Steve Krause

November 6, 2024December 4, 2024

Money, Strong Men, and Blue Dots

This morning, after Trump has won decisively, I am surprised but I’m not shocked. Harris seemed to be finishing strong and Trump seemed to be imploding, but I still knew Trump might win. Though it’s disturbing that the vote was this decisive.

There are lots of reasons why Trump won— immigration, Biden should have never run for a second term, the US is still not ready for a woman president, etc. I think it’s mostly about money though. As I heard Geoff Bennett early last night on the PBS Newshour (I’m paraphrasing here), perhaps it is a luxury for people to be concerned about the ideal of Democracy when they can’t afford groceries. After all, a surprisingly large percentage of Americans would struggle paying a $500 emergency expense. As I was driving around this morning, I heard (yes, on public radio because I am that kind of educated liberal elite) someone pointing out that in times of high inflation, incumbents lose— Ford, Carter, and now Biden/Harris. And let’s not forget that Clinton beat Bush I because “it’s the economy, stupid.”

So people poorer than me who couldn’t pay off a surprise $500 car repair bill (let alone something like a devastating medical bill) are so mad and desperate they’re willing to pick someone we know will be an agent of chaos both because that’s how he governed when he was president four years ago and that’s what he’s told us he would do in the campaign. They’ve been taken into the cult that is Trump. But rich people— I mean very very rich people, but also upper-middle class people like me who have plenty of money and safety nets to pay surprise bills, who have good jobs, who have retirement plans that have swollen thanks to a robust stock market, the kind of people who don’t pay attention to how much a loaf of bread costs— also voted for Trump because, duh, the economy, stupid. Money money money.

Let us also not forget the appeal of the strong man.

Back in spring 2019, my wife and son and I went on a guided tour/vacation to China. One of the many MANY striking things about that trip for me was seeing an authoritarian regime up close and personal on a day-to-day basis. There were cameras and checkpoints and heavily armed soldiers everywhere, especially in Beijing. My face was scanned by security guards dozens of times. Access to the western version of the Internet was blocked, and we had to use VPN software to get around it with mixed results. Most of the programming available on television (at least in the hotels where we stayed) were state broadcasts with a bit of clearly censored news from CNN and BBC. It wasn’t as bad as I imagine it was on Soviet-era Eastern Europe or it is now in North Korea, but it was pretty bad.

But here’s the thing: as far as I could tell, most Chinese people were okay with this arrangement. As long as the great leader and the state enabled the poorest citizens to have food and shelter and for the elites to shop for western goods (I saw stores for every luxury good product that you can think of, along with almost every American fast food chain), everyone was happy— or at least satisfied. Political polls in authoritarian regimes are always sketchy, but the government in places like China and Russia are popular.

What’s clear from this election is a lot of Americans seem eager to give this fascism thing a try. Because while I strongly disagree with the results, it was a fair and square vote where more people opted for the wannabe strong man. This obviously makes me worry about mindset of the majority of voters in this country right now.

I think we all know that the next four years are going be a chaotic shitshow filled with scandals and protests and insane policy proposals and all the rest. Trump might be more able to do more damage, sure, but we also know a lot more about how to try to resist and fight back. I don’t know if this will be the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it, but I know it ain’t going to be good and the minority of us who didn’t vote for this are going to have to find ways to resist and fight.

But to speak selfishly here for a moment, at least I live in a very blue dot community. Just over 70% of voters in my county (Washtenaw) voted for Harris, so a very blue community in a left-leaning region (67% of Wayne county/Detroit and just over half of Oakland county voters picked Harris) and in a still purple state. We didn’t move here for politics— we moved here to work at EMU— but we’re liable to stay for politics.

And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.

A break from AI & academia to talk politics

When I got up this morning and before I started writing in my journal, I looked back to the entries I wrote just before and after the 2016 election. FWIW, I write in a journal— I will not verb that into “journaling”— every morning and I have been doing so very consistently for about the last 15 years. Eight years ago, my journal entries in October/November 2016 were more brief than they’ve been lately, and I didn’t write much about the election between Hillary and Trump before election day. I think that’s because like everyone else, I thought Hillary had it in the bag. The shock of the day on November 9, 2016 (the day after the election) comes off the page, and I kept writing about the surrealness of the results for quite some time after that.

Let us also not forget the appeal of the strong man.

And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.

October 15, 2024December 4, 2024

Messing Around with the Viral “What’s One Thing I Don’t Know About Myself” ChatGPT Prompt

The article goes on to describe how blown away users were by the AI response, how it made them feel better about themselves, etc. It also talks about people hacking the prompt by instead asking ChatGPT to “roast me” based on our interactions. Well, I didn’t try that, but I did try the first one. If you’re curious, here’s a link to the discussion.

I don’t want to suggest I’m the most introspective guy in the world, but I don’t thinking ChatGPT told me anything about myself that I didn’t think before. But its response was definitely flattering and clever, making connections between my cooking interests and technology, for example. So I can see why it would be a good pick-me-up for users.

Anyway, the thing I really wondered about was the title the AI gave to the discussion. ChatGPT always creates the titles of these discussions, but I thought this one, “Self-Discovery Through AI Insights” sounded a little too like marketing or advertising copy.

So I asked ChatGPT about that. It responded that no, to the best of its knowledge, the AI had not been specifically instructed to say that and that’s just now how the AI works. I pointed out that there are certain prompts about things like asking ChatGPT how to build a bomb that produce specific responses: in the case of “tell me how to make a bomb,” it explains why it cannot do that. Why couldn’t that same coding/protocols be used to require ChatGPT to title conversations from a specific prompt in a specific way? The AI said that theoretically, yes, that could happen.

Could that be used for advertising? Yes. “This would be similar to how search engines or other platforms may show ads or sponsored content. If I were programmed with specific instructions to promote a particular cruise line, I could be guided to prioritize talking about that company, its features, or its benefits when asked certain questions.”

I don’t know if any of this is surprising, but it is kind of interesting, isn’t it? How long will it be before OpenAI does this?

“Self-Discovery Through AI Insights”

I have been catching up from a fall break weekend in New York City (family, friends, shows, etc.) this afternoon. It’s a good thing classes don’t start for me until Thursday. While taking a break from grading and such, I stumbled across this piece on the website tech radar, “New ChatGPT prompt goes viral with Sam Altman’s approval.” It’s about a viral ChatGPT prompt:

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, put his name to a new viral trend on the platform recently when he retweeted it on X (formerly Twitter) with “love this” added in response to a tweet that has got ChatGPT users enthralled.

The original Tweet, from writer Tom Morgan, says simply, ‘Ask ChatGPT

“From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself’.

I don’t know if any of this is surprising, but it is kind of interesting, isn’t it? How long will it be before OpenAI does this?

October 9, 2024December 6, 2024

Four Rules For Discouraging Cheating with AI in Writing Classes

An indirect but positive review of Mollick’s “Co-Intelligence”

This semester, I’m teaching two sections of first year writing (aka freshman comp) and an advanced writing course called Digital Writing, and both have AI elements and themes. In first year writing, the research theme is “Your Career and AI.” In the Digital Writing course, the last two writing projects are going to be waist-deep in writing with AI. Maybe one day I will better understand/make use of Substack’s newsletter function to chronicle these classes in more detail, but that’s later.

