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...
8 days ago • 4 min read
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...
15 days ago • 2 min read
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...
20 days ago • 2 min read
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...
29 days ago • 4 min read
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...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
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)....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
One of the most frequent requests I get from faculty is to see examples of actual assignments that thoughtfully integrate generative AI. I am very happy to share a new collection of such assignments on the University of Virginia Teaching Hub: "Integrating AI into Assignments to Support Student Learning." In my day job at the University of Virginia, I'm helping to support about 50 faculty fellows who are part of UVA's Faculty AI Guides program. These faculty are exploring the use of generative...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
The Intentional Teaching podcast has hit a milestone: 25,000 total episode downloads! That represents a lot of people across higher education developing foundational teaching skills and exploring new ideas in teaching. Or maybe a handful of super-fans. Either way, I'm proud of building up this podcast! Now on to the next 25,000 downloads... Learning at Play with Greg Loring-Albright Speaking of the podcast, this week's episode features another interview in my occasional series exploring the...
2 months ago • 2 min read
I've had the good fortune to be a part of a lot of conversations on teaching and learning in the last week. Instead of a longer essay in this week's newsletter, here are some highlights from some of those conversations. Hopefully, you'll find at least one that connects with your teaching context! Also below you'll find a few photos from my outing to the Circle B Bar Reserve near Orlando, Florida, last week. The birdwatching at this nature preserve was top notch. Course Contributors An anhinga...
2 months ago • 4 min read