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Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff

Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. The name of this newsletter is a reminder that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also in how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.

Featured Post

AI as a learning technology: Examples from the UVA Faculty AI Guides

AI-Integrated Assignments with the University of Virginia Faculty AI Guides One of my roles at the University of Virginia this year has been supporting the university’s Faculty AI Guides program. The provost’s office funded fifty-one faculty to explore potential uses of generative AI in their own teaching and to share what they learn with colleagues in their departments and schools through informal consultations as well as presentations, workshops, and lunch-and-learns. The Faculty AI Guides...

This image features 3 images of a street. Overlying the image are different shapes which are arranged to look like QR code symbols. These are in white/blue colours and intersect one another. The first image is clear, but the second is slightly more pixela

World Building with Generative AI Last fall, Google released a new generative AI tool called NotebookLM. It does a lot of different things, but it's claim to fame (briefly) was its ability to generate an audio overview of one or more documents in the style of a particular kind of podcast. When this feature of NotebookLM hit the social last fall, I saw lots of faculty posting that having students listen to an AI-generated summary of a course text instead of reading the text themselves was...

Integrating Instructional Design and Student Support It can be challenging to design and implement effective online courses and programs in higher ed. Doing so often involves learning new technologies and new skills as well as navigating new teaching contexts, new types of students, and new regulatory environments. But because of all that newness, sometimes an online program can catalyze new thinking about how we go about the work of post-secondary education. On the podcast this week, I have...

Bridging the AI Trust Gap Last month I was on a virtual panel hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Bridging the AI Trust Gap." Lee Rainie (Elon University), Gemma Garcia (Arizona State University), and I tried to unpack the differences in how higher ed administrators, faculty, and students approach generative AI in teaching and learning. Moderator Ian Wilhelm from the Chronicle asked very good questions and relayed even more good questions from the audience, and my fellow...

Annotation and Learning with Remi Kalir It's one thing to pull a book off a shelf, highlight a passage, and make a note in the margin. That's annotation, and it can be a useful learning tool for an individual. It's another thing to share your annotations in a way that others can read and respond to. That's social annotation, and when I heard years ago about digital tools that would allow a class of students to collaboratively annotate a shared textbook, I thought, well, that's the killer app...

Structure Matters: Custom Chatbot Edition Many years ago when educators were seeing what they could do with Twitter in their teaching, I wrote a blog post noting that structured Twitter assignments for students seemed to work better than more open-ended invitations for students to use Twitter to post about course material. When we walked through my mom's house as it was being built, I couldn't help but take a photo of all those lines. Somewhat more recently, I started sharing the structured...

Students as Partners in Teaching about Generative AI Last year on the podcast, I talked with Pary Fassihi about the ways she was exploring and integrating the use of generative AI in the writing courses she teaches at Boston University. During that interview, Pary mentioned an AI affiliate program running out of the writing program at Boston University. This program involved matching undergraduate students—the AI Affiliates—with writing instructors, giving the AI Affiliate a role in...

A Long View of Undergraduate Research A long time ago (in a galaxy far away?), I spent all three summers of my college years in undergraduate research experiences. That first summer I worked on a project that seems quaint now: I built a website for sharing a collection of quotations about mathematics that my mentor, a math professor, had collected. And (I can't believe this) the website is still around! See the Furman University Mathematical Quotations Server for a flashback to mid-90s web...

I was on the fence about reading John Warner’s new book, More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in an Age of AI. It wasn’t that I didn’t respect Warner’s work. No, I had been following his work for years, especially his Just Visiting blog on Inside Higher Ed where he writes about teaching. His was an essential voice for me after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. He had already argued in his book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities that writing...

Take It or Leave It with Liz Norell, Betsy Barre, and Bryan Dewsbury This week on the podcast I once again borrow a format from one of my favorite podcasts and host a Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and weigh in on several "hot take" essays on teaching and learning in higher ed. For each essay, each panelist had to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It (that is, disagree)....