For Digital Writing, we’re reading and discussing Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. If you’re reading posts like this because you too are trying to make sense out of the what AI is about, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Mollick’s book and his Substack, One Useful Thing. If you haven’t heard of Mollick and you want to know more about AI but you’re overwhelmed with the firehose of news and information, then his book is for you. Co-Intelligence is a well-written, accessible, and a thoroughly researched 30,000 foot overview in less than 250 pages printed in a big font. It’s enough to get the “AI curious” up to speed on the current state of things (it was published in April 2024), while also pointing readers to ideas for further reading and research.

Mollick is a business professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, so he is primarily interested in how AI will impact productivity and innovation. I think we conceptualize teaching a bit differently, and like everything I’ve read about AI, Mollick is making some claims I doubt. But we’re mostly on the same page.

One of the most cited/mentioned chapters in Mollick’s book is “Four Rules for Co-Intelligence.” In brief, those rules are:

Always invite AI to the table, meaning you have to experiment and try to use AI (or really, different platforms, so AIs) for lots and lots of different things in order to discover what it/they can and can’t do.
Be the human in the loop: it’s a bad idea to completely turn over a task to AI, both because AI makes a lot of mistakes (aka hallucinations) and humans ought to be in charge rather than the other way around.
Treat AI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). AI doesn’t behave same way as other computer applications, so Mollick says we need to be conversational with it as if it were a human. Mostly he’s talking about creating context and scenarios in AI prompts, as in “You are an experienced teacher speaking to skeptical students about the value of group work. What advice would you give those students?”
Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use, which is perhaps the most accurate of these AI rules.

So, in that spirit, here are four more rules about teaching writing and AI— specifically, what teachers can do to discourage students from using AI to cheat.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to come up with four more rules for AI— I’m not even the first person to come up with four more rules for AI and writing! For example, there’s this fine post from Jane Rosenzweig at her site Writing Hacks “Four Rules for Writing in the Age of AI,” and also this guest post at John Warner’s Substack site by high school teacher and writer Brett Vogelsinger, “Artificial Intelligence and Writing: Four Things I Learned Listening to my High School Students.” Both great posts and great thoughts.

The most common concern about AI I read on Facebook (though not so much on Substack) from other professors and teachers is students using it to cheat on writing assignments. So this post isn’t about how to use AI to teach writing— maybe I’ll write more about that when I have a better sense of the answer. This is about how teachers can create an environment that discourages students from cheating with AI. It’s not foolproof. Sometimes, usually when they are desperate to try anything to pass the class, students cheat.

Teach writing as a process; don’t assign writing as a product.

I kicked off my writing about AI in this blog post from December 2022 “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay.’” It’s the most frequently read post on the old blog. I wrote it in response to two different articles published in The Atlantic at the time arguing that the new ChatGPT had made writing assignments impossible and irrelevant.

Teaching writing as a process has been the mantra in composition and rhetoric since the late 1970s. Scholars debate the details about what this means, but in a nutshell, teaching writing as a process means setting up a series of assignments that begin with pre-writing invention exercises (freewriting and other brainstorming techniques, for example), activities that lead to rough drafts which are shared with other students through peer review. When students hand this work in, the instructor’s feedback is geared toward revision and (hopefully) improvement on future projects. My first year writing course is typical in that it is about research and students complete a research essay project. But long before we get to that assignment, students complete a series of smaller scaffolded assignments that build up to the larger essay. Again, none of this is new and it is how I was taught to teach writing back in the late 1980s when I started as a graduate teaching assistant.

I teach writing this way because there is good evidence that it works better than merely assigning writing. I also think teaching writing as a process deters plagiarism and other forms of cheating (including with AI). I require students to build their research writing projects through a series of smaller and specialized assignments, and to share their work in progress with other students in peer review. It’s awfully hard to fake this. Also, as I wrote back in July, I now make the process more visible by requiring students to complete their essays from beginning through final revisions on a Google Doc they share with me so I can view the document history and see what it is they did to put their writing together.

In contrast, assigned writing projects have always been much easier to cheat on. Before AI, students cheated with the internet, paper mills, by getting others doing the writing, or (at least according to my father who went to college in the early 1960s) with the library of papers that fraternities kept on hand.

There’s also the issue of the purpose of writing assignments in the first place. Teaching writing as a process is especially important in a course where the subject itself is writing and there is a lot of attention to how students craft their sentences and paragraphs. I realize that’s different from a class where the subject is literature or political science or business administration. But besides the fact that we should teach (not just assign) writing across the curriculum, writing assignments should ask students what they think about something. In research-based courses like freshman comp, students write about the research they did to persuade and inform both me and their classmates about something. It’s one of the reasons why I like teaching this class: my students are always teaching me new things. In my classes that are not as research-based (like Digital Writing), students write and reflect on the assigned readings and other projects of the class in order to share with readers what they think.

Assigned writing tasks tend to seek specific answers based on the content of the course— write about the theme of madness in Hamlet, about the balance of power between the three parts of the federal government, about they key causes of the great recession, etc. In evaluating assigned writing, teachers are less interested in what students think and are more in seeing if students correctly repeated the content of the course the teacher delivered through lectures, activities, and readings. In other words, assigned writing is an assessment tool, like an exam— and in most cases, it probably would be a more effective to use an exam.

Now, teaching writing as a process is A LOT more work for everyone because it means more reading, more teacher commenting, and more checking in with students’ writing as they progress through these assignments. This is why at the vast majority of colleges in the U.S., first year writing courses have 25 or fewer students. Some colleagues who teach lecture courses with 100 or so students who also assign papers have asked me how they’re supposed to teach writing as a process in these courses. My answer is I wouldn’t. Instead, I’d rely on short written responses to readings, quizzes, and exams.

Any course assignment that could be completed without being present in that course is a bad assignment.

A lot of the hype around AI is about how great it is at passing tests— LSAT, GRE, SAT, etc. etc.— and how that is supposed to mean something. But besides the issue of whether AI can pass these tests because it “knows” or because the test questions were part of the content used to create the AI, I think we all know this is not how school works. I mean, if on the first day of a course I introduced all the writing assignments, and then a student showed up on the second day and said “I finished everything— can I get my A now?” the answer, obviously, is no.

Which brings me to this second rule: if a teacher gives students an exam or an assignment that could be successfully completed without ever being in the class, then that’s a bad assignment. This is something I never thought about before AI. In the old old days, I don’t think it made much difference. When I went to college in the mid 1980s, if someone could pass an intro to chemistry exam or a history 101 exam without ever attending the class, what’s the problem? They already had enough mastery of the subject to pass the class anyway. That started to end with students doing Google searches to pass exams, and now that AI can answer all those questions in that history 101 class final in real time, it’s completely over.

