AI Across the CurriculumThis 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 across the curriculum” program there. I thought, sure, that makes sense, lots of universities are trying to grapple with ChatGPT and the like. It sounds like UF is a little ahead of the game. Then Flower pointed out to me that they started planning this program in 2021—a full two years before ChatGPT was released to the world. This week on the podcast, I’m excited to share an interview with Jane Southworth, professor and chair of geography at the University of Florida and co-chair of the “AI Across the Curriculum” committee that designed this new UF program. Jane shares about her landscape change research, which was using a kind of AI called machine learning long before ChatGPT was launched, and how that work get her involved in AI curriculum initiatives at UF. Jane also provides a lot of details on the new UF program, including the university-wide undergraduate AI certificate, AI-focused undergraduate research opportunities, and what turned into a herculean effort to get AI literacy embedded across the UF curriculum. I keep thinking about that last part, which Jane described as the hardest part, that is, setting up a system to tag AI literacy courses in a way that can have some impact. I remember efforts at Vanderbilt to encourage faculty to embed more digital media literacy into their courses by having students produce podcasts or make videos or design infographics. Those efforts could never really go beyond a set of early adopters because there was no curricular incentive to design courses like that. Such courses didn’t “count” for students’ general education requirements, because there was no digital media literacy requirement. Although the UF program doesn’t make AI literacy a requirement, by weaving that tag into the course catalog and setting up career advising structures to align with those literacy, they’re well on their way to seeing big changes in the curriculum. You can listen to my conversation with Jane Southworth about AI across the curriculum here, or just search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. Recentering LearningThis week marked the publication date of Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education. This book is edited by Maggie Debelius, Joshua Kim, and Edward Maloney and it features reflections by an all-star team of faculty and faculty developers about lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that higher ed can and should take into future crises and challenges. Contributors include Betsy Barre, Isis Artze-Vega, Jenae Cohn, Peter Felten, Tazin Daniels, Bryan Alexander, and Randy Bass, and those are just the people I've interviewed on my various podcasts! I'm quite honored to have co-authored the first chapter in the book, "Centering Resiliency: Principles for Academic Leaders and Teaching Center Directors," with Matt Kaplan (University of Michigan) and Mary Wright (Brown University). Our respective centers for teaching and learning played key roles on our campuses during the pandemic helping faculty and other instructors move their teaching online. In our chapter, we identify the ingredients that allowed our centers to be not just centers for teaching but centers for resiliency. We note that there will be other challenges to university teaching missions in the future, and wise investments in teaching centers will help universities be ready to face those challenges. You can learn more about (and order) Recentering Learning on the Johns Hopkins University Press website. And keep an eye on Josh Kim's Insider Higher Ed blog for interviews with contributors to the book in coming weeks. Thanks for reading!If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague who might like it! That's one of the best ways you can support the work I'm doing here at Intentional Teaching. Or consider supporting Intentional Teaching through Patreon. For just $3 US per month, you can help defray production costs for the podcast and newsletter and you get access to Patreon-only interviews and bonus clips. |
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.
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...