There’s a lot out there from folks trying and suggesting and selling ways for teachers to put their fingers in the dike holding back the allegedly inevitable AI tide.
How artificial intelligence is reshaping college for students and professors
This year’s senior class is the first to have spent nearly its entire college career in the age of generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can ...
This week our institution launched a uni wide assessment framework. As good a reason as any to jump on the notebook Infographics bandwagon. It's not a perfect approach (has anyone come up with one… | Sam Doherty | 27 comments
This week our institution launched a uni wide assessment framework.
Commentary on Introducing Nano Banana Pro by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more
When Canva first launched its code tools in Canva AI, I was pretty cynical. In fact, I was definitely too harsh, with my first post based on a few basic expe...
Critical Thinking with AI Mode #44: Florida coastline
A prediction about Florida's coastline is wrongly portrayed by people engage in climate change denial -- but AI Mode does mess up the summary in a way that r...
These remarks were delivered this evening at the Creatively Critical Tech Speaker Series at Illinois State University.
"There is no good way to say this."
These are the opening words of Yiyun Li’s latest book Things in Nature Only Grow about life after the death by suicide of both
TEG to AI Fundamentals with Apple | Common Sense Education
Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.
The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y.
This week has emphasized that now is the time for reimagining what critical AI education might look like in the coming months and years, an education that eschews industry-captured AI literacy lessons for an expansive, interdisciplinary civics education with an emphasis on digital degrowth and data center resistance.
We're spending too much time restating how important "productive struggle" is, and not enough time talking about why we do it. ** Why would I spend 2 hours toiling over something that will… | Jason Gulya | 36 comments
We're spending too much time restating how important "productive struggle" is, and not enough time talking about why we do it.
** Why would I spend 2 hours toiling over something that will inevitably produce a less-than-polished product, when I could spend 10 minutes offloading that task and creating something that looks polished and (marketing insists!) sounds just like me? **
Increasingly, I think this is becoming this moment's defining question.
I was thinking about it recently when discussing an The Atlantic article with Christopher Ostro's book club.
The writer shares her experience of preparing for her daughter's birthday.
In the midst of preparing (and putting a lot of time and effort into it), she finds out about an app that would do almost everything without too much effort.
But she does things herself, because the very act of making an anti-ROI decision expresses value.
Here's how the author (Miranda Rake) ends the article:
"We didn’t have balloon arches, the cake came out a bit funky, and the Elsa experience was unbelievably awkward for the adults (though the preschoolers loved it). Still, I am so glad we all planned it—me, my daughter, and our community—slowly, imperfectly together."
Going through a difficult process -- and engaging in struggle -- communicates value to her daughter.
What does this mean for our classroom?
As we teach and tout the power of "productive struggle," we need to think carefully about why students would go through it.
What's on the other side?
One of the problems with the grade-centered approach (and the transactional model of education, more generally) is that the motives for going through productive struggle may not be sustainable.
What happens if/when the student leaves school, and doesn't have the impetus that we've build the system around?
Anyway...
Those are my thoughts for the day.
| 36 comments on LinkedIn
Grandchildren (Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, Marcello Hernández, Tommy Brennan) show their grandmother (Ashley Padilla) photos of her father (Glen Powell) th...
Is AI Making College Students Dumber? Ronny Chieng Investigates | The Daily Show
The AI revolution is integrating chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT into all aspects of life, from education to friendship, so Ronny Chieng fights the dumbing ef...
Most of us in higher education are now familiar with generative AI bots, where you formulate a prompt and get a reply. Yet, we are now beginning the advancement to agentic AI, the autonomous 24-7 project manager.
“What Are We Really Assessing?” Rethinking Evidence of Learning in the Age of AI
This piece builds on earlier reflections I’ve shared about responsible, transparent and learning-focused use of AI in SACE assessments, extending that thinking into the wider question of how we gather trustworthy evidence of learning. A few weeks ago, in a curriculum meeting, a HASS (Humanities and
Time, emotions and moral judgements: how university students position GenAI within their study
The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted considerable discussion within the research community. Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored....
When it comes to the future of assessment, I think it's all right for faculty to create buckets.
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Bucket 1: Short-term changes that get us thorugh the day, the week, or the month.
We can revise assessments by grounding them in other modules or in-class activities, using multimedia, or including a synchronous component.
Maybe these end up being band-aids.
That's all right.
Band-aids are useful.
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Bucket #2: Long-term changes
These are things like shifting to process-focused assignments, creating a culture of transparency, or shifting to alternative assessment.
I think they'll have longer shelflives.
But they take a while to set up.
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We can't do everthing all at once.
I think it's perfectly all right to do small changes that get us through the semester, and recognize that we'll need bigger, more systemic changes down the road.
That's what I talked about during my keynote at San Diego Community College District.
We talked about how to manage those buckets.
It's a key part of the conversation, because on surefire way to create change paralysis is to say "change everything about what you teach, right now."