I am still listening to oral histories from the Goin North digital humanities project and mapping the structure of my final project, a Twine game about the Great Migration, targeted at high school students who live on the Main Line. The purpose of this project is to teach students aspects of historical thinking, including analysis of primary sources, multiple accounts and perspectives, and sourcing. Students will have the opportunity to assume a character of their age and navigate the journey. One of the key challenges is finding concentrated blocks of time to sit and work uninterrupted. My goal is to complete the course assignments and turn off my phone during peak time blocks each day to make greater progress.

The readings this week on generative AI, particularly the writings of Cohen (2025) and Kelly (2025), provide strong arguments for the advantages of using AI in research and writing. These insights have motivated me to consider using Gemini during this midstage of my work to review my draft for feedback. I am also considering using this tool to transcribe handwritten primary documents for the project, so students can more easily understand the text.

Cohen (2025) and Schaul, Chen, and Tiku (2023), however, provide caution against expecting AI outcomes to be produced by a system capable of reasoning. Instead, their writings point out that AI-generated results are based on vast amounts of text they are trained on, often without transparency about the sources, so the results mimic human speech. I will need to consider the results in this context.

The readings this week also highlight an important point about AI-generated content and student learning, especially concerning student essays, which are already considered an ineffective means of assessing student understanding (Sample & Schrum, 2012). When combined with generative AI, which can help students write essays without understanding the material or what they are submitting, this assessment method loses even more significance in education (Christman, 2025). The solution is for educators to incorporate generative AI into their teaching practices, so students can critically evaluate the content produced (Christman, 2025; Mills, 2025). I plan to incorporate these practices in my teaching moving forward.