In Maureen Gallagher's Professional Uses of Social Media course, students have to decide, in a real assignment, whether and how to use generative AI themselves. That decision, and everything students learn from making it, is the heart of the lessons that Professor Gallagher shares with this AI Teaching Field Notes.
The assignment
During Project 2 of the class, students build a digital portfolio for professional use. They create a LinkedIn profile, a Substack newsletter with two long-form posts, and a written rationale explaining their design and writing choices. One of those Substack posts asks students to reflect on their own experience as readers and writers in the AI era, grounded in two outside sources on AI and college writing. What makes the project distinctive isn't the topic but the thoughtfulness and work surrounding the process built around it.
Starting with a blank page, on purpose
Before any AI, students draft by hand. In class, working from a printed source, they write out their initial ideas with no device or assistant. That handwritten material becomes the seed for the newsletter post they'll eventually bring to peer review.
Only after that first draft exists do students face a choice. They can choose to take "the path of resistance" and write without AI, or take "the path of assistance," using AI in a limited, tutor-like role where they can ask it to flag unclear passages or act as a peer reviewer, never to generate the writing itself. A course module spells out exactly what counts as acceptable ("green") use versus what doesn't ("red").
- Click here for a link to Gallagher's notes
Whichever path a student takes, they have to account for it. Students who use AI log every instance in an acknowledgment, with chat screenshots submitted separately, following Monash University's guidance on citing AI use (https://guides.lib.monash.edu/apa-7/artificial-intelligence). Students who don't use AI say so explicitly, in writing. Either way, the final submission includes a short rationale: why did you make this choice, and how does it serve the audience your professional materials are meant to reach?
Why the choice matters more than the tool
Gallagher designed the sequence so that using AI is never the default — it's a decision students have to justify to themselves and to her. The early handwritten draft protects the brainstorming stage, the part of writing most vulnerable to being skipped altogether when a tool can generate a full draft in seconds. The peer review and revision steps that follow keep the emphasis on writing as a process, not a single polished output.
The acknowledgment requirement builds a transparency habit students will need well beyond this class, and it quietly reframes AI use as something to document and stand behind, not something to hide.
What's working, and what's still a work in progress
The structure gives students agency through the ability to opt out of AI entirely, or to use it and explain why, without either choice being penalized. Gallagher has also seen that her design gives students language to articulate what it's actually like to be a student writer right now, caught between institutional AI policies , conflicting instructions by various faculty members,and their own instincts about their work.
The rougher edges are mostly about follow-through. For example, acknowledgement logs don't always get filled out as carefully as intended, which has Gallagher planning to share clearer sample acknowledgments before the next round. And despite the Pitt-approved tool list (Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, Claude) some students still reach for ChatGPT, a reminder that the "why" behind approved tools needs to be taught alongside the "what."
The takeaway for other instructors
You don't need a blanket AI policy to teach AI literacy well. Gallagher's approach suggests a different model that protects the parts of the writing process most worth protecting, the meaningfulness. This requires students to be honest about their choices, and let them practice defending those choices which, for these students, is exactly the professional skill the assignment is trying to build in the first place.