AI isn’t attending classes with our students (at least not yet), and so it is not as useful to cheat on exams or assignments that have specific connections to the course. That’s easy enough to do in the kinds of courses I teach, though I have to assume this is more complicated in a subject like calculus where the concepts and methods transcend classroom boundaries. But perhaps an even easier way to address this problem is for the teacher to make participation count as part of the grade. As I discussed in this post, my classes have a participation grade component that counts for about 30% of the grade.

AI detection software doesn’t work and it never will.

A lot of teachers want to skip these first two rules and instead just rely on some kind of app that can detect what parts of a student’s paper were written by an AI. Essentially, they want something like the plagiarism detection software Turnitin many of these teachers have used for years. Though as a quick glance at the Turnitin website reveals, they are shifting from plagiarism detection along with AI detection as well.

Plagiarism detection software has been a divisive topic in writing studies for years. While I know lots of teachers routinely require their students to run their papers through Turnitin for a plagiarism check, I never have done this because I don’t think it’s necessary and I don’t think Turnitin is as good of a tool as many users seem to think. This is especially true with AI detection. According to Turnitin, the false-positive rate for “fully human-written text” is less than 1%, but up to 20% for AI writing. And that is just for the very common and very dumb way people use to cheat with AI: writing a simple prompt and copying and pasting the answer with few changes. I have to assume the ineffectiveness in detecting AI goes down if the human using the AI effectively: for brainstorming, proofreading/editing, chatting with it about revision ideas, and so forth.

It’s a futile effort, especially as the AIs improve and as all of us (including our students) learn more about how to use them for not just cheating. Which leads me to my last point:

Teachers at all levels need to learn more about AI.

Colleges and universities are certainly trying. The two talk things I did last year about AI were both faculty development events, and the attendance at both was pretty good. I know folks here at EMU have held similar events, and I get the impression this is pretty common at most colleges and universities. And faculty have heard of AI at this point, of course.

The problem is I’m not sure any of the faculty development or the oodles of news stories about AI has resulted in any differences in teaching. This is mostly just based on my own sense of things, but I did informally poll my current students (I have about 70 this semester) the other day about AI in other classes they were taking. A few students mentioned classes where they are using AI for various assignments. A few other students mentioned instructors who expressly forbid the use of AI. I asked these students if they thought the instructor had any way of enforcing that; “no.” But the majority of my students said that the topic has not come up at all. That’s a problem.

I’m not saying every teacher now needs to embrace AI and incorporate it into their teaching. Not at all. Besides experimenting with AI in my teaching, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and reading about AI that is (hopefully) going to turn into a research project. I think my teaching with AI experiments are going well, but I honestly don’t know if this is something I’ll continue to do in the future. I feel the same way about AI generally: it probably is going to “change everything,” but it also might end up being another one of those things (like MOOCs, which was the subject of my last major research project) that never lives up to the hype.

What I am saying though is AI is here now and it looks like it’s going to be (probably) a big deal for some time to come. It is not just going to “go away” and it cannot be ignored. A professor or teacher can continue to refuse to engage with AI for valid ethical or personal reasons, but that is not going to stop everyone else from using it. That includes some of our students who are using AI simplistically to cheat, perhaps by feeding the teacher’s writing assignment into ChatGPT and copying/pasting whatever the AI comes up with. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot that sort of AI use. But what teachers cannot easily recognize or stop is a student who uses AI more in the way that it is really meant to be used: as a tool to help/improve what humans do, not replace it.

So start learning about AI, even if you hate it. Mollick’s book is a good place to start.

September 10, 2024December 4, 2024

Classroom Cell Phone Bans, Before and After Covid

It’s a good idea, though I didn’t used to think so.

When cell phones first showed up 25-20 years ago, I didn’t think much about a policy in my classes because there wasn’t much you could do with those flip phones besides talk to someone, and students knew they couldn’t do that. The main issue back then was students would forget to silence their phone and they’d go off in the middle of class. I’m not proud to admit this, but if a student’s cell phone rang during a discussion, I would make them sing a song for the group. I had heard this was the common practice in Norway and Sweden; the goal was to have a slightly embarrassing but also funny way of reminding students to turn off their phones. There’s no way I would do anything like this nowadays, of course— though it did work pretty well back then.

When smartphones came along, I continued my kind of non-policy policy: don’t let it be a distraction, and if you need to use it for taking notes or looking something up, feel free. A lot college instructors instituted strict bans on both phones and laptops, but these policies always struck me as reactionary and unnecessary. I didn’t want to be that sage on the stage who insists on complete attention from every student for every minute of class. And I didn’t want to be a hypocrite either. In faculty meetings, especially the larger ones, most of my colleagues have their laptops open and they are clearly multitasking. That’s what I do. Anyway, I always had a few students who could not resist the distraction and fondled their devices constantly, but I usually let it go, figuring that these students were mostly hurting themselves and that the overall benefits of these devices outweighed the harms.

In fact, as I blogged about back in June and September 2019, I was on a research release in the fall 2019 semester to work on a project officially called “Investigating Classroom Technology Bans Through the Lens of Writing Studies,” but which I more informally called the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit” project. I was studying the quantitative/experimental research that had been done about students using laptops and devices in classrooms, most of which was done by folks in education and/or psychology, to try to connect it to the practices and qualitative/observational sorts of research on this in writing studies. I gave a talk about starting this project at the Corridors 2019 conference at Oakland University (and I repurposed this for the online version of the CCCCs in 2020) called “Laptop/Cell Phone Bans are Bullshit (or Maybe Not).” The very short version for now is a lot of the scholarship argued it was better for students to take notes by hand rather than with a device, and that (IMO) was and is bullshit. But the “Maybe Not” part of the talk was about the problems of multitasking, how devices themselves are distracting to others, and the ways in which social media applications are designed to be as addictive as slot machines.

The next semester was the start of Covid. I and almost all my EMU colleagues taught online from the middle of that Winter 2020 semester through Winter 2022, and most high schools in Michigan were all online for those two years as well. That time online changed everyone in higher ed, but especially the students. I blogged about this in more detail here at the end of the 2022-23 school year and after being back to teaching f2f. In brief, two years of online courses was enough for a lot of students to forget they couldn’t behave the same way in person and in a classroom as they did when they were online and alone at home and often still in bed. After all, if you’re a student in a Zoom class with the camera off or in an asynchronous online class, no one cares if you’re texting or watching cat videos as the same time as you’re doing online class stuff. The freshmen had more problems with distraction then the juniors and seniors, but even some of the better students in the upper-division classes could not stop staring at their phone right in the middle of discussions.

In other words, I went from a few students not paying attention to most of them not paying attention. This was obviously bad for students, but it was also bad for me. Like I said, I don’t need to be the at the center when I’m teaching. But when a lot of students are ignoring everything and everyone around them, including me, it’s hard to not take that personally. And at the end of the day, my students’ behavior was just rude.

