An unpopular thing about me is I always basically enjoyed marking. Like, not the grading part — I always struggled with numerating the denominator and I just don’t believe there’s a meaningful difference between a B- essay and a C+ one in the honest-to-goodness real world — but the marking part? Entering into discourse with…
This week’s post shares a bunch of intellectual air with John Warner’s thinking about AI writing and undergraduate assessment. There’s often a lot of alignment between my thinking and John’s when it comes to talking about writing assessment, but he published first, so let me point you to his excellent piece, ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything…
A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…
The ChatGPT handwringing of late has bothered me, not least because it is cloaked in a kind of shock, like the domain of higher education has suddenly been sullied by this profane technology. But babes, it was always already here. Many faculty are learning about the impacts of artificial intelligence on their own practice as…
The first time I used ChatGPT, I was fascinated. You stick in a prompt and it spits out something. The prose is grammatically correct. It’s coherent. It knows basic paragraph structure and it connects ideas together. It obeys the prompts and offers a kind of clarity, if we define clarity in terms of accurate prose….
It’s hard not to be aware of the encroachment of artificial intelligences* on our teaching and learning spaces if you work in education these days. The launch of ChatGPT a few weeks ago has caught many teachers and learners off guard with its level of sophistication and its capacity to absorb the seemingly mundane writing…
Digital Detox 2022 Archive Overcoming Apathy and Fighting Back Every week, you’ll read a deeply researched (but always readable!) essay about the state of the academy and the role disaster capitalism is playing in our classrooms as we teach and learn together. We’ll share up-to-date thinking from around the globe. In the comments sections and…
Can you tell us a bit about your contexts and experience teaching the Detox? At the start of Jan 2020, I was teaching a 3rd year Special Topics course at Thompson Rivers University on ‘Digital Sociology.’ I had pitched this topic to the Chair, as I had just completed my PhD at the University of…
I promised a toolkit in this final post, and a sense of what resistance can look like. Sometimes I think the most helpful way to think about this work is to recognize that every choice we make every day is part of the larger constellation of resistance, which I get sort of sounds exhausting. I promise, I get that. And I don’t think we can possibly fight every fight or be ready for a fight every second of the day. But taking the “every day, every choice” approach also means that every day has myriad opportunities to challenge the status quo, to start a difficult conversation, to ask a question no one else is asking. I find that hopeful, because it means that when you do step back, or opt out, or take time to breathe, the next opportunity to make the small connection that sparks the change is just around the corner.
Here are the moves that I think should be in every post-secondary reformer’s toolkit.
Why is technology and accessible practice important? It is important because there are likely more accessibility needs in your classroom than you know. It is not always easy for someone with an accessibility need to come forward because when you do you are singling yourself out and subjecting yourself to negative attitudes. I remember being…