SNHU Agents of Change Podcast · SNHU Social Sciences

Season 4 Episode 2 Scripting the Future: AI and Writing in Higher Education: Conversation with Dr. Julie Minnaugh

·30 min·1 clip

Critical thinking stays on employer wish lists, and Dr. Minow says students need transparent practice showing their thought process.

1. SNHU’s Agents of Change podcast starts a series on artificial intelligence and higher education with Dr. Julie Minow and Dr. Leman Tash. 2. Dr. Leman Tash hosts the episode, and Dr. Julie Minow is the Senior Associate Dean of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Southern New Hampshire University. 3. The episode asks how AI should change writing instruction without losing the skills students need in classrooms and workplaces. 4. Dr. Minow says her interest comes from doctoral research on writing in the workforce and manager perceptions of good writers. 5. She reports that managers used different standards across fields, which made “good writing” hard to define without context. 6. She says new hires were seen as stronger writers when they asked questions, self-started, and looked for a mentor or “key person.” 7. Dr. Minow notes that one manager might want a brief email while another expects a longer explanation, depending on workplace conventions. 8. She connects that finding to AI by saying students also need to learn conventions for when and how AI is accepted in a new workplace. 9. The episode returns to writing across disciplines, including examples like poems, police reports, press releases, and business plans. 10. Dr. Minow says prompt engineering works better when writers specify audience, length, and purpose, which she links to first-year composition. 11. She says SNHU recently updated courses to make those rhetorical criteria clearer for students. 12. Dr. Minow argues that prompt engineering often assumes knowledge from composition theory even when writers in tech do not name it that way. 13. She says prior knowledge helps learning when students transfer familiar writing concepts into AI prompting. 14. The conversation emphasizes empathy for audiences with different needs and different levels of knowledge. 15. Dr. Minow cites John Swales and his concept of discourse community to explain why accepted sources vary by field. 16. She says AI can still miss the mark if the generated style, format, or sources do not fit a manager’s expectations or a field’s conventions. 17. Dr. Minow says critical thinking stays on employer wish lists and is not something the AI tool itself provides. 18. She compares effective writing instruction to the old math instruction of “show your work,” especially when assignments ask students to explain claims and connect ideas to lived experience. 19. The tone is conversational and instructional, with back-and-forth examples from academic writing, prompt engineering, and workplace communication. 20. Listeners interested in AI, writing instruction, and higher education will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a technical AI demo may skip it.

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