So in Fall 2023, I started doing something I never thought I’d do: I began class by asking students to place their cell phones on a table in the front of the room. Their phones are in sight, but out of reach. I’ve had a few students resist this by giving some reason (kids, ill relatives, etc.) why they must be in contact at all times. I tell them to leave their phones on, and if it rings, take the call in the hall. (No one has had to take a call). Also worth mentioning: I explain why I do all this by sharing a version of what I just wrote here, including the reality that learning how to participate in a f2f conversation with other humans without staring at your cell phone is a good adulting skill to have.

The class discussions improved immediately. Sure, some students grumbled about it, but no one complained on the end of the semester course evaluations where students tend to complain about all sorts of things. Now, I only do this for the first three weeks or so of the semester. After they get the idea, I tell them they can keep their phones— as long as they remain face down on the desk or otherwise stowed away. There is often a backsliding moment where I once again collect their phones, but that too is a teachable moment.

This semester when I first asked students to put their phones on the table in the front of the room, none of them hesitated or seemed surprised. I suspect I was not the first teacher they have had since Covid with a similar policy. The other day was the first class meeting in my more advanced class where I told students they could keep their phones, and one student went ahead and put their phone on the table I had previously set up anyway. “I think this helps,” she said.

For what its worth, I think this bad behavior with cell phones is fading, at least at the college level. A lot of my students have heard about and thought about cell phone addiction and the problems of various social media platforms, so I do think that there is a lot more awareness of the problem of staring at the phone too much. I think we’re soon returning to before Covid times with cell phones— and lots of other things, too.

I used to be against these bans, but not anymore

Cell phone bans in K-12 schools have been in the news at the start of this school year. Several states have instituted measures to ban cell phones in elementary and secondary schools, and bans are happening in prestigious private schools as well. The research suggests these policies help students to pay attention in class and also to socialize and interact with their peers in real time. Interestingly enough, a lot of the objections to these policies are coming from parents who are used to being in contact with their children at all times.

It’s a good idea, though I didn’t used to think so.

September 5, 2024January 24, 2025

Me and Johann Hari Swap Weight Loss Med Stories

Zepbound, Starting Month 9

I am beginning my ninth month on Zepbound, and so far, I’ve lost around 35 pounds, which averages out to about a pound a week. When I started Zepbound in January, I had a BMI that was just on the edge of “morbidly obese;” now I’m solidly “obese.” I can now run for a mile on the track at the gym without stopping (well, my “run” is more like a jog that isn’t walking, and I am often passed by taller people who are fast-walking), a goal I’ve been trying to reach for a long time. I went to my doctor for a physical in June, and learned my cholesterol (which has been under control for a while with a statin) was even lower, and, more importantly, my AIC numbers went from pre-diabetic to normal. A couple of weeks ago, I went through my closet and drawers. I set aside almost all of my pants and jeans and went shopping for things that actually fit.

So, so far, so good. As I described in a bit more detail in my previous Zepbound post, I still have nausea and other tummy-trouble side effects for a day or two after I inject, and it has changed in subtle and not subtle ways the way I think about food. I’m also feeling like after nine months, I need to be a more conscious participant in the process. As I said before, Zepbound works for me because I’m not always hungry, and when I do sit down to eat a meal, I cannot physically eat as much as I used to be able to eat. That is still true. But if I want to get to my goal of being considered merely overweight, I’m going to need to lose at least another 25 pounds. That’s going to take a more conscious effort cut out even more snacks, late night treats, booze, etc.

Meanwhile, I finished listening to Johann Hari’s book Magic Pill, which is about these new drugs, and based on his research and own experiences on the meds— in his case, Ozempic. Hari is a Scottish writer/journalist whose fast-rising career in British media almost ended in 2011 when he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating huge elements of his stories. He made a comeback a few years later with a couple of books about addiction and depression, and also a couple of very well received Ted Talks.

I became familiar with Hari from his previous book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. As the title suggests, it’s about the loss of attention and focus I think most of us sense in our day-to-day lives. Hari mostly blames cell phones and the intentionally addicting properties of social media, and also a host of other environmental and cultural factors. He presents the book as a literal journey: it starts with him traveling America with his nephew, and then Hari recounts his a solo trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he was on a social media detox and offline for several weeks. The rest of the book has him traveling the world, talking to various experts. All along the way and as a direct result of the previous plagiarism/fabrication scandals, he cites his work in detail, both in the notes in the book and on his website about the book.

For the most part, I agree with the arguments that Hari makes, though not everything— I think Hari goes too far with some of his claims about the dangers of social media and the causes of ADHD. But those disagreements were part of what made that book interesting. I assigned it in my first year composition and rhetoric classes last year, but that’s a different story. In short, Stolen Focus is a good and informative read. I’d recommend it.

Magic Pill is not.

Several reviews— notably this detailed take-down by Daniel Engber in The Atlantic— point out that in Magic Pill, Hari is slipping back into the sloppy journalism that got him in trouble before. He recycles many bits of past columns and books (I recognized a couple of these passages from Stolen Focus, complete with his nephew), and he significantly altered some of those stories to make them fit into this new book. He mixies up dates and places and people, and some of these errors are glaring. For example, Hari claims that a well-known British restaurant critic named Jay Rayner lost his love of food after being on Ozempic. Rayner posted on Twitter that that was “complete and utter bollocks.” The Telegraph did a deeper fact-checking dive into the book, and there are a lot of problems. In the end, as Marion Winik wrote in The Washington Post, Hari is constantly trying to create “ah-ha” moments out of things that anyone who has tried to lose weight— or merely eaten— already knows, like you eat less when you feel full.

Hari spends a lot of time mulling over the upsides of dramatic weight loss versus the downsides of yet still undetermined harms and the potential of needing to stay on these expensive medications for life. But in the closing chapter, I think he sums up what should be the decision making process for just about everyone with these medications in a couple sentences. To paraphrase: if you have a BMI higher than the low 30s (aka “obese”), you probably should consider trying these drugs. If you have a BMI lower than about 27 (which is the lower-end of “overweight”), you probably shouldn’t take these drugs.

What I did find interesting in listening to Magic Pill was his recounting of his experiences on Ozempic compared to mine on Zepbound. We’ve had similarly mild but persistent side-effects, and I too was surprised at how quickly it lowered my ability or desire to eat something like a Big Mac— though in his case, it’s fried chicken.

I also agree with the way Hari talks about BMI and when he gently critiques the concept of “health at every size.” Body Mass Index is far from an ideal system because of its lack of diversity and also its inability to distinguish between mass from muscles versus mass from fat, and because of its definition of “healthy” weight. I mean, for my height, BMI thinks I should weigh around 150 pounds, which is not a weight I’ve seen since middle school. At the same time, it’s kind of the best measure we’ve got. I of course agree that fat people should not be stigmatized or shamed or seen as failures because of their weight. But no one who is in the morbidly obese weight range should believe that there’s no correlation between weight and health, nor that the health problems of being too fat can be negated by only embracing body positivity.

But mostly, it’s about the differences. I began taking these drugs after years of being stuck at the same morbidly obese weight and because I did not want to develop type 2 diabetes and other health problems. Hari started taking Ozempic because he wanted to look better. As a side effect, I suppose, I’ve been pleased how Zepbound has also improved my appearance. Hari’s side effect was it improved his health.

