This article explores teaching writing with generative AI as critical play where students and teachers engage in an ethically dialectical and aleatory game with generative AI. I qualitatively surveyed 24 writing teachers about how they teach writing with generative AI as well as its advantages and disadvantages. I discovered that teachers used generative AI to teach about the ethics of generative AI's design and rhetorical use to avoid plagiarism. Teachers also critically played with generative AI to teach the writing process of invention, drafting, revision, and editing. Specifically, the critical, dialectical interplay of human and machine invents in aleatory and emergent ways, creating moments of epiphany for students and teachers within the writing process for invention, drafting, revision, and editing while the real time pace of generative AI democratizes education, making writing and teaching more accessible for them.

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that game design can be used to teach design thinking within a pedagogy of making. It analyzes qualitative survey responses from 12 writing teachers who asked students to design social justice games and argues that games not only give students practice in design thinking but that, as multimodal, embodied systems, games can enact social theories and, as such, be a way for students to empathize with and design for wicked social problems.KEYWORDS: Computer-based learningcritical theorypedagogical theoryrhetoric of technologysocial theoryusability studies Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebekah Shultz ColbyRebekah Shultz Colby is a Teaching Professor at the University of Denver. She has co-edited The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Rhetoric/Composition/Play through Video Games. She has published articles on using games to theorize and teach rhetoric and technical writing in Computers and Composition and Communication Design Quarterly.

Changes in technology, development philosophy, and scale have required game designers to change how they communicate and mediate design decisions. Traditional game design studios used an extensive game design document (GDD), a meta-genre that described most of the game before it was developed. Current studies suggest that this is no longer the case. We conducted interviews at four independent game studios in order to share their game design documentation processes, revealing that, while an exhaustive GDD is rare, the meta-genre functions are preserved in a variety of mediated ways.

The site’s goal is to examine "the ways in which rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy interact with and inform each other. In keeping with this mission, the viz. blog is a forum for exploring the visual through identifying the connections between theory, rhetorical practice, popular culture, and the classroom.