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.

Somewhat more recently, I started sharing the structured reading groups activity I learned about from sociology faculty Heather Macpherson Parrott and Elizabeth Cherry as a way to bring more focus to pre-class reading assignments. Once again, a little structure seemed to go a long way.

Last week I learned about an experiment by a graphic design professor, Nikhil Ghodke, in which he created a custom AI chatbot to help his students reflect on their motion graphics projects. Nikhil finds that students often struggle to connect their design choices with the concepts and principles introduced in the course. His "Motion Graphics Reflection" chatbot has been set up to help students make those connections through AI-generated conversation.

Sure, you could invite your students to ask all kinds of course-related question to their favorite general purpose chatbot, but I really like the very specific and targeted use of generative AI that Nikhil has tried here. Structure matters when teaching, and this is a nice example of that principle.

​Read more about all this in my latest post on my Agile Learning blog.​

Around the Web

I haven't done an "Around the Web" segment in a long while! This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• "Should College Graduates Be AI Literate?" A good chunk of my work right now is helping college and university instructors learn about generative AI and then figure out what role it could or should play in their teaching. This Chronicle article by Beth McMurtrie takes a deep dive into similar work happening across higher ed right now. I'm not in the piece, but my UVA colleague Michael Palmer is, along with my old Ole Miss colleagues Josh Eyler and Marc Watkins.
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• "Recap: Understanding and Supporting Executive Function." Speaking of my Ole Miss colleagues, Liz Norell from the UM Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning shares this recap of a recent CETL event on supporting students' executive function. Executive function refers to a set of cognitive behaviors used for setting goals, planning projects, monitoring progress, and much more. Liz's post is a great introduction to executive function, what affects it (including three types of cognitive load!), and how we can support it.
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• "Teaching for Democratic Engagement and Civic Learning." You may remember Bethany Morrison's appearance on my podcast shortly before the U.S. presidential election. At that time she talked about ways to teach in a tumultuous political environment. Well, the environment hasn't gotten any less tumultuous, so I'm glad to share this new collection on the UVA Teaching Hub curated by Bethany. It features resources for supporting students' development as citizens and voters and for building students' civic skills.
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• "Beware the Chicken Bomb." Have I recommended the Sound School podcast here in the newsletter yet? It's all about audio storytelling, like the kind you hear on NPR or, well, a good podcast. Sound School is one of my favorite podcasts, and Rob Rosenthal's recent episode on the origin of the radio term "chicken bomb" is just delightful. And not only because the episode features radio legend Ira Glass calling in from the back of a cab in Budapest.

Thanks for reading!

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