Also, and I am surprised he never discusses this and it doesn’t come up in the reviews, Ozempic is a type 2 diabetes medication. Prescribing it “off-label” for weight loss has been common, but it also created shortages that made it a lot harder for people who actually need it for diabetes.

Hari describes a chaotic childhood where his Swiss father (who was also a chef at one point) angrily tried to force him to eat nutritious food and his mother and grandmother smuggled him junk food. He talks about how (before Ozempic, of course) he used to eat an entire bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken by himself, how he used to go on these eating binges with a friend of his who was enormously fat and who died young several years before. Hari is in his early forties, and he says he has never cooked himself anything ever, and in one scene, he describes how a friend tried to teach him how to make some simple and healthy meals and how inept he was at it. And to hear him tell it, the food industry in the UK and the US are so hopelessly hell-bent on making all of us addicted to crappy food that he literally had to go to Japan to study how the richest nation with the lowest average BMI eats real food.

How much of this is exaggerated to fit the story is unclear, but as Engber wrote in that Atlantic piece, all of Hari’s “comeback” writings and books have been obsessed with “self-control and self-destruction,” which Hari argues has been brought about by his upbringing and other social factors. In other words, Hari blames this trauma, his eating disorders, and the complete lack of available health food choices for his weight. And by implication, Hari seems to think that this is how all fat people got that way.

I don’t think this is true for me. In my teens and early twenties, I was overweight. Most people in my extended family are overweight or more. But I think there were three things that really pushed me into that “morbidly obese” range: I quit smoking over 30 years ago (still the smartest thing I’ve done for my overall health, but I almost immediately gained 20 pounds); I did not take very good care of myself in graduate school; and I got older (it’s a whole lot harder to lose a few pounds in your 50s than it is in your 30s). What I’m saying is my weight gain has been slow and steady, and it wasn’t caused by trauma or an eating disorder. I think that’s how most people get fat.

Very much like Stolen Focus, Hari calls for larger societal changes to solve the problem— in this case, changes to the food industry and also in promoting (regulating?) healthier and more nutritious diets. I agree there are some things governments can do easily (calorie and ingredient information on packages and also at the fast food counter, taxes on sugary foods, etc.), and there are some things that governments might be able to do not so easily. There is a clear correspondence between obesity and income levels in the US, so doing more to get people out of poverty would help with that.

But here’s the thing: it’s not that hard to buy food from a grocery store or a restaurant that is healthy, and it is much easier to do this now than it was just a few years ago. Detroit (and other cities like it) definitely still have food desert neighborhoods, but they also have a lot of urban farming, mobile farmers markets, and, as development has come to parts of the city like midtown, so has Whole Foods and some other chains. And yes, it’s cheaper and easier to buy and prepare processed foods and junk food, but it’s not that much cheaper and easier than buying and preparing simple meals with vegetables, fish, and (less often) meat. We don’t have to go to Japan to eat like this and none of this is new information. As Michael Pollan discovered and advised us in 2008, it’s simple: eat food (by which he means not the overly processed things), not to much, mostly plants.

Here’s the other thing that Hari never talks about, nor does anyone else trying to convince us to eat healthier: besides the undeniable convenience of fast food and processed food, these manufactured and engineered and packaged “food” products are fucking delicious. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I eat things that are bad for me just because I have “Daddy Issues” or depression or stress, or because there are few other options. I eat chocolate and doughnuts and ice cream and bacon and other clearly not good for me foods because they still give me pleasure.

The difference is with Zepbound, I just don’t eat that stuff as often.

August 26, 2024December 4, 2024

A Small Example of the Jagged Frontier and Discovering What ChatGPT Can’t Do

Or, the case of the penless writing logo

One of the things about AI I find most fascinating (and I read about this in other commentaries about ChatGPT and other AIs all the time) is it is really good at lots of things and weirdly bad at lots of other things, and that seems especially true with a lot of things humans do very well. In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes this as the “jagged technological frontier.” He describes a large study he and some colleagues did (I will probably need to read this and possibly it assign this fall), and in the abstract of that study, they write that AI creates a jagged technological frontier “where some tasks are easily done by AI, while others, though seemingly similar in difficulty level, are outside the current capability of AI.” ChatGPT can easily make a pretty good looking (to me) logo, but it cannot separate writing from the word/image/concept of “pen.”

This is going to find its way into my courses this semester; as one of a series of exercises, I want to ask students to discover for themselves something the AI can’t do, and, if possible, make a guess as to why. I guess this would be my example of some of that assignment. I had a “conversation” with ChatGPT the other day to create a logo for the Canvas site for my Digital Writing class this fall. This is using the “not free” version which allows me to generate lots of images (I think the free version limits users to just two a day.). ChatGPT won’t let me just share the conversation, so I’ll reproduce/paraphrase it here.

I started with this prompt:

“Draw me a logo for the top of a website for a college class I’m teaching called digital writing. The class examines writing as a technology. Since the course number is 354, incorporate the number somewhere into the design. The university’s colors are green and white, but it is okay to incorporate other colors if you want.”

ChatGPT made this:

Then I asked it to make a JSON script that describes what this image looks like. I’m going to skip that in this post in part because I don’t know enough about JSON, and in part that’s not the point I’m trying to make. That’s maybe a future post.

Anyway, here’s an image it made with the JSON script:

And here’s another one it made when I asked it to repeat what it did before:

FWIW, this was my favorite and the one I went with— after some minor editing.

Then I wrote: “Now forget the json script. Instead, draw me a logo for the top of a website for a college class I’m teaching called digital writing. The class examines writing as a technology. Since the course number is 354, incorporate the number somewhere into the design. The university’s colors are green and white, but it is okay to incorporate other colors if you want.” Here’s what it drew:

To me, I think the the reproduction of the logo by ChatGPT is getting a little worse in some ways. I mean, “Nourse?”

Then I wrote: “I noticed you added a pen even though that wasn’t in the prompt. There are a lot of other kinds of writing implements and tools. Why did you decide on using a fountain pen?”

ChatGPT responded: “I chose to include a fountain pen because it’s a classic symbol of writing, representing the traditional side of the writing process. The contrast between the fountain pen and digital elements (like circuits or binary code) visually communicates the course’s theme of examining writing as a technology.

“Fountain pens are often seen as timeless and elegant, bridging the gap between old and new, which fits the idea of exploring writing in both traditional and technological contexts. It also has a distinctive and recognizable shape, which makes it effective in a logo.

“If you’d prefer a different writing tool or symbol, I can certainly create a version with an alternative element!”

I wrote: “How do you think it might look if instead of a fountain pen you used a typewriter instead?”

ChatGPT responded: “Using a typewriter in the logo could create a strong visual connection to the history of writing technology, emphasizing the transition from traditional mechanical tools to digital ones. The typewriter could be depicted with keys or as a whole, evoking a sense of retro charm while still aligning with the theme of writing as technology. This could give the logo a more nostalgic feel, yet still relevant to the course’s examination of the evolution of writing tools.

