World Building with Generative AI

Last fall, Google released a new generative AI tool called NotebookLM. It does a lot of different things, but it's claim to fame (briefly) was its ability to generate an audio overview of one or more documents in the style of a particular kind of podcast. When this feature of NotebookLM hit the social last fall, I saw lots of faculty posting that having students listen to an AI-generated summary of a course text instead of reading the text themselves was surely going to lead to a loss of reading skills among students. At the same time, I talked with a colleague from my university who had an independent study student use the audio overview as a way into a hard reading, not replacing the reading but doing a better job than the paper's abstract at orienting her to the text.

With reading as with writing, outsourcing our thinking to an AI chatbot is problematic, but that's hardly the only way generative AI can be used.

It was with all this going on that I met Lauren Malone at a conference at the University of Tampa earlier this year. Lauren is an assistant professor of communication at Tampa, and while I didn't get the chance to attend her conference session about NotebookLM, I did take down her name to follow up later. Lauren teaches a few different game studies courses in the communication and media studies program, including a course on writing for games, especially digital games. When I met her she was actively experimenting with NotebookLM in that course, which made her one of the first faculty I knew about doing something with NotebookLM.

On this week's episode of Intentional Teaching, I talk with Lauren about what she's learned integrating this particular generative AI tool into her teaching, with a focus on an extended worldbuilding assignment. She shares about teaching creative thinking with AI, the importance of the struggle in learning, some very different student responses to AI, and changes she's already making in her use of AI as her work-in-progress continues. Can AI like NotebookLM function as a meaningful learning assistant? The jury's still out, but I appreciate that faculty like Lauren are trying to answer that question.

​You can listen to my conversation with Lauren Malone here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Some AI Futurism

All I know about futurism I learned from Bryan Alexander. Bryan teaches at Georgetown University, but he's probably best known for his books exploring the future of higher education. Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education came out in 2020, the same year I interviewed Bryan on my old Leading Lines podcast. His most recent book is Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis from 2023. Bryan taught me that futurism isn't just some kind of sci-fi speculation, but instead a set of practices that groups can use to hypothesize about the future in a way that can inform our present choices.

One of my spring projects has been facilitating a faculty learning community on teaching and generative AI for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis. I learned a lot from this group over several sessions about how faculty in different disciplines and teaching contexts are thinking about the impact of AI on teaching and learning. For our final session together, we engaged in a little forecasting about generative AI and higher ed. I'm no Bryan Alexander, but I was able to borrow a couple of the futurism practices he's written about to spend a very productive sixty minutes with my WashU colleagues imagining what might be coming.

I think we collectively generated a lot of food for thought regarding AI's future in higher ed, and you can read all about it on my blog in a post I titled "Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Chatbots."

New Collections on the UVA Teaching Hub

Part of my work at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia is serving as an editor for the CTE's Teaching Hub, a website featuring collections of resources curated by experts from around higher ed. We've published four collections in the last week or so, and I thought I would share them here for readers interested in any of the topics these curators have covered.

• "From Class to Community: Centering Trust in Learning Spaces" was curated by Brielle Harbin, who teaches political science at the United States Naval Academy. (You might remember Brielle from a 2023 episode of Intentional Teaching about teaching race and politics.) Brielle's new collection argues that "a collaborative classroom doesn't happen by accident; it's created by design." The collection features resources on a variety of techniques for fostering trust in one's classroom.
• "Compassionate Online Course Design" was curated by Jeremiah Shipp, a faculty developer at the Center for Innovative and Transformative Instruction at Winston-Salem State University. I attended a conference session led by Jeremiah awhile back, and I knew he would have a lot to offer in a Teaching Hub collection. His new collection offers resources for putting "flexibility, peer support, and motivation at the heart of the online learning experience."
• "Learning Assistant Programs" was curated by Katie Johnson, who teaches math at Florida Gulf Coast University. I've seen campus after campus where the Learning Assistants (LAs) model--embedding trained undergrads in classrooms to support active learning--has been successful. Katie founded the LA program at Florida Gulf Coast, where it now serves 15 departments. I had Katie and one of her experienced LAs, Katarya Johnson-Williams, on the podcast last year, and then I invited Katie to put together this fantastic introduction to the LAs model.
• "Standards-Based Grading" was curated by Drew Lewis, who is the director of research at the Center for Grading Reform. Drew is a former math professor, and he's been using alternative grading practices in his teaching for over a decade. You may know the Center for Grading Reform for its annual Grading Conference, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, June 11-13. The conference is online and inexpensive, so if you're interested in alternative grading, you might check it out. Drew's new Teaching Hub collection provides an introduction to one particular alternative grading practices, Standards-Based Grading.

The Teaching Hub is always taking proposals for new collections, so if you're interested in curating a collection like one of these four, please reach out!

Thanks for reading!

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