Zine Fair Planning

End of semester grading looms…

Geoff: Instead of a final essay, to avoid AI-written submissions, I’m having my students create zines.
Nancy: Handmade with visuals and reflections? 
Geoff: Graphics, handwritten notes, sketches. 
Nancy: Could work for my drama course. Critiques of performances, rehearsals, and characters. 
Geoff: And what they learned from classmates. 
Nancy: In breakout rooms?
Geoff: Sure. After the 45 seconds of “Having problems with WiFi.”  For submission, I’m thinking scanned PDFs. 
Nancy: Good. But maybe warnings about about file sizes? 
Geoff: Right. Capped to say 16 MB. With instructions on how to compress.
Nancy: And allow phone scans. Not everyone has a proper scanner. 
Geoff: Agreed. As long as it’s readable and not photographed at a dramatic angle.
Nancy: Sometimes dramatic angles are a feature, not a bug. We should also balance creativity with substance. Some students will go full art project and forget the learning.
Geoff: Rubric contains criteria like reflection, course concepts, peer learning, and presentation. And of course, whether it reflects the actual voice of the writer.
Nancy: Speaking of handwriting “voice”, were you? Beautiful scrawl is still scrawl. So how do we showcase them? We can’t exactly pin them on classroom walls. 
Geoff: Virtual zine fair? Final class session. Shared folder, screen-sharing, short presentations. We could make it a joint event.
Nancy: Love it. Like a gallery opening, but with more unstable Wi-Fi. And fewer canapés.
Geoff: Bring your own snacks.
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Voice-over
Check in again next episode for a report on how it went.

Zines for Assessment

On Outwitting AI…

Kay: Need to minimize students’ reliance on AI in the media course.
Geoff: You might want to try zines.
Kay: Heard of them, would they help?
Geoff: As you know, they’re DIY, small-scale publications—usually handmade, often visually expressive. Tactile and personal, helps create a voice instead of generic AI output.
Kay: How would I frame them as an assessment device?
Geoff: Have students create a semester-long zine documenting their evolving perspective on the future of media—notes, sketches, experiments, even failed ideas.
Kay: AI could still generate some content, right?
Geoff: Possibly, but you can design prompts that are difficult for AI to answer meaningfully—like asking them to include autobiographical media experiences or classroom observations.
Kay: Right. Something like “Describe a media technology that changed the way your family communicates.” AI can’t fabricate their lived experience convincingly.
Geoff: Exactly. And you can require handwritten elements, collage work, or annotations on physical artifacts—ticket stubs, screenshots, receipts, doodles. Physically giving a break from screens, which is ironically relevant in a course on media futures.
Kay: We could have checkpoints—maybe mid-semester mini-zine submissions.
Geoff: And at the end, they turn in the final zine but keep a copy—either by scanning, photographing, or printing a second run. That way it becomes part of their own creative archive. Another idea: ask them to incorporate a prediction about future media that they track and revise over the semester.
Kay: A “living hypothesis” section! They could show erasures, edits, footnotes—almost like visible thinking.
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Voice-over
Visible thinking is key. AI can generate text, but it can’t reproduce the messy evolution of human insight.