Author: Steve Krause

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

New School Year Resolutions

Well, sort of….

The 2024-25 school year is my 36th teaching college (counting my time as a grad student and a part-timer), my 26th year as a tenure-track professor at EMU, and my 17th as a full professor. So it’s probably no wonder that when I think of the “new year,” I think of new school year at least as much as I think of January. On the old blog, I usually wrote a post around this time of year, reflecting on the school year that was and the year that was likely ahead of me. No reason to stop doing that now, right?

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.

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.

Posted on

Grading Participation Helps Students

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.

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.

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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).

Posted on

Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about why I use Google docs to teach writing at all levels. I’ve been using it for years–long before AI was a thing–in part because being able to see the history of a student’s Google doc is a teachable moment on the importance of the writing and revision process. This also has the added bonus of making it obvious if a student is skipping that work (by using AI, by copying/pasting from the internet, by stealing a paper from someone else, etc.) because the document history goes from nothing to a complete document in one step. I’m not saying that automatically means the student cheated, but it does prompt me to have a chat with that student.

In a similar vein and while I’m thinking about putting together my classes for the fall term, I thought I’d write about why I think teaching citation practices is increasingly important in research writing courses, particularly first year composition.

TL;DR version: None of this is new or innovative; rather, this is standard “teaching writing as a process” pedagogy and I’ve been teaching research writing like this for decades. But I do think it is even more important to teach citation skills now to help my students distinguish between the different types of sources, almost all of which are digital rather than on paper. Plus this is an assignment where AI might help, but I don’t think it’d help much.

Continue reading “Why Teaching Citation Practices (yes, I’m talking MLA/APA style) is Even More Important with AI”

Posted on

Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI

I follow a couple different Facebook groups about AI, each of which have become a firehose of posts lately, a mix of cool new things and brand new freakouts. A while back, someone in one of these groups posted about an app to track the writing process in a student’s document as a way of proving that the text was not AI. My response to this was “why not just use Google docs?”

I wish I could be more specific than this, but I can’t find the original post or my comment to it; maybe it was deleted. Anyway, this person asked “what did I mean?” and I explained it briefly, but then I said I was thinking about writing a blog post about it. Here is that post.

For those interested in the tl;dr version: I think the best way to discourage students from handing in work they didn’t create (be that from a papermill, something copied and pasted from websites, or AI) is to teach writing rather than merely assigning writing. That’s not “my” idea; that’s been the mantra in writing studies for at least 50 years. Also not a new idea and one you already know if you use and/or teach with Google docs: it is a great tool for teaching writing because it helps with peer review and collaborative writing, and the version history feature helps me see a student’s writing process, from the beginning of the draft through revisions. And if a student’s draft goes from nothing to complete in one revision, well, then that student and I have a chat.

Continue reading “Why I Use Google Docs to Teach Writing, Especially in the Age of AI”

Posted on

No, Student Writing Is Not Dead (or how AI faculty freakout is back)

Now that the 2023-24 school year is long over and my wife and I are (mostly) done moving into our new house, it’s time to start thinking again about AI for teaching in the fall and for some scholarly things beyond. I’ve been mostly ignoring these things for the last couple of months, but even in that short time, it feels like things have changed. AI tech is getting quickly integrated into everything you can imagine, and it feels to me like the AI faculty freakout factor is on the rise once again.

This is just a gut feeling– like I said, I’ve been out of the loop and it’s not like I’ve done any research on this. But the current moment reminds me a bit of late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT first appeared. By the time I did a talk about AI at Hope College in late April 2023 and also again a talk/workshop about AI (over Zoom) at Washtenaw Community College in October 2023, teachers had settled down a bit.  Yes, faculty were still worried about cheating and the other implications, but I think most of the folks who attended these events had already learned more about AI and had started to figure out how to both use it as a tool to help teaching. They also realized they needed to make some changes to assignments because of AI tools.

