Tech & Civ Course Guide to the AI Journal

HIST 1210: Technology & Civilization I

Xaq Frohlich, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts

People walk through a golden medieval market as robots, drones, and holograms blend technology with the historic city.

Assignment Description

The AI Journal is a semester-long portfolio designed to help students in Technology & Civilization I explore the human side of artificial intelligence. This course guide frames AI as a thinking partner that supports reflection, metacognition, and creative inquiry. Students engage with AI tools to analyze sources, generate ideas, and experiment with storytelling and visualization, all while maintaining radical transparency about their process.

Through ten scaffolded assignments, which include activities such as dialogues with AI, origin myth creation, visual analysis of historical periods, and critical prompting exercises, students learn to balance online and offline thinking. The journal emphasizes critical AI literacy: understanding not just what AI can produce, but how it shapes thinking, where it fails, and why human judgment remains central. This approach reflects a human-centered AI philosophy, preparing students to navigate a world where algorithmic tools increasingly mediate knowledge, creativity, and historical imagination.

AI Capabilities Used

Brainstorming assistance, Research support, Case study, Problem solving, Data analysis

Number of Students

30-35

Level of Students

Undergraduate

Teaching Modality

In-person

Tech & Civ Course Guide to the AI Journal

Instructor Notes

I would recommend using any of the ten assignments that I developed and am sharing here, and upload them into ChatGPT and prompt the genAI to help you adapt my materials to your course content and needs. The preamble to the assignments provides my general rationale for how students should approach the AI tools, and the assignments are designed to give fairly structured use of the AI and be transparent about pedagogical payoffs.
In addition to the Technology & Civilization I core curriculum CLOs [AU SL-F; AU SL-G], I included this third course learning outcome specific to AI in my syllabus:
- Develop foundational critical AI literacy by using a variety of AI tools to support historical inquiry and communication. Students will learn to engage with generative AI critically and ethically, addressing concerns such as "anxiety" and "ethics" while developing awareness of best practices and the potential biases and limitations of these tools.
I encourage students to embrace what Chris Basgier has called "messy learning" for the AI Journal—not worry about polished answers, but focus on the process for each assignment and open-ended reflection about what was gained (or not) from the experiment with AI.

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