Before You Write
At the start of Week 6, before you read anything about artificial intelligence, you wrote down what you believed. You described what AI is, named examples, noted its limits, shared your concerns, and asked a question you hoped the course would answer.
Before you respond to the prompts below, go back and read what you wrote. Find your Week 6 pre-reflection submission on Blackboard and read it carefully — not to judge your past self, but to see clearly where you were starting from. Then return here and write your post-reflection responses.
The goal is not to show that you have learned the "right" answers. The goal is to think honestly about how your understanding has grown, where it has become more complicated, and what questions the past two weeks have opened rather than closed.
Reflection Prompts
Respond to each prompt below. For prompts 1-5, your pre-reflection response is the starting point — quote it, paraphrase it, or simply describe what you wrote as you reflect on it. A few sentences to a short paragraph per prompt is appropriate.
1. How has your definition changed?
Re-read your Week 6 answer to "what is artificial intelligence?" How would you define it now? What is the most significant thing your original definition was missing or getting wrong — and what do you understand now that you did not then?
2. Revisit your examples.
Look at the three examples of AI you named in Week 6. For each one, how would you now describe what is actually happening under the hood? Were any of your examples not AI in the way you thought? Were there examples you would add now that you did not think to include before?
3. What is AI still not good at?
Compare your Week 6 answer about AI's limits to what you now know. Were your intuitions correct? Did the course reveal limits you had not considered, or did it complicate limits you thought were clear? What do you understand about why those limits exist that you did not before?
4. How have your concerns evolved?
Re-read the concerns you expressed in Week 6. Do you still hold them? Have any of them sharpened into something more specific now that you understand how these systems work? Have any of them eased? Did the past two weeks introduce concerns you did not have before?
5. What would you tell your students now?
In Week 6, you described what you thought your students believed about AI and what you wished they understood. Now that you have studied the field more deeply, what is the most important thing you want your students to know? Has that answer changed from what you wrote before?
6. Did the course answer your question?
In Week 6, you named one question you hoped these two weeks would answer. Did they? If yes, what is the answer? If not — or only partially — what would you need to explore further to find it?
7. The bigger picture.
This is the only prompt with no Week 6 counterpart. Step back from AI specifically and think about the course as a whole. You have now studied how computers represent data, how hardware works, how operating systems manage resources, how networks communicate, how databases organize information, and how AI systems learn. How does understanding all of that change how you see the technology you and your students use every day? What is the most important thing you are taking out of this course?
Submitting Your Responses
Copy your responses into the Blackboard submission box for the AI Post-Reflection assignment and submit.
Unlike the pre-reflection, you may receive feedback on this submission — your instructor will read your responses and may reach out if something you wrote raises a question worth following up on.