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.
On the sensibility of cognitive outsourcing
On the Sensibility of Cognitive OutsourcingYou may have seen a headline or two about that new MIT Media Lab study "Your Brain on ChatGPT." This is the study in which more than 50 participants wrote SAT essays either with ChatGPT or with Google search (but no AI assistance) or with just their brains. The researchers took electroencephalography (EEG) measures of the participants and concluded that the ChatGPT cohort didn't have the same brain connectivity seen in the other two groups. The resulting headlines were predictably dire: “ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills” and “Study: Using AI Could Cost You Brainpower” and “Your Reliance on ChatGPT Might Be Really Bad for Your Brain.” I am not a neuroscientist and don't have anything to say about that part of the study, but I do know a thing or two about teaching and learning and I had a lot to say about this SAT essay writing task. I spent a morning putting those thoughts down on (virtual) paper the other week, and the result is a piece that came out this week in Inside Higher Ed titled "On the Sensibility of Cognitive Outsourcing." I invite you to read the entire article, but here's the punchline: "I think the takeaway from this study is that if you give adults an entirely inauthentic task and access to ChatGPT, they’ll let the robot do the work and save their energy for something else." And here's my real thesis: "If we’re going to better understand generative AI’s impact on learning, something that will be critical for higher education to do to keep its teaching mission relevant, we have to look at the best uses of AI and the best kinds of learning activities." I've received some very kind words about the piece, and perhaps my favorite response came from Michelle D. Miller, who is also not a neuroscientist but is a psychologist and has written about cognitive outsourcing. Here's what Michelle posted on LinkedIn about my op-ed: "Great piece and thank you for writing it, Derek! Offloading is a powerful but increasingly misunderstood concept. Cynical me wonders if it's going to become the new 'dopamine squirts are wrecking your brain!' neurobabble nonsense. Good research and good dissemination/translation of that work are the antidote, so I'm doubly glad to see this here...." If you have thoughts about cognitive offloading (which I now realize I called "outsourcing" because that's how AI use is often framed) or the kinds of educational research we should be doing about AI or about robot vacuum cleaners (a running example in my essay), please share! Teaching Effectively with ChatGPTThis week also brought a new episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast featuring an interview with Dan Levy and Angela Pérez Albertos, authors of the book Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. I ran a reading group for faculty and other instructors at the University of Virginia this spring using their book, and I found the book and the conversations it generated incredibly useful for exploring potential roles of generative AI in teaching and learning. I was very excited to talk to Dan and Angela about the book, and I'm equally excited to share that conversation with my podcast audience this week. We talk about how to help our students avoid lazy uses of AI, that is, ways that shortcut instead of enhance learning. We talk about the challenge of writing a book about such a rapidly evolving topic. And we talk about why it's important for higher education faculty (collectively, if not individually) to prepare our students to navigate this new AI world as it evolves. What we don't talk about--because I didn't learn about it until after we recorded the interview--is that Dan and Angela have a second edition of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT out this month! It's now available on Amazon (kindle | paperback), and I look forward to leading a reading group again this fall with the new edition. You can listen to my conversation with Dan Levy and Angela Pérez Albertos here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. 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 subscribing to the Intentional Teaching podcast. For just $3 US per month, you can help defray production costs for the podcast and newsletter and you get access to subscriber-only podcast bonus episodes. |
Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff
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.
Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy We're back with another "Take It or Leave It" panel on the podcast this week. I know it's only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there's a lot happening in U.S. higher ed right now, and I find these panels helpful for making sense of it all. Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions...
Teaching with AI Agents: A Conversation about Cogniti I think the first custom AI chatbot I tried was one called “Are You a Witch?” designed by past podcast guest Marc Watkins. This chatbot would answer your questions like ChatGPT, but unlike ChatGPT it would only do so after accusing you of witchcraft (in the most caricatured way possible) and making you solve a riddle. That chatbot was kind of silly, but I soon heard about faculty and other instructors building chatbots to do all kinds of...
New from the UVA Teaching Hub One of my roles at the University of Virginia Center for Teaching Excellence is supporting the growth of the CTE's Teaching Hub. The Teaching Hub features collections of resources on a variety of teaching and learning topics, with each collection curated by someone with expertise in that topic. The goal isn't to build all the great resources, but to point to the really good ones that are already out there, with recommendations like the staff picks at a good...