I need to workshop my titles more. But anyway: this post reflects on teaching the history of the internet to a class of 160 first year students in a world where generative AI shabbiness is pushed on them and a perfectly rationale way to deal with the myriad pressures and bad choices of being a student is to go ahead and use it. What’s a prof to do?

The first thing I tried to do was use the metaphor of going to the gym: you go to exercise your body and get stronger. If there was a machine that lifted weights for you, could you go, turn it on, point to it and say, ‘look, weights have been lifted! I have therefore exercised!’ No, you cannot. But – the same error is made in university classrooms all the time. Look! An essay has been written! Give me my grade! And I don’t need to spill any more photons, bits, or ink over the instrumentalization of higher education that has led us here. Instead, here’s how I tried to deal with it this term. And no, I didn’t put any trojan horse prompts into my assignments.

Instead, I chose to focus on reading and notemaking.

By hand.

I asked all students to get a little paper notebook. I showed them the readings; I showed them hypothes.is; we talked about how to read and what to pay attention to (“don’t read it through like a novel! Read like a predator! Go to where the game is!” etc etc). Then in class, I asked them to do two things for a given reading: write a rhetorical précis (using a model developed by historian Chad Black) and a research memo-to-self that pulls together one’s observations and annotations. They had to do this cold. In my lecture hall. No computer. No phone. No notes. (Students with accommodations: I made accommodations.)

I also told them: we’re doing this multiple times throughout the semester. You’re going to have off days. I’ll take your best 3 of 4 examples for grading. And we graded at first for the format, for the shape of what we were after, and then started pushing them towards deeper engagement with the content. They were always encouraged to filter these ideas through my lectures too. A pretty good example (though not perfect) of what we were after is this composite of a couple of student’s responses, after reading a longer blog post by Doctorow on Enshittification:

PRECIS MAJOR CLAIM: Doctorow argues in his McLuhan lecture on enshittification (2024) that platforms degrade through a three-stage process of user exploitation, business exploitation, and shareholder extraction leading to a world of digital decay known as the enshittocene. HOW: Doctorow develops this argument through a detailed case study of Facebook, tracing the three stages of enshittification (from user surplus to business surplus to shareholder surplus) while systematically dismantling the historical constraints that once prevented such decay, and showing how the erosion of competition, regulation, self-help, and labor power enabled the collapse of digital trust. PURPOSE: The author’s apparent purpose is to diagnose the systemic decay of digital platforms and show how it spreads across industries in order to empower users, workers, and policymakers to reverse the trend and build a more equitable, open digital world.

MEMO INITIAL OBSERVATION: WHAT IF there’s a connection with the Bory piece; what if tech ceos believe themselves to be the hero of the journey? This’d create a cultural narrative in which enshittification is not a failure, but a necessary stage of progress. THEN this mythos might normalize the extraction of surplus from users, workers, and business partners, treating exploitation as a form of “service” or “evolution”? #to-investigate #possible-thesis KEY: The reading matters because it reframes enshittification not as a technical process, but as a cultural one. #cultural-processes MY CONTRIBUTION: Doctorow’s framework shows how platforms collapse through a three-stage exploitation process: user → business → shareholder. There’s a connection here with Bory’s critique, which reveals that this process is culturally enabled by a narrative in which the founder is the hero, and the platform is the vehicle of a moral mission. When founders say, “I created this to serve humanity,” they are not just describing a product; they are enacting a myth. And when that myth is accepted, enshittification becomes not just a crisis, but a natural consequence of leadership.

These for the most part got better as the term went on. However, it took us longer to grade them than I would’ve liked. I transformed the final exercise from another round of precis/memo combos (we’d do 2 per session) to one last class workshop on ‘how to write with these things’ (where grading was pass/fail did-you-do-the-thing?-full-points).

The idea is, a student would look at these precis/memos and think to themselves, ‘what’s the story here? How do these observations speak to one another?’ How you look at things – ie, historical theory – guides your attention to some ideas rather than others. It being the last week of term, I wanted to do something fun first to get them in the mood, so today we did a kind of team debate-cum-tournament style sort of thing, where suggestions for the most important people/ideas/technologies of the history of the internet were gathered. These were arranged into a bracket. For each round in the bracket, I suggested a different lens through which the disputants were to make their argument for the greater importance of their person/idea/technology. Winners were chosen through applause from the class (y’know, I forget the winner? But I think it was between the ENIAC women and Vannevar Bush). And do you know, students were drawing some pretty nifty arguments from their precis/memos to do this, bouncing ideas off one another. It was neat to see! And difficult: the power went off during class and we did this via the blackboard and cellphone flashlights (internal lecture theatre without windows).

On wednesday this week, the idea is the students will have their precis/memo combos ready to hand. I’ll say, ‘let’s assume we’re looking at the history of the internet through a social history lens. What have you got that speaks to that or could be informed from that?’ The idea is, they’ll make a list (with page & paragraph numbers, since they’ll have numbered the pages in their booklets) of these interesting observations. We’ll do some think-pare-share: show your neighbour what you’ve got. Then, I’ll have them create an outline with each element they have, beginning with: where’s the question here? They’ll reorder their useful observations such that there appears to be an emergent story or argument. At that point, I’ll ask them to think about ‘what is missing? What pieces of connective tissue do you have to write?’ … and they’ll then make quick notes about what they’d need to look into or write to make the tissue of observations whole.

This will be what they need to do for the final exam, so I’ll give them the exam question on Friday (in the exam room: no aide-memoire. They’ll have had to work through their materials before going in). I’m feeling pretty good about this.

And that’s how I’ve moved through reading -> note making -> thinking -> writing in an age of generative AI.

Yes, this was a lot of work. And I find language models interesting to explore. But that doesn’t mean I think they have any business in a first year class.

Post script: Because I’m interested in code, and in the way generative AI as an average machine spit out things that work (for a given value of work) I also like to try cooking up small one-page html tools since I know precious little about javascript, react, etc. I built a little outliner tool that I will use in class on wednesday to explain the concept that I am after, on the big screen. And maybe some of my gang will find it useful. You can give it a whirl here: https://shawngraham.github.io/outliner/ and you can grab the html from here: https://github.com/shawngraham/outliner/.