But now the freakout is back. Perhaps it’s because more faculty are starting to realize that “this whole AI thing” is something they’re going to have to deal with after all. And as far as I can tell, a lot of the freaked out faculty are in the humanities in general/in English in particular. I suppose this is because we teach a lot of general education classes and classes that involve a lot writing and reading. But I also think that the reason why the freakout is high in fields like English is because a lot of my department and discipline colleagues describe themselves as being “not really into technology.”

The primary freakout then and now– at least among faculty in the humanities (I assume STEM faculty have different freakout issues)– is that AI makes it impossible to teach writing in college and in high school because it is too easy for students to have ChatGPT (or whatever other AI) to do the work for them. I wrote a post in response to these articles back in December 2022, but there were dozens of freakout articles like these two. These articles almost always assume that AI has uniquely enabled students to cheat on assignments (as if paper mills and copy and pasting from “the internet” hadn’t existed for decades), and that given the chance, students will always cheat. So the only possible solution is to fight AI with things like detection software or returning to handwritten exams.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Consider, for example, Lisa Lieberman’s June 2024 Chronicle of Higher Education article “AI and the Death of Student Writing.” Lieberman, who teaches community college English and composition courses “in California’s Central Valley,” has seen an alarming uptick in students using AI to write their papers. She gives an example of a student’s essay about The Shining that included the sentence “A complex depiction of Jack’s development from a struggling family guy to a vessel of lunacy and malevolence is made possible by Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant direction.” Lieberman writes “I called the student in and asked him to write a sentence with the word ‘depiction.’ He admitted he didn’t know what ‘depiction’ meant, much less how to spell it, much less how to use it in a sentence. He confessed he hadn’t written a single word of the essay.” (For what it’s worth, I would have asked this student about “malevolence”).

Then she moves on to discussing a student writing her essay with the now AI-fueled version of Grammarly. Lieberman “discovered it’s a multilayered computer program that does everything from simple spelling and grammatical corrections to rewriting entire sentences, adjusting tone and fluency.” She estimated that at least of a third of her students were consistently using AI: “Once they believed they could turn in AI assignments undetected, they got bolder … and used AI for every single assignment.”

It’s all just so wrong, Lieberman laments, in part because of how her students are just cheating themselves by using AI. Here’s a long quote from the end of the article:

I remember my days at Berkeley, where, as an English major, I’d take my copy of Wallace Stevens’s The Palm at the End of the Mind, or Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and pick a nice, sunny spot on campus on a grassy knoll underneath a tree, lay out my blanket, and spend the afternoon reading and scribbling notes in my books. It was just me and my books and my thoughts. There was nothing better.

As I lay there reading the writer’s words, they came to life — as if the author were whispering in my ear. And when I scribbled my notes, and wrote my essays, I was talking back to the author. It was a special and deep relationship — between reader and writer. It felt like magic.

This is the kind of magic so many college students will never feel. They’ll never feel the sun on their faces as they lie in the grass, reading words from writers hundreds of years ago. They won’t know the excitement and joy of truly interacting with texts one-on-one and coming up with new ideas all by themselves, without the aid of a computer. They will have no idea what they’re missing.

I understand the anxiety that Lieberman is expressing, and I completely agree that AI technology is forcing us to change how we teach college classes– and, in particular, classes where students are expected to read and to write about that reading.

However:

  • Students have been cheating in school for as long as there has been school. AI make it easier (and more fun!) to cheat, but none of this is new. So any educator who thinks that students have only now started to cheat on the things they assign only because of AI are kidding themselves.
  • In my experience, the vast majority of students do not want to cheat this much. Oh sure, they might cheat by poorly borrowing a quote from a website, or looking over someone’s shoulder to get a quiz answer on a multiple choice test. But in my view, these are misdemeanor offenses at best. Also, when students do not cite sources properly (and this is as true for the MA students I work with as it is with the first year writing students), it’s because they don’t know how. In other words, a lot of plagiarism is a teachable moment.
  • Also in my experience, students who do blatantly cheat by downloading from a papermill or prompting an AI to do the whole assignment are a) already failing and desperate, and b) not exactly “criminal masterminds.” Every freakout narrative I’ve read– including Lieberman’s– includes a “scene” where the instructor confronts the student with the obvious AI cheating. So to me, if it’s this easy to catch students who cheat using AI, what’s the problem? Just punish these students and be done with it.
  • The fundamentals of teaching writing as a process– the mantra of writing studies for the last 50+ years– are still the same and the best way to discourage students from cheating with AI or anything else. Don’t merely assign writing– teach it. Make students show their work through drafts. Use a series of shorter assignments that build to a larger and more complex writing project. In a research-oriented writing class (like first year composition, for example), require students to create an annotated bibliography of all of their sources. Have peer review as a required part of the process. Etc., etc., etc. None of this is foolproof and for all I know, Lieberman is already doing this. But besides actually helping students to become better writers, teaching (rather than just assigning) writing like this makes cheating as much work as just doing the assignments.
  • I think the best way to dissuade students from using AI to cheat is to explain to them why this is a bad idea. Last year, I had a discussion at the beginning of all of my classes on the basics of AI and why it might be useful for some things (see my next bullet), and why it is not useful for cheating, and that’s especially true in classes that involve research and where writing is taught as a process (see my previous bullet). I think by making it clear from the beginning that yes, I too knew about AI and here’s why cheating with it isn’t a good idea, fewer of them were tempted to try that in my classes.
  • I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Grammarly. At EMU, I will often get letters of accommodation from the disability office about students enrolled in my classes that tell me how I am supposed to “accommodate” the student. That usually means more time to take exams or more flexibility for deadlines, but often, these letters say I should allow the student to use Grammarly.

My philosophy on this has always been that it is a good idea for students to seek help with their writing assignments from outside of the class–help that assists, not that does the work for the student. I always encourage students– especially the ones who are struggling– to get help from a writing center consultant/tutor, a trusted friend or parent, and so forth. I think Grammarly– when used properly– falls into that category. I don’t think asking Grammarly to write the whole thing counts as “proper use.” I want students to proofread what they wrote to make sure that the  mechanics of their writing are as clear and “correct” as possible, and if Grammarly or an AI or another electronic tool can help with that, I’m all for it.

I think the objection that Lieberman has with Grammarly is it makes writing mechanically correct prose too easy, and the only way for students to learn this stuff is to make them do it “by hand.” As someone who relies heavily on a calculator for anything beyond basic arithmetic and also as someone who relies on Google Doc’s spell checking and grammar checking features, I do not understand this mindset. Since she’s teaching in a community college setting, I suppose Liberman might be working more with “basic writing” students. I could see more of an argument for getting students to master the basics before relying on Grammarly. But for me and even in classes like first year writing, I want to focus mostly on the arguments my students are making and how they are using evidence to support their points. So if a student gets some help with the mechanics from some combination of a writing center consultant and an application like Grammarly, then I can focus more exclusively on the interesting parts.

Where Lieberman and I might agree though is if a student doesn’t have basic competency with writing mechanics, then Grammarly is not going to solve the problem. It’s a lot like the mistakes students still make with there/their/they’re even if they take the time to spell check everything. And again, that’s why it is is so easy to detect AI cheating: the vast majority of students I have had who have tried to cheat with AI have done it poorly.

  • Finally, about students missing “the magic” of reading and writing, especially while doing something clichéd idealistic like laying on a blanket on the campus lawn and under an impressive oak. I get it, and that’s part of why I went into this line of work myself. But this is the classic mistake so many teachers make: just because the teacher believes reading and writing are magical doesn’t mean your students will. In fact, in required gen ed classes like first year writing or intro to literature, many (sometimes most) of the students in those classes really do not want to take those courses at all. I can assign students to read a book or essay that I think is great or I can encourage students to keep writing on their own and for not just school, and sometimes, I do have students who do discover “the magic,” so to speak. But honestly, if the majority of my first year writing students at the end of the semester come away thinking that the experience did not “totally suck,” I’m happy.

So no, this is not the end fo student wri