Around the Web This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too. This week, this is the entire newsletter! Education as the Lighting of a Fire: Personal Connection Strikes the Match - This is a preprint of a study by Steven Most and Nathan Clout of the University of New South Wales Sydney. Two groups of participants heard the same recorded lecture. One group was given a "relatable" backstory about the lecturer, the other was told...
12 days ago • 2 min read
How well do you know the law as it applies to teaching? This week on the podcast, I talk with Kent Kauffman, author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know. I invited him on the show because of all the stories we've seen in the last year about college and university faculty being accused by students of teaching something the student didn't the instructor should be teaching. These incidents have a lot of instructors worried about teaching controversial...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Learning How to Learn (with AI, Actually) I wrote the first draft of the “Using AI as a Tutor” chapter in the forthcoming Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins. I pitched this chapter for the book because I was brought into the author team as the “STEM guy,” that is, a co-author who could bring some STEM education perspectives to the work, and because the number one use case of generative AI in STEM education that I hear about is students turning to...
26 days ago • 6 min read
Reimagining Grading with Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley This past December, I had the honor of being a guest on the Grading Podcast ("reimagining grading as a tool for student success") hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. We had such a great conversation that I thought I would return the favor and invite Sharona and Boz on my podcast. Sharona Krinsky is the executive director of the Center for Grading Reform, a non-profit that hosts an annual conference on grading, among other...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Student-Designed AI Chatbots I've heard a lot of different objections from students to bringing generative AI into the classroom, but there was one I hadn't heard until I talked to my friend Windy Frank, who teaches in the College of Bible at Lipscomb University here in Nashville. She asked her students to design custom AI chatbots based on figures in the Old Testament such as Jonah (with the whale) and Daniel (with the lions). Her goal was to motivate students to study relevant primary and...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi friends, Many of you know I'm based in Nashville, and we had an epic ice storm last weekend. My power went out Sunday morning and didn't come back on until Thursday afternoon. And I'm one of the lucky ones! There are still 80,000 households in Nashville without power. And other parts of the Southeast were hit at least as hard... I know my friends in Oxford, Mississippi, are struggling. Please send your warm thoughts our way! All that to say, there was no podcast episode this week, and I'm...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Upcoming Appearances I have a few speaking engagements coming up this spring that I thought I would share. One of them is a free webinar anyone can attend, while the other two are for particular audiences. February 6th - "Integrating AI into Assignments to Support Student Learning," a webinar for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, 9:30am to 10:30am Central February 19th - "Thinking about Thinking: Using Formative Practice to Grow Metacognitive Learners," a panel webinar for...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Students and AI Literacy with Annette Vee How do students feel about generative AI and learning? What kind of guidance are they looking to their instructors for? How can we be understand our students so that we can together figure out how to adapt to a world with generative AI? This week on the podcast, I talk with Annette Vee, associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Annette and her colleagues have talked to a lot of students at Pittsburgh about AI, and she has a lot...
3 months ago • 3 min read
After switching newsletter providers last month, I'm back to using Kit for this week's newsletter. Kit recently increased the price for their paid plan, which is why I switched to a free WordPress newsletter tool last month. I had tried to downgrade my Kit account to their free option, but I didn't get help from their customer service department until last week. When they finally replied, they were very helpful, so I'm back on Kit to see if their free plan will work for me. None of that may...
3 months ago • 3 min read