Generative AI as a Design AcceleratorBack 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 multimedia technologies like virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence. See my newsletter from the time for a recap of my visit along with some photos of the Dreamer. A lot has happened in the world of AI since then, so I thought it was time to reach back out to Ryan and see what his team has been up to. I learned that, among other things, they designed a number of AI experiences for faculty to use with their students. The idea is that an instructor would bring their class to the Dreamery or one of the other TLT learning spaces and have Ryan’s team walk their class through a set of activities designed to help the students (and the faculty member) increase their generative AI knowhow. While the products students create, either individually or collaborative, during these experiences are not traditional academic products (a board game, a hit single, a personal brand), the skills students develop in working with AI as part of creative design processes transfer across academic domains. This week on the podcast, I'm excited to share my interview with Ryan Wetzel. He talks about shifting one's view of generative AI from an "advanced Google search" to something more like a "design accelerator," an approach that can help students explore topics in ways they wouldn't have felt equipped to otherwise. Students who aren't, for example, graphic designers, can use AI image generators to develop multimodal projects that explore course topics. The final product isn't as important as the process that led to it, a process that can move faster or deeper thanks to strategic use of generative AI. Ryan and team are also exploring how AI can function as something of an additional group member in student group projects. You can listen to my conversation with Ryan Wetzel here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. And while you're in that app, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. UVA's Teaching HubThanks in part to a writing retreat that the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence team held in December, the UVA Teaching Hub has a bumper crop of new collections this month. Each collection features a small set of resources curated around some teaching and learning topic. See below for some of the latest collections, and be sure to subscribe to the Teaching Hub newsletter for future updates on the growing website!
If you're interested in curating a Teaching Hub collection on one of your favorite teaching and learning topics, please reach out to me! We're happy to have folks external to UVA involved, and we do our best to make the curation process as easy as possible. 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.
Peer and AI Review of Student Writing Peer review is a signature pedagogy of writing instruction. What happens when you take that established structure and add in a layer of AI-generated feedback on student writing? You get PAIRR: Peer and AI Review and Reflection, an approach to integrating AI into writing instruction developed by a team of faculty at California public institutions. On the podcast this week, I talk with two members of that team, Marit MacArthur and Anna Mills. They share how...
Managing Hot Moments in 2025 If you've been around a center for teaching and learning in the last twenty-five years, you might have seen Lee Warren's article "Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom." Lee wrote this while at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, and it's been a favorite handout at teaching center workshops ever since. From the article: "Sometimes things seem to explode in the classroom, and what do we do then? Knowing strategies for turning...
You've heard of Google NotebookLM and its "audio overview" feature, right? This is the AI-powered tool that can create a podcast-style audio summary of one or more files submitted to NotebookLM. Within a minute or two, you can hear two chatty podcast hosts talk to each other about whatever reading you've given them. I've heard faculty worry that students might start listening to NotebookLM's summaries of course texts instead of doing the hard work of actually reading the course texts. How...