2024 Week 34

It’s been 29 weeks straight of posting these weekly things. I’m amazed that I’ve kept at it. It’s been kind of helpful to formalize the things I’m thinking about each week, but I also know that I’m not digging deeply into things. Quantity over quality, as it were. Although, I don’t know that it’s these weekly things that are getting in the way of that - are they like some kind of textual relief valve? Hopefully not. Anyway. I’ll probably keep this up for a bit more - it’s been super useful to have links searchable at least. But I could do that offline in Obsidian or something. 🤷‍♂️

⚙️ Work

• Teaching Days 2024 was outstanding. I didn’t get to all sessions, but the ones I got to were truly top-notch. Decolonizing education, Creating Inclusive Classrooms, Neurodiversity in Education, Integrating Generative AI into University Teaching. So much great stuff from UCalgary colleagues, for UCalgary colleagues. We’re already talking about how to make the event even better for 2025…
• I signed up to volunteer as part of the 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report panel. Who knows if I’ll be selected, but it might be interesting to help shape this stuff rather than just shaking my head at some of the predictions…
• I met with 2 students from our Software Engineering program, who wanted some feedback on a few mockup application ideas they’re working on to enhance online teaching and learning. Amazing stuff.
• I gave a tour/demo/orientation to a group of instructors who will be teaching in the TI. And, of course, the fancy tech in the room completely imploded so it was more of a discussion and “imagine, if you will…” kind of scenario. Fun! (The tech has since been completely rebooted and verified that it’s all working as expected)

🔗 Links

AI

• Ian Bogost @ The Atlantic: Colleges Still Don’t Have a Plan for AI Cheating (alternate non-paywall link)

  Generative AI has “pretty much ruined the integrity of online classes,” which are increasingly common as schools such as ASU attempt to scale up access. No matter how small the assignments, many students will complete them using ChatGPT. “Students would submit ChatGPT responses even to prompts like ‘Introduce yourself to the class in 500 words or fewer,’” he said.

  And, the heart of the matter:

  One reason it’s so easy for AI to generate credible college papers is that those papers tend to follow a rigid, almost algorithmic format.

  Formulaic assignments (write 5 paragraphs using this structure, etc.) can be effectively solved algorithmically? This is my shocked face.

• Mohammad Keyhani @ Digitvibe: The Essence of Writing (with AI) is the Taking of Responsibility

• Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research @ Northeastern University: AI assignments and activities gallery (I get why Northeastern didn’t bother to spell out the acronym for CATLR in their current posting for a me. What a mouthful.)

HR

• Timothy Wingate & Joshua Bourdage @ The Conversation: Employers should use science to optimize job interviews instead of relying on outdated misconceptions - I think we do a pretty good job of interviewing for open positions in the TI. Looking at the list of recommendations based on research (Dr. Bourdage is a prof in UCalgary’s psychology department, Dr. Wingate is at Wilfred Laurier) we’ve been doing all of that for years now.

Risk, Integrity, etc.

• Nikhil Suresh @ Lucidity: Quitting My Job For The Way Of Pain. I have thoughts, as someone with a 30-year career in academic edtech and leadership.¹

🍿 Watching

• ★★★☆☆ The Umbrella Academy. The final season started out strong, weird, interesting. It wound up kind of a mess. Anyway. It’s a thing that happened.

📚 Reading

• ★★★★☆ Finished reading Ethan Mollick’s Co-intelligence. It’s a solid exploration of generative AI and implications for work, education, practice, etc.
• Started reading Wayi Wah! Indigenous Pedagogies
• Still reading The Land of the Painted Caves.

🧺 Other

Apparently, I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from the bike. Not sure what to make of that. It’s still my happy-place, but has definitely been less fun this summer, between being out of shape, some fun health stuff, and generally just feeling too run down to really enjoy being on the bike for actual rides.

🗓️ Focus for next week

The calmer schedule of late-july/early-august is now definitely over. Lots of meetings and prep work before the F2024 semester kicks off (Block Week starts on Monday, the full semester starts after the long weekend).