“If you’d like, I can create a version of the logo with a typewriter instead of the fountain pen to see how it looks. Would you like me to do that?”

“Sure, create a version like that” I wrote back. Here’s what it made:

ChatGPT also wrote with this image “Here is the logo with a typewriter element instead of a fountain pen. This version emphasizes the traditional aspect of writing through the typewriter while maintaining a connection to digital technology. If you have any further requests or adjustments, feel free to let me know!” Oh, the mansplaining confidence of ChatGPT, trying to convince me there was no pen anymore!

I responded “That’s interesting, but there is still a pen in the logo. can you eliminate that and the three smaller versions of the logo on the left side and in the right corner?” It produced this:

And ChatGPT wrote “Here is the revised logo, with the pen removed and only the typewriter elements included. The smaller versions of the logo have also been eliminated. Let me know if this version meets your needs or if you would like any further adjustments!” Again, it seems to be glitching more on some of the words and such.

I responded “Nope, the pen is still there and there are still three smaller logos, this time across the bottom of the page. Can you get rid of the pen and the smaller logos?” ChatGPT made this:

I find the inclusion of a photo-realistic pen/mechanical pencil particularly amusing, like ChatGPT is just trying to sneak it in there. You can also see where it’s getting more confused with “W- – +—33ING” or whatever that is. I responded “The small logos are gone, but there is still a writing implement– a pen or a mechanical pencil, I can’t tell. Also you the writing for digital writing and university at the bottom of the logo shouldn’t be there. Can you eliminate these things?” It made this:

It also wrote back “This version removes the pen or pencil, as well as the additional text at the bottom of the logo. The design now focuses entirely on the typewriter and digital elements, with the course number 354 subtly incorporated. If this meets your expectations or if further adjustments are needed, just let me know!” It’s almost as if it is admitting that yeah, the pencil/pen is still there, but at least the typewriter is what is being emphasized.

Here’s the punchline for me. I asked again “Can you delete the pencil, the pen, and the word University from this logo?” ChatGPT’s response surprised me:

“It seems that the tools available to me do not allow direct editing of existing images to remove specific elements like the pencil, pen, or text. Instead, I can generate a new logo without those elements, as I attempted to do in the previous steps. However, if those elements persist in the new generation, it’s due to the constraints of the image generation process.

“If you have access to image editing software, you might be able to manually remove the undesired elements. Alternatively, I can keep trying to refine the prompt to produce a version that meets your specifications. Would you like me to attempt another version or provide instructions for editing the image manually?”

I asked “Can you tell me more in simple layman terms what you mean by the constraints of the image generation process?”

ChatGPT answered “Sure! When I generate images, I’m using a process that interprets a text description to create a visual design. The tool I use is powerful but not perfect—it tries to match the description as closely as possible, but sometimes it includes extra elements or doesn’t fully understand specific requests, like leaving out certain objects or text.

“These ‘constraints’ mean that even when I specify not to include a pen or extra text, the tool might still add them because it’s interpreting the description in a way that makes sense to it, based on patterns it has learned from millions of images.

“So, while I can describe what you want very precisely, the image might still include some unwanted elements because the generation process doesn’t always get it exactly right. This is why there might be some back-and-forth to refine the result, but it’s not always guaranteed to be perfect due to these limitations.”

If I am understanding this correctly, I think what I am running into here is a bit of that jagged frontier and the limits of the AI’s training data. Essentially, I think ChatGPT’s association between images of writing and pens/pencils are so connected that it can’t make a picture of writing that does not include a pen or a pencil.

When you think about it for a second, this isn’t too surprising. Try doing a Google image search for just the word “writing” to see what I mean. Here’s a screenshot of what I came up with from such a search:

It’s no wonder that ChatGPT thinks that the idea/word/concept “writing” goes with pen or pencil because of the rest of the data it’s been trained on does the same thing. Which is to say I think when you ask a human to create an image of the process of writing, they default to a pen.

Though I will say ChatGPT’s advice for me the human in this loop: why don’t you just use some image editing software and fix it yourself?

August 23, 2024August 25, 2025

New School Year Resolutions

So, kind of in the form of resolutions, here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this school year— mostly with work stuff, with a few life things on the list too.

Wade Deeper into AI in My Teaching— Much Deeper

This fall, I’m going to be teaching two sections of the required first year writing course (aka “freshman comp”), and a junior/senior level course called “Digital Writing.”

For first year writing, I have never let students do research on whatever they wanted. Instead, I have always had a common research theme; for example, a few years ago, the theme was “social media,” meaning students’ semester-long research project had to have something to do with social media. This semester, the theme for my sections of first year writing is going to be “AI and your future career goals.”

The Digital Writing course is one I helped develop quite a while ago and it has gone through various evolutions. It’s a course that explores literacy as a technology, and it is also about the relationships between “words in a row” writing and multimedia writing. I have always started the course with readings from Walter Ong, Dennis Baron, a selection from Plato’s Phaedrus (where Socrates talks about the nature of writing), and similar kinds of texts, and also with an assignment where students have to “invent” a way of writing without any of the conventional tools. Maybe I’ll post more about that later here. In previous versions the course, the next two projects were something more multimedia-ish: podcast-like audio presentations, short videos, comics, memes, mashups, etc. But this semester, the second two projects are both going to be deep dives into AI— and I’m still trying to figure out what that means. In that class (and among other readings), I’m assigning Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. I’m sure I’ll write more about all of that later too.

I don’t know how this is going to go, and I think it is quite possible that it will turn out poorly. I think it’ll be interesting though.

Try to be at least a little more “involved”

Being in my 36th year of teaching at the college level means that I’m getting closer to retiring— or at least officially retiring. I don’t think I can afford to retire for another seven years (when I’ll be 65), and I don’t think I’ll want to work much past 70 (12 years from now). Unofficially though, as the joke goes, I retired from service work six years ago.

Just service, mind you: I’m not “deadwood” because I’m still publishing and presenting (at least some), and I’m still trying to innovate with my teaching. But I’ve been unofficially retired from service and committee work in my department since about 2018, mainly because I spent 13 of my first 20 years here doing A LOT of service. I had a couple of different coordinator positions, I chaired a number of searches, and I had been on just about every elected committee at one time or another. I was burnt out, I wanted to get out of the way for younger faculty to step up, and I think my colleagues were tired of me being involved in everything. So for the last six years, I’ve been a lot more checked out. I meet with my fellow writing faculty about things, and I’ll go to a department meeting if there’s something important on the agenda, but that’s about it.

This year, I think I want to make more of an effort to be a little more involved with happenings on campus, I guess for two reasons. First, after six years away, I’m just ready to back, at least a bit. After all, I did a lot of service stuff for my first 20 years because I liked it and I was good at it. Second, EMU is going through some interestingly difficult times as an institution. Like most of the other regional universities in the state and a lot of similar places in the upper midwest and northeast, we’ve had falling enrollments for a while, and it seems to have gotten worse in the last two years. Falling enrollments have resulted in dramatic budget cuts and declining faculty and staff. At the same time, the administration tries to keep some money around the place with some dubious outsourcing decisions.

Just to add to the drama a bit: we’re going to have to have some serious conversations this year about the future of most of my department’s graduate programs; the dean has announced that she is taking an early buyout and is leaving at the end of the school year; and the president announced a while ago that he will be retiring at the end of his contract in 2026. Which, when I think about it, might be when the faculty union will be negotiating a new contract.

I could go on, but you get the idea. There’s too much going on around here now to be checked out.

I’m not quite sure what “trying to be at least a little more involved” means, and I’m not interested in taking on any huge service jobs. I’m not planning on running to be on the executive committee of the faculty union, for example. But I suppose it means at least going to more informational meetings about things on campus.

(I should note that I have already failed on this resolution: I attended a kicking off the semester department meeting this morning, but then decided to blow off the College of Arts and Sciences meeting in the afternoon).

Put together my next (maybe last?) sabbatical/research release project proposal

I have a few ideas, mostly about AI and teaching (not surprisingly). As was the case with my work on MOOCs and before that the emergence of different writing technologies and pedagogy, I’m interested to see what kinds of tools and technologies from the past were as disruptive in ways that are similar to AI. That’s kind of vague, both on purpose and because that’s where I’m at in the process.

Anyway, sabbaticals and semester long research releases are competitive, and I’m eligible to submit a proposal in January 2025 for a semester off from teaching to research in the 2025-26 school year.

Keep figuring out Substack

The look and feel of this interface versus WordPress is intriguing, and while there are features I wish this had, there’s something to be said for the simplicity and uniformity of Substack— at least I think so far. I don’t think I’ll be able to rely on revenue from newsletter subscriptions anytime soon, and that’s not really my goal. On the other hand, if could convince 1000 people to give me $100 a year for stuff I write here…

Keep losing weight with Zepbound

I started Zepbound in the first week of January 2024 and, as of today, I’ve lost about 35 pounds. It’s not all the result of the drugs, but it’s— well, yes, it is all the result of the drugs. Anyway, my resolution here is to keep doing what I’m doing and (ideally) lose another 25-30 pounds before the end of the semester.

August 16, 2024December 4, 2024

Grading Participation Helps Students

But no, not this. In my experience, attendance (participation, actually) needs to be a part of a student’s grade.

Dyer’s argument against grading attendance is based on compassion for students and their complicated lives. I get that, and I hear a lot of similar things from many of my fellow writing teachers as well. I teach at an opportunity granting institution where my students are probably similar to hers (she teaches at a community college). We do have “traditional” students who are 18-21 and living on or near campus, the kind of student more typical at a place like U of Michigan (which is about 7 miles away from where I work, EMU). But we also have students who commute and some from quite a distance away, and that creates a variety of attendance problems. We also have a lot of students who have significant work and family obligations— and that isn’t just the older returning students, either.

Dyer mentions a “secret project” she’s working on that includes reviewing syllabi from dozens of other gen ed biology classes, and she highlights a couple of draconian policies where missing two or three classes could drop a student’s grade by a full letter. That seems crazy and unreasonable to me too.

That said, I don’t think it takes a lot of research for me to claim that students who miss too much class tend to fail. Sure, teachers need to have some compassion and understanding, and they need to remember students have lives where stuff happens sometimes. But to me, a reasonable attendance policy is just like all kinds of rules and laws for things people should do anyway, even if it is arguably a “personal choice.” Take seat belt laws, for example. I’m old enough to remember riding in a car and learning to drive myself before seat belt laws, and I rarely bothered to buckle up. The law requiring it (and the possible ticket, of course) gave me and many other drivers the nudge we needed.

At Eastern, legend has it that the Board of Regents once passed a policy that declared no student could fail a class based on attendance alone. I’ve never found evidence that this policy exists (though I haven’t looked very hard), but whatever. I don’t grade students on attendance; I grade students’ participation, and the first thing a student needs to do to successfully participate is to show up.

Now, Dyer and I are working in different disciplines. I teach writing and all of the classes I teach have 25 or fewer students. It’s obviously easier to take attendance with 25 students than in a lecture hall with 250, and it’s a lot easier for students in a small class to understand why they need to show up. I have no idea how many students Dyer is working with in her courses, but since she teaches biology, I assume it’s more than me.

I think also think we have different assumptions about what class meetings are for. Dyer writes:

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

I think she thinks that the point of a class meeting is for an instructor to deliver content to students, and the measurement of a student’s success in the course is an exam. And I get that— as far as I can tell, this has been the STEM assumption about pedagogy and assessment forever.

In the courses I teach (and I think this is true in most courses in the humanities), we value the stuff students do in these class meetings. The new-ish innovation of the “flipped classroom” is how most people I know have been teaching writing forever. My courses involve a lot of discussion of readings, discussions and brainstorming about the writing assignments, and peer review of those assignments. So “being there” is part of process, and there’s no way to cram on an exam at the end of the semester to try to make up for not being there.

The other thing is that now that we have AIs that easily answer any question that might pop up on a gen ed intro to biology exam, it seems to me that this approach to assessing students’ success is going to have to change and change very soon. One of the many things AI has made me rethink about teaching and learning is if someone can successfully complete an assignment without attending the course, then that’s not a very good assignment. But that’s a slightly different conversation for a different time.

Anyway, here’s what I do:

Participation in my classes is 30% of the overall grade and it includes activities like reading responses, small group work, and peer reviews. I don’t have a good way of keeping track of the details of these things in f2f classes, so to figure out a grade for participation, I have students email and tell me what grade they think they have earned, I respond, and then I base the grade on that. I think this is a surprisingly accurate and effective way of doing this, but that too might be a different post.

Students can’t participate if they aren’t there, so I tell my students they shouldn’t miss any class at all. However, the reality is there are of course legitimate reasons why students have to miss. So my policy is students can miss up to four class meetings— or the equivalent of two weeks in a 15 week semester— for any reason whatsoever. Students can always tell me why they need to miss class, but that’s up to them and I do not ask for any sort of “note” from someone.

Students who miss five classes fail— or at least they usually fail. Since the age of Covid, I have lightened up on this a bit and I’ve made a handful of acceptions with a few students. I also recently started giving students with perfect attendance a very small bonus, often enough to make a half-letter grade difference.

I’ve had a version of a policy like this for my entire teaching career, and I am comfortable in asserting that students who miss two weeks of a 15 week semester are essentially fail themselves anyway. These students aren’t just absent a lot; they also don’t turn stuff in. So just like seat belt laws incentivized wearing a seat belt (and undoubtedly saved countless numbers of people), an attendance policy incentivizes the positive behavior of showing up. And I guarantee you that I have had students in classes who grumbled about being required to show up who would have otherwise failed themselves.

And the first step to participating is attendance

In my new (mis)adventures on Substack, I stumbled across “Grading attendance hurts students” from Jayme Dyer in the Threads feed. Dyer teaches biology and based on my very brief browsing of her site (stack? sub? newsletter? what the hell is this called again?), I am pretty sure we’d agree about most things.

But no, not this. In my experience, attendance (participation, actually) needs to be a part of a student’s grade.

I think also think we have different assumptions about what class meetings are for. Dyer writes:

Think about it this way – if a student misses a class, makes up what they missed and performs well on the assessment, should their grade really be lower than a student who attended class and performed equally as well on the assessment?

Anyway, here’s what I do:

August 11, 2024August 18, 2024

Bye-Bye Blog (sort of, at least for now)

This is the 2,677th post I’ve written in/on this blog, and it’s the last one. Well, probably, or as long as this Substack thing works out.

The first post published on this site was “A New Blog is Blogging,” back in 2003. The post is about moving my already created blog from a software I no longer remember called flipsource (which I ran on a desktop computer I was using as a server in my school office) to Blogger. I switched to Moveable Type (which I guess still exists) briefly but I’ve been using WordPress since about 2005. I’m going to keep using that here.

I actually sorta/kinda started blogging the year before that here in September 2002. As I wrote back then, I started my not a blog (just a static website, actually) as a way of updating/promoting an article I wrote which was published in the brand-new College Composition and Communication Online called “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites,” and also to write some things for a talk I was going to give in March 2003 at the CCCCs called ““Why Weblogs Should (and Shouldn’t) Count as Scholarship.” That was the first conference presentation I gave about blogging.

Also a tangent: “Where Do I List This on My CV?” was “disappeared” by NCTE when they gave up on the new online version of the journal after one issue and deleted my article from their servers. Here’s a blog post about that experience. I can’t remember if the Kairos editors reached out to me or if it was me to them, but they published a follow-up “Version 2.0” of the piece in 2007. NCTE tried again to do an all online version of the CCCs a few years later that was a disaster and ended after one issue, though that still is online. No one at NCTE or the CCCs editorial office has ever done anything to restore my disappeared article. Funny how that goes, huh?

Anyway, I’m not quitting blogging, but I am moving that part of things over to Substack. I’ll keep using this space as my homepage, perhaps as a “depository” for other web things, like my textbook (which I am going to update some day, maybe). I explain why in my first post completed on the Substack platform— the other posts are ones I imported from this site.

But the “at least for now” thing is real. Looking back at the origin story of my blogging reminds me that back in the day, I switched platforms and hosting services a couple of times before settling on WordPress. So who knows what will happen in the next couple years.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, this site isn’t going away, and come see me at Substack.

August 10, 2024December 4, 2024

Oh Hi, Substack…

Switching from stevendkrause.com to here for “blogging”

This is my first post on Substack that didn’t originate at stevendkrause.com, which is where I’ve been blogging (I think people still call it that?) since 2003. So I’m a newbie here, but this ain’t my first rodeo.

To back up:

I started back in the late 1990s when weblogs were this whole new thing. It’s a format that has always appealed to me, I suppose because it merges two things I’m really interested in: writing (as a practice, a study, a profession, etc.) and emerging medias/technologies. I’ve kept a journal off and on since I was a kid, I was an English major in college, and I studied creative writing in an MFA program back in the days when I had aspirations of being the next famous novelist. I went on to a PhD in the field Composition and Rhetoric, and since 1998, I’ve been a professor at Eastern Michigan University. I mostly teach writing courses, everything from “freshman comp” to courses to MA students about how to teach writing.

I’ve also always been keen on computer stuff. I am old enough to have started writing in college with a typewriter only to switch to a computer. In my case, that was a Mac 512K with no hard drive, just floppies. I got a “real job” for a couple years after I finished my MFA and before I went on for my PhD mainly because I knew how to use PageMaker, the desktop publishing software of its day. I like gadgets (Apple fan boy forever), not to mention all things internet. I’m not a programmer or an expert about how computers (and the Internet, AI, etc.) actually work, but I’ve always been interested in how we use this technology. Plus most of my scholarship has to do with the connections between writing practices and pedagogies with technology.

Twenty-some-odd years ago, the majority of my blog posts were like social media posts, mostly links and brief commentary. When social media platforms came along, those “micro-blog” posts” ended up on Facebook (and at one point Twitter). But for longer pieces (like this, for example), I continue to write on my blog, about a post every month or so.

In academia, there has/had been debate about the value of public writing like this. Back in the day, there were a lot of articles in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education telling grad students and the untenured it’s a bad idea to have a blog because you might end up writing something that could ruin your career. As my mother-in-law who grew up behind the Iron Curtain said about life in communist East Germany, the tallest sunflowers are the ones that get their heads cut off first.

My experience has been the opposite: just about every success I’ve had as a scholar has been connected to blogging. This is not to say I can claim to have been all that successful as a scholar in my field (as a friend and former colleague likes to put it, “famous academic” is an oxymoron), but I’ve done okay. My scholarship about blogging (in the early days) lead to my first sabbatical project and some work on using blogs as a teaching tool. My blogging about MOOCs lead to an edited collection of essays, a bunch of cool speaking/conference gigs, and my single authored book on MOOCs. And in more recent years, my blogging about AI has lead to a couple of invited speaking opportunities, and who knows what’s next.

Plus it’s kind of a compulsion for me, like keeping a journal. I tried to give that up a few years ago, thinking that the daily 15-45 minutes doing that could be used doing more productive things. I couldn’t stop.

So, why the switch to Substack?

I started checking it out/noodling around with it a few months ago because it seemed to be what all the cool kids were using. I’m not planning on charging any money to read my rants, but I do like the idea that it is something a user can easily do. I can take or leave the email/newsletter feature here, personally. On the one hand, I still spend a lot of time in email and I do sometimes read the things I get from Substack subscriptions. I can see why a lot of Substack users push these newsletters, especially if they’re trying to convert free subscriptions into paid ones. On the other hand, I often delete those emails unopened. I really like the ease of the Substack interface for writing/publishing, though I have nothing at all against writing/publishing with WordPress. I’ll still keep that for my “official” homepage.

The main reason I’m switching to Substack (for now— who knows how long this will last) is the community and connections possible. Back in the old old days, bloggers had “blogrolls,” links to other bloggers. Back in the not as old days, I used Feedly and other RSS Feed readers to follow different blogs. Most of those writers stopped posting a while ago, which I suppose is inevitable.

But Substack (this is for anyone who is just reading this and not actually interacting with it on the platform itself) strikes me as an opportunity to reconnect with that kind of community again. The interface is much more like Facebook or Instagram in that there’s a “feed” of both Substackers (what do you call these people?) I follow and about things I’m interested in. You can share or “restack” posts from others in your feed, also like the old days of blogging and social media now. I like that.

Writing on Substack or blogging on my own WordPress site is still mostly screaming into the void. At least 90% of the 2,600+ posts I wrote on my blog have never been read by anyone but me. But besides the fact that the value of writing like this is as much about the process as it is about reaching an audience, every once in a while, I’ll write something that makes that connection with readers. That’s what I’m hoping for here.

Anyway, thanks for coming by, and as be sure to smash that subscribe button (or whatever it is they say nowadays).