Prepping one of my Spring courses, and I’m apparently so tired that I’ve just decided to appeal directly to my students’ sense of decency when it comes to respecting course policies on generative AI.

Woke up this morning from a dream about curriculum redesign. How’s your end of semester going?

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.

I can see the value in some state guidelines, but I suspect they would be more permissive than what I want for my classroom. I hope I’ll still have the chance to establish restrictions as I see fit.

Discovered a quirky museum spotlighting local artists and found in their gift shop a zine that a former student of mine contributed to. Double win!

I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom. Since the very first time I taught with this combination of software, students have expressed a clear preference for WordPress, and so every time I teach the class, I think that I’m going to give it up and just focus on WordPress the next time around.

Me, all of December: “Next semester, I have a course release and a once-a-week evening class. I’m going to get so much research done during the day!”

Me, on February 7th: “Wow, it’s great to finally be getting to research this semester.”

A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.

I’m stress-eating banana bread to put off grading, how’s your end of semester going?

Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.

Another fun bike commuting game is precipitation chicken: How much of this rain can I wait out before delaying my ride in makes me late for class?

Some switch has recently flipped in my brain so that I can hand out Bs, Cs, and worse without being anxious about it. I still have real concerns about grading as a concept, but I’ve stopped worrying about taking off points as though I’m the one being penalized.

I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.

I really ought to read the original piece instead of just the Slashdot excerpt, but I tried that, and it just made me even more angry, and I don’t think it would change my response.

I’m not opposed to doing away with grades, but I’m not convinced by hand-wringing about grade inflation. Grades do need to be meaningful to be useful, but the idea that As need to be reserved for an elite few speaks less to meritocracy (referenced in the full piece) than to a need for an elite.

I am, unbelievably, preparing my fourth offering of my department’s ICT/LIS 661 Intro to Data Science class, and this time around, I’ve decided to add a new section to my “about the class” page in Canvas to head off some concerns that I’ve seen over the past few years. I have a lot of students with no background in either statistics or programming who take my class, and it can be really intimidating for them. I’m not convinced that the advice I give below is everything that I ought to say (or exactly how I ought to say it), but this semester, I want to get out ahead of a lot of the one-on-one pep talks I give throughout the semester.

This semester, I am encouraged to include in my syllabus links to student resources related to mental health, food insecurity, etc., but required to include instructions for how to respond to an “active aggressor.” How depressing.

This morning, I’m reviewing a manuscript while watching a “cab ride” video on YouTube and thinking about how much calmer academic work is once final grades have been submitted.

Recently, an idea has been bubbling in my head that’s the culmination of months—even years—of thinking about how I assess in my courses. I’ve typically taken the pretty-standard approach that assessment is the process of students’ proving that they’ve learned something. What if, though, assessment is itself the proof of the process of students’ learning something. That is, what if we doled out points for students’ proving that they appropriately participated in learning activities and then trusted the learning to happen on its own?

I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.

Catching up on grading today, and I’ve been laughing out loud at some of my students’ Hypothesis annotations of class readings. I’m so glad I use this instead of discussion board responses: It’s so much more organic and creates more social presence in online classes.

Too much truth in this.

George’s example statement is one worth bookmarking.

In the summer of 2015, New Zealander Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championships despite not speaking a word of French. I heard this story on a Radio Télévision Suisse news show repackaged as a podcast (probably Le 12h30, but I can’t remember exactly) and wrote myself a note that if I ever got a chance to teach a class on games and learning, I would use this story in it. Since Spring of 2019, I’ve been teaching a once-a-year class for LIS students on games, literacies, and learning, and I’ve assigned this article from The Guardian every year that I’ve taught it. It regularly blows students’ minds when they read the headline and the first few paragraphs:

I mean this as a general observation and not generational handwringing, but it’s amazing how many cues my students take from YouTubers when recording video presentations for my class.