It's been a week. There's been a lot of news here in the U.S. related to the new presidential administration. Most of the attention in higher education has been focused on M-25-13, the memorandum issued Monday by the Office of Management and Budget freezing disbursement of "all Federal financial assistance." No one seemed entirely sure what that might include, but it certainly seemed to include grants and other funding that colleges and universities depend on and were in fact promised by the...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Generative AI as a Design Accelerator Back in April 2023, I had the chance to visit Pennsylvania State University and to stop by Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology group. I got a tour of the Dreamery, a flexible and innovative learning space named after Penn State’s famous creamery. The tour was led by Ryan Wetzel, manager of creative learning initiatives, and I was impressed by how Ryan and his colleagues were helping faculty and students at Penn State explore emerging...
19 days ago • 3 min read
Educational Technology Advice for Academic Leaders Frequently in this newsletter, I let readers know about a new podcast episode featuring a guest with something interesting to share about teaching in higher education. Almost always, that guest is not me. But this week, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the EdUp Provost podcast hosted by Gregor Thuswaldner. Gregor had read my Intentional Tech book and invited me to offer advice on educational technology to the provosts and other academic...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Rethinking Doctoral Education Some years ago I was talking with the chair of a department. It was a STEM field, but I won't be more specific than that. I asked the chair what his goals were for the department's doctoral program. He said that they wanted all of their PhD graduates to secure faculty positions at top 25 research universities. I then asked him how many of their graduates were landing those spots at the moment. He said, "Oh, none of them." Way back in 2001, Chris Golde and Timothy...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Intentional Teaching, Wrapped 'Tis the season for your quantified life. If you're a Spotify user, you've already received your Spotify Wrapped report about the music you listened to on the platform this year. Meanwhile, my Board Game Stats app tells me that I currently have an h-index of 6 for the year (meaning there are 6 games I've played at least 6 times each in 2024) and I'm one play away of hitting a 7. I'm also looking forward to seeing how my War and Peace slow read shows up in my...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
"Imagine an issue. Wrong, it's more complicated than that." I've been taken with the above snarky quote from minor social media celebrity @internethippo. I seems to describe so many of the issues we've been debating and discussing here in the United States in the year 2024. So many people want simple answers to complicated problems, whether that's combating inflation or balancing the federal budget or a whole host of culture war debates. But complicated problems rarely have simple answers,...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
AI Across the Curriculum This past summer I was at a conference and ran into Flower Darby, co-author of Small Teaching Online and The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Flower has been doing a lot of work over the last two years supporting faculty explorations of generative AI in their teaching, and we spent a few minutes swapping resources and citations, since I’ve been doing that work, too. Flower pointed me to a paper from a team of faculty at the University of Florida about an “AI...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Conceptual Understanding, Technical Skills, and Generative AI Literacy One of the perks of working at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia this year is getting to meet UVA faculty who are doing really interesting work in their teaching. Back in August, I had the chance to spend a couple of days on Grounds, as they say there, working with UVA’s Faculty AI Guides. These are faculty fellows who are experimenting with the use of generative AI in their own teaching and...
3 months ago • 4 min read
An Oral History of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching When I left Vanderbilt University in September 2022, I wanted to find a way to honor the good work that the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching had done over the years. The CFT was founded in 1986, which made it 37 years old in 2023 when the current Vanderbilt provost folded the center into another unit. I worked at the CFT for 19 of those 37 years, including two years as a graduate assistant, six years as an assistant director, and eleven...
3 months ago • 3 min read