I’m sorry I failed you. But please explain why you didn’t learn anything–then I still know you were putting in effort and I can understand how to improve.
This is what separates excellent from mediocre reflections. To say that “I learned to think more critically about AI” is fine only if you provide several SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of the issues that you think are important to think critically about and WHY. But if you just make a vague statement that you learned about a topic on the syllabus, and don’t provide any examples from the readings or discussions, I can only assume it’s because you didn’t read or learn very much.
The more you can tie themes together and speak about the course as a whole (while giving specific examples from the readings), the higher your score will be. But I expect you to go beyond these as well to reflect on the course as a whole.
There’s no right answer, oviously. This is an opinion aspect of the final, that asks you to describe what you were interested in, or not, and what kinds of topics or reeadings resonated with you, or didn’t. It’s just another angle to show me how you engaged with the course.
You are welcome to use AI for your final as much as you want. Hpefully you feel equipped to produce something beyond what you can do without it. But you must do it ethically and with academic integrity.
Whether you use it or not, remember it is course policy that it is your responsibility to differentiate yourself from an AI-generated response. This is super easy if you’ve actually done any work for the course. In case you haven’t discovered it for yourself, AI cannot yet write very convincingly about human experiences (it sounds super fake, even if it’s getting better). If your response sounds like AI, I can only assume you didn’t put in much effort to your reflection or didn’t learn much in the course.
This final assignment is vague on purpose so you can tell me what you’ve gotten out of the course. That’s different for everyone. But if you feel lost about what to do, please reach out so we can chat and make sure you have a clear path forward.