Be the first annotator who invites response. Do not share a syllabus with your students that you have not already annotated. How do I “seed” my syllabus? With a mix of annotations that are administrative, introductory, informal, personal, and critical. Here are a few examples of “seed” annotations from courses I’ve taught this past spring and summer terms

And then actually later on I repeated this, but I presented this material in what we call an active learning environment, where rather than just telling students that they had to answer a question, they had to figure out a question about how something behaved and then get feedback on that. And then I tested them on that and overwhelmingly they all remembered it. So that was just a very simple but clear demonstration of what I thought was pretty good lecturing was not very effective.

Studies

Sonstein, the Purdue University CTO, said his team currently has a generative AI system that can give advice related to technical documentation, like how to set up a networked printer. Next month, he said, an AI will learn from the university’s public website and be able to answer questions about which dining facility has things like pizza and how to find buildings on campus

“What are the enduring questions she should be asking herself?” Weiss said. “Is it OK to work alongside an AI for this type of task versus this type of task? Is it taking away from future opportunities or future skills she might have? I think students do have the capacity to reflect, but I’m not sure right now we’re giving them the right questions.”

Starting your campaign with a strong hook for why it should matter to your learners

We encourage faculty to exercise caution in testing assumptions of what AI “can” and “cannot” do through research and experimentation. Many of our assumptions were debunked as we put this tool together — such as the notion that only activities, assessments, and outcomes at the bottom levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy may need revision.

How is the environment affected by this technology?

While ChatGPT is new, the phenomenon it represents — a disruptive technology raising fears of automation and cheating — is anything but. Before ChatGPT, there was Wikipedia; before Wikipedia, TV; before TV, the camera; before the camera, the printing press; and on and on

a larger question looms: How do we empower students and remind them that their own original ideas and work are always superior to an artificially generated idea (or 10-page paper)? This is especially important for first-generation college students and students of color at all degree levels who are still trying to determine if they belong.

ChatGPT is powerful, but while the prose it produces is grammatically correct, it is bland and analytically weak

I have concerns about access. Will individuals have to pay for access after the testing phase? When servers are busy who gets priority access? I also have questions about content. Who determines the data used to train the model?

I would have them work on the same general topic and come up with their own prompts to see what essay ChatGPT would generate for them. I’d then have them work in small groups to compare the essays that their prompts generated.

But we saw these patterns change when adjunct faculty were given professional learning supports on par with those available to their full-time faculty peers

As an example, Dr. Ng adapted this activity, originally written as an individual project, to a short in-class activity for teams

take time to mentally walk through the learning objectives, driving questions, and key takeaways.

Students may submit their own questions in advance or provide commentary that can serve as a jumping-off point for discussion

It’s useful to name the awkwardness as well as our own misgivings

This is a spat about status symbols that distracts from an important conversation about academic labor.

Duke's Kits project is the university's latest effort to provide a next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE) for the Duke community and, as an open-source project, to the wider world

“When we call anything “open” we need to clarify: What are we opening, how are we opening it, for whom, and why?”

VR learning experiences need to be about action. As learning expert and virtual world expert Randy Hinrichs astutely pointed out in Learning in 3D “It’s not about being there, it’s about doing there.” Create the VR environment so that the learning objectives are embedded in an experiential activity. If the learner is merely observing in a VR environment, the design has a dramatic shortfall.  Think about adding action and activity to the VR experience. Make the learner do something, make movement required and meaningful

This would be fine if everyone had access to these jobs, but this is unlikely to be the case

When prototyping becomes a habit, teachers begin to build stamina to keep iterating, especially when something doesn’t work the first time

Duncan’s technique is to interview real-life technology experts, such as Kevin Kelly and Dean Kamen and Tim O’Reilly, and that work their insights into a vision of the future

the types of annotations students typically add to a syllabus. Here’s an incomplete list: