Category: Academia

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Is Apple Intelligence (and AI) For Dumb and Lazy People?

And the challenges of an AI world where everyone is above average

I’ve been an Apple fanboy since the early 1980s. I owned one Windoze computer years ago that was mostly for games my kid wanted to play. Otherwise, I’ve been all Apple for around 40 years. But what the heck is the deal with these ads for Apple Intelligence?

In this ad (the most annoying of the group, IMO), we see a schlub of a guy, Warren, emailing his boss in idiotic/bro-based prose. He pushes the Apple Intelligence feature and boom, his email is transformed into appropriate office prose. The boss reads the prose, is obviously impressed, and the tagline at the end is “write smarter.” Ugh.

Then there’s this one:

This guy, Lance, is in a board meeting and he’s selected to present about “the Prospectus,” which he obviously has not read. He slowly wheels his office chair and his laptop into the hallway, asks Apple’s AI to summarize the key points in this long thing he didn’t read. Then he slowly wheels back into the conference room and delivers a successful presentation. The tagline on this one? “Catch up quick.” Ugh again.

But in a way, these ads might not be too far from wrong. These probably are the kind of “less than average” office workers who could benefit the most from AI— well, up to a point, in theory.

Among many other things, my advanced writing students and I read Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence, and in several different places in that book, he argues that in experiments when knowledge workers (consultants, people completing a writing task, programmers) use AI to complete tasks, they are much more productive. Further, while AI does not make already excellent workers that much better, it does help less than excellent workers improve. There’s S. Noy and W. Zhang’s Science paper “Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence;” here’s a quote from the editor’s summary:

Will generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT disrupt the labor market by making educated professionals obsolete, or will these tools complement their skills and enhance productivity? Noy and Zhang examined this issue in an experiment that recruited college-educated professionals to complete incentivized writing tasks. Participants assigned to use ChatGPT were more productive, efficient, and enjoyed the tasks more. Participants with weaker skills benefited the most from ChatGPT, which carries policy implications for efforts to reduce productivity inequality through AI.

Then there’s S. Peng et al and their paper “The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot.” This was an experiment with a programming AI on Github, and the programmers who used AI completed tasks 55.8% faster. And Mollick talks a fair amount about a project he was a co-writer on, “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality,” which found that consultants in an experiment were more productive when allowed to use AI— except when faced with a “jagged technology frontier” problem, which in the study was a technical problem beyond the AI’s abilities. However, one of the problems Mollick and his colleagues observed is that a lot of the subjects in their study often copied and pasted content from the AI with minimal editing, and the AI-using subjects had a much harder time with that jagged frontier problem. I’ll come back to this in a couple more paragraphs.

Now, Mollick is looking at AI as a business professor, so he sees this as a good thing because it improves the quality of the workforce, and maybe it’ll enable employers to hire fewer people to complete the same tasks. More productivity with less labor equals more money, capitalism for the win. But my English major students and I all see ourselves (accurately or not) as well-above-average writers, and we all take pride in that. We like the fact we’re better at writing than most other people. Many of my students are aspiring novelists, poets, English teachers, or some other career where they make money from their abilities to write and read, and they all know that publishing writing that other people read is not something that everyone can do. So the last thing any of us who are good at something want is a technology that diminishes the value of that expertise.

This is part of what is behind various declarations of late for refusing or resisting AI, of course. Part of what is motivating someone like Ted Chiang to write about how AI can’t make art is making art is what he is good at. The last thing he wants is a world where any schmuck (like those dudes in the Apple AI ads) can click a button and be as good as he is at making art. I completely understand this reason for fearing and resisting AI, and I too hope that AI doesn’t someday in the future become humanity’s default story teller.

Fortunately for writers like Chiang and me and my students, the AI hype does not square with reality. I haven’t played around with Apple AI yet, but the reviews I’ve seen are underwhelming. I stumbled across a YouTube review by Marques Brownlee about the new AI that is quite thorough. I don’t know much about Brownlee, but he has over 19 million subscribers so he probably knows what he is talking about. If you’re curious, he talks about the writing feature in the first few minutes of this video, but the short version is he says that as a professional writer, he finds it useless.

The other issue I think my students and I are noticing is that the jagged frontier Mollick and his colleagues talk about— that is, the line/divide between tasks the AI can accomplish reasonably well and what it can’t— is actually quite large. In describing the study Mollick and his colleagues did which included a specifically difficult/can’t do with AI jagged frontier problem, I think he implies that this frontier is small. But Mollick and his colleagues— and the same is true with these other studies he quotes on this— are not studying AI in real settings. These are controlled experiments, and the researchers are trying to do all they can to eliminate other variables.

But in the more real world with lots of variables, there are jagged frontiers everywhere. The last assignment I gave in the advanced writing class asked students to attempt to “compose” or “make” something with the help of AI (a poem, a play, a song, a movie, a website, etc. etc.) that they could not do on their own. The reflection essays are not due until the last week of class, but we have had some “show and tell” exchanges about these projects. Some students were reasonably successful with making or doing something thanks to AI— and as a slight tangent: some students are better than others at prompting the AI and making it work for them. It’s not just a matter of clicking a button. But they all ran into that frontier, and for a lot of students, that was essentially how their experiment ended. For example, one student was successful at getting AI to generate the code for a website; but this student didn’t know what to do with the code the AI made to make it actually into a website. A couple of students tried to use AI to write music, but since they didn’t know much about music, their results were limited. One student tried to get AI to teach them how to play the card game Euchre, but the AI kept on doing things like playing cards in the student’s hand.

This brings me back to these Apple ads: I wish they both went on just another minute or so. Right after Warren and Lance confidently look directly at the camera with smug look that says to viewers “Do you see what I just got away with there,” they have to follow through with what they supposedly have accomplished, and I have a feeling that would go poorly. Right after Warren’s boss talks with him about that email and right after Lance starts his summary, I am pretty sure they’re gonna get busted. Sort of like what has happened when I have suspected correctly that a student used too much AI and that student can’t answer basic questions about what it is they (supposedly) wrote.

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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.

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TALIA? This is Not the AI Grading App I Was Searching For

(My friend Bill Hart-Davidson unexpectedly died last week. At some point, I’ll write more about Bill here, probably. In the meantime, I thought I’d finish this post I started a while ago about the webinar about Instructify’s AI grading app. Bill and I had been texting/talking more about AI lately, and I wish I would have had a chance to text/talk more about this. Or anything else).

In March 2023, I wrote a blog post titled “What Would an AI Grading App Look Like?” I was inspired by what I still think is one of the best episodes of South Park I have seen in years, “Deep Learning.”  Follow this link for a detailed summary or look at my post from last year, but in the nutshell, the kids start using ChatGPT to write a paper assignment and Mr. Garrison figures out how to use ChatGPT to grade those papers. Hijinks ensue.

Well, about a month ago and at a time when I was up to my eyeballs in grading, I saw a webinar presentation from Instructify about their AI product called TALIA. The title of the webinar was “How To Save Dozens of Hours Grading Essays Using AI.” I missed the live event, but I watched the recording– and you can too, if you want— or at least you could when I started writing this. Much more about it after the break, but the tl;dr version is this AI grading tool is not the one I am looking for (not surprisingly), and I think it would be a good idea for these tech startups to include people with actual experience with teaching writing on their development teams.

Continue reading “TALIA? This is Not the AI Grading App I Was Searching For”

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Bomb Threat

It is “that time” of the semester, which is made all the much worse by it also being “that time” of the school year, mid-April. Everyone on campus– students of course, but also faculty and staff and administrators and everyone else– is peak stressed out because this is the time where everything is due. We’re all late. My students are late finishing stuff they were supposed to finish a couple weeks ago, and for me that means I’m late on finishing reading/commenting on/grading all of those things they haven’t quite finished. We are mutually late. And just to make the vibe around it all that much more spooky, there’s the remaining mojo of Monday’s eclipse.

So sure, let’s through a stupid bomb threat into the mix.

This entry from “EMU Today” (EMU’s public relations site) provides a timeline, and this story from The Detroit News is a good summary of the event.  I was in my office during all this, slowly climbing Grading Mountain (the summit is visible, the end is near, and yet the distance to that summit is further away than I had hoped) and responding to earlier student emails about missing class because of “stress” and such. Then I started getting messages from EMU’s emergency alert system. “Emergency reported in Wise, Buell, Putnam (these are dorms). Please evacuate the building immediately.” This was followed a few minutes later by a similar message about clearing several other dorms and an update that said it was a bomb threat.

EMU set up an emergency alert system a few years ago as part of a response to the rise in school and college campus shootings and violence happening around the country. They rolled this out at about the same time the campus security folks started holding workshops about how to properly shelter in place. I believe yesterday’s bomb threat was the first time this system was used for a threat like this. Previously, the only alerts I think I have received from this system (besides regular system tests) had to do with the weather, messages about campus being closed because of a snowstorm. It is also worth mentioning that this time, the alert system didn’t just send everyone a text. It also sent emails and robocalls, which means all the devices were all lit up in a few different ways.

Our son Will (who lives in Connecticut) texted me and Annette because, for whatever reason, he’s signed up to get these EMU emergency messages and he was concerned. Annette, who wasn’t on campus, wasn’t sure what was going on. When EMU alerted a few minutes after the evacuation posts that it was a bomb threat, I knew it had to be a hoax. I knew (well, I assumed) this in part because I have a good view of several of these dorms from my office, and it wasn’t like I was seeing cops and firefighters rushing into those buildings. Mostly what I saw were students hanging around outside the dorm looking at their phones.

I also thought immediately it was a hoax because 99.9999% of the time, bomb threats are hoaxes. One of the few colleagues of mine who was around the offices at the same time as me poked his head in my door and asked if I was going to still have class. “Well, yeah,” I said, “no one has said classes are cancelled.”

Rather than spending another hour or so prepping for my two afternoon classes and at least making a tiny bit more of a dent on all the grading as I had planned, I instead spent the time responding to student emails and then sending out group emails to my afternoon classes that yes indeed, we were meeting because EMU had not cancelled classes. Some were genuinely confused, wondering if we were still having class because the alerts did not make that clear. Some emailed me about the logistics of it all, basically “I don’t know if I can make it because I need to get back into my dorm room to get my stuff first,” or whatever. Some were freaked out about the whole thing, that they didn’t feel safe on campus, there was no way they were coming to class, etc. “Well, EMU has not cancelled classes, so we will be meeting,” I wrote back. And a couple of student seemed to sense this might be the excuse to skip they were hoping for.

About an hour after it all started and before my 2 pm class, we got another alert (or rather, three more alerts simultaneously) that the three dorms that had been named in the initial bomb threat had been inspected and declared clear. The other dorms had been evacuated as a precaution. At about 2:15, I got an email from the dean (forwarded to faculty by the department head) that no, classes were not cancelled.

Before my 2 pm class was over, EMU alerts sent a final message (again, three ways) to announce all was clear. But of course a lot of students were still freaked out– and for good reason, I guess. I talked with one student after my last class and after it was over who said he was nervous about spending the night in his dorm room, and I kind of understand that. But at the same time, maybe there was never anything to be afraid of?

I’m not saying that EMU overreacted because, obviously, all it takes is that 0.0001% chance where bombs go off simultaneously in the dorms like in the end of Fight Club. Not unlike a fire alarm going off in the dorms in the middle of the night (a regular occurance, I’m told), everyone knows (or at least assumes) is because of some jackass. But you still have to evacuate, you still have to call the fire department, etc.

The whole thing pisses me off. At least it was a hoax and it wasn’t a shooter, something that is always always somewhere on everyone’s minds nowadays. At least no one was hurt beyond being freaked out for a while. And at least there are only about two weeks before the end of the semester.

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Once Again, the Problem is Not AI (a Response to Justus’ and Janos’ “Assessment of Student Learning is Broken”)

I most certainly do not have the time to be writing this  because it’s the height of the “assessment season” (e.g., grading) for several different assignments my students have been working on for a while now. That’s why posting this took me a while– I wrote it during breaks in a week-long grading marathon. In other words, I have better things to do right now. But I find myself needing to write a bit in response to Zach Justus and Nik Janos’ Inside Higher Ed piece “Assessment of Student Learning is Broken,” and I figured I might as well make it into a blog entry. I don’t want to be a jerk about any of this and I’m just Justus and Janos are swell guys and everything, but this op-ed bothered me a lot.

Justus and Janos are both professors at Chico State in California; Justus is a professor in Communications and is the director of the faculty development program there, and Janos is in sociology. They begin their op-ed about AI “breaking” assessment quite briskly:

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has broken higher education assessment. This has implications from the classroom to institutional accreditation. We are advocating for a one-year pause on assessment requirements from institutions and accreditation bodies. We should divert the time we would normally spend on assessment toward a reevaluation of how to measure student learning. This could also be the start of a conversation about what students need to learn in this new age.

I hadn’t thought a lot about how AI might figure into institutional accreditation, so I kept reading. And that’s where I first began to wonder about the argument they’re making, because very quickly, they seem to equate institutional assessment with assessment in individual classes (grading). Specifically, most of this piece is about the problems caused by AI (supposedly) of a very specific assignment in a very specific sociology class.

I have no direct experience with institutional assessment, but as part of the Writing Program Administration work I’ve dipped into a few times over the years, I have some experience with program assessment. In those kind of assessments, we’re looking at the forest rather than the individual trees. For example, maybe as part of a program assessment, the WPAs might want to consider the average grades of all sections of first year writing. That sort of measure could tell us stuff about the overall pass rate and grade distribution across sections, and so on.  But that data can’t tell you much about grades for specific students or the practices of a specific instructor. As far as I can tell, institutional assessments are similar “big picture” evaluations.

Justus and Janos see it differently, I guess:

“Take an introductory writing class as an example. One instructor may not have an AI policy, another may have a “ban” in place and be using AI detection software, a third may love the technology and be requiring students to use it. These varied policies make the aggregated data as evidence of student learning worthless.”

Yes, different teachers across many different sections of the same introductory writing class take different approaches to teaching writing, including with (or without) AI. That’s because individual instructors are, well, individuals– plus each group of students is different as well. Some of Justus and Janos’ reaction to these differences probably have to do with their disciplinary presumptions about “data”: if it’s not uniform and if it not something that can be quantified, then it is, as they say, “worthless.” Of course in writing studies, we have no problem with much more fuzzy and qualitative data. So from my point of view, as long as the instructors are more or less following the same outcomes/curriculum, I don’t see the problem.

But like I said, Justus and Janos aren’t talking about institutional assessment. Rather, they devote most of this piece to a very specific assignment. Janos teaches a sociology class that has an institutional writing competency requirement for the major. The class has students “writing frequently” with a variety of assignments for “nonacademic audiences,” like “letters-to-the-editor, … encyclopedia articles, and mock speeches to a city council” meeting. Justus and Janos say “Many of these assignments help students practice writing to show general proficiency in grammar, syntax and style.” That may or may not be true, but it’s not at all clear how this was assigned or what sort of feedback students received. .

Anyway, one of the key parts of this class is a series of assignments about:

“a foundational concept in sociology called the sociological imagination (SI), developed by C. Wright Mills. The concept helps people think sociologically by recognizing that what we think of as personal troubles, say being homeless, are really social problems, i.e., homelessness.”

It’s not clear to me what students read and study to learn about SI, but it’s a concept that’s been around for a long time– Mills wrote about it in a book in the 1950s. So not surprisingly, there is A LOT of information about this available online, and presumably that has been the case for years.

Students read about SI and as part of their study, they “are asked to provide, in their own words and without quotes, a definition of the SI.” To help do this, students do activities like “role play” to they are talking to friends or family about a social problem such as homelessness. “Lastly,” (to quote at length one last time):

…students must craft a script of 75 words or fewer that defines the SI and uses it to shed light on the social problem. The script has to be written in everyday language, be set in a gathering of friends or family, use and define the concept, and make one point about the topic.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, has broken assessment of student learning in an assignment like this. ChatGPT can meet or exceed students’ outcomes in mere seconds. Before fall 2022 and the release of ChatGPT, students struggled to define the sociological imagination, so a key response was to copy and paste boilerplate feedback to a majority of the students with further discussion in class. This spring, in a section of 27 students, 26 nailed the definition perfectly. There is no way to know whether students used ChatGPT, but the outcomes were strikingly different between the pre- and post-AI era.

Hmm. Okay, I have questions.

  • You mean to tell me that the key deliverable/artifact that students produce in this class to demonstrate that they’ve met a university-mandated gen ed writing requirement is a 75 word or fewer passage? That’s it? Really. Really? I am certainly not saying that being able to produce a lot of text should not be the main factor for demonstrating “writing competency,” but this seems more than weird and hard to believe.
  • Is there any instructional apparatus for this assignment at all? In other words, do students have to produce drafts of this script? Are there any sort of in-class work with the role-play that’s documented in some way? Any reflection on the process? Anything?
  • I have no idea what the reading assignments and lectures were for this assignment, so I could very well be missing a key concept with SI. But I feel like I could have copied and pasted together a pretty good script just based on some Google searching around– if I was inclined to cheat in the first place. So given that, why are Justus and Janos confident that students hadn’t been cheating before Fall 2022?
  • The passage about the “before Fall 2022” approach to teaching this writing assignment says a lot. It sounds like there’s no actual discussion of what students wrote, and the main instructions to students back then was to follow “boilerplate feedback.” So, in assessing this assignment, was Janos evaluating the unique choices students made in crafting their SI scripts? Or rather, was he evaluating these SI scripts for the “right answer” he provided in the readings or lectures?
  • And as Justus and Janos note, there is no good way to know for certain if a student handed in something made in part or in whole by AI, so why are they assuming that all of those students who got the “right answer” with their SI scripts were cheating?

So, Justus and Janos conclude, because now instructors are evaluating “some combination of student/AI work,” it is simply impossible to make any assessment for institutional accreditation. Their solution is “we should have a one-year pause wherein no assessment is expected or will be received.” What kinds of assessments are they talking about? Why only a year pause? None of this is clear.

Clearly, the problem here is not institutional assessment or the role of AI; the problem is the writing assignment. The solutions are also obvious.

First, there’s the teaching writing versus assigning it.  I have blogged a lot about this in the last couple years (notably here), but teaching writing means a series of assignments where students need to “show their work.” That seems extremely doable with this particular assignment, too. Sure, it would require more actual instruction and evaluation than “boilerplate feedback,” but this seems like a small class (27 students), so that doesn’t seem that big of a deal.

Second, if you have an assignment in anything that can successfully be completed with a simple prompt into ChatGPT (as in “write a 75 word script explaining SI in everyday language”), then that’s definitely now a bad assignment. That’s the real “garbage in, garbage out” issue here.

And third, one of the things that AI has made me realize is if an instructor has an assignment in a class– and I mean any assignment in any class– which can be successfully completed without having any experience or connection to that instructor or the class, then that’s a bad assignment. Again, that seems like an extremely easy to address with the assignment that Justus and Janos describe. They’d have to make changes to the assignment and assessment, of course, but doesn’t that make more sense than trying to argue that we should completely revamp the institutional accreditation process?

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Starting 2024 With All First Year Writing/All the Time!

This coming winter term (what every other university calls spring term), I’m going to be doing something I have never done in my career as a tenure-track professor. I’m going to be teaching first year composition and only first year composition.  It’ll be quite a change.

When I came to EMU in 1998, my office was right next to a very senior colleague, Bob Kraft. Bob, who retired from EMU in 2004 and who passed away in December 2022, came back to the department to teach after having been in some administrative positions for quite a while. His office was right next to mine and we chatted with each other often about teaching, EMU politics, and other regular faculty chit-chat. He was a good guy; used to call me “Steve-O!”

Bob taught the same three courses every semester: three sections of a 300-level course called Professional Writing. It was a class he was involved in developing back in the early 1980s and I believe he assigned a course pack that had the complete course in it– and I mean everything: all the readings, in-class worksheets, the assignments, rubrics, you name it. Back in those days and before a university shift to “Writing Intensive” courses within majors, this was a class that was a “restricted elective” in lots of different majors, and we offered plenty of sections of it and similar classes. (In retrospect, the shift away from courses like this one to a “writing in the disciplines” approach/philosophy was perhaps a mistake both because of the way these classes have subsequently been taught in different disciplines and because it dramatically reduced the credit hour production in the English department– but all this is a different topic).

Anyway, Bob essentially did exactly the same thing three times a semester every semester, the same discussions, the same assignments, and the same kinds of papers to grade. Nothing– or almost nothing– changed. I’m pretty sure the only prep Bob had to do was change the dates on the course schedule.

I thought “Jesus, that’d be so boring! I’d go crazy with that schedule.” I mean, he obviously liked the arrangement and I have every reason to believe it was a good class and all, but the idea of teaching the same class the same way every semester for years just gave me hives. Of course, I was quite literally in the opposite place in my career: rather than trying to make the transition into retirement, I was an almost freshly-minted PhD who was more than eager to develop and teach new classes and do new things.

For my first 20 years at EMU (give or take), my work load was a mix of advanced undergraduate writing classes, a graduate course almost every semester, and various quasi-administrative duties. I occasionally have had semesters where I taught two sections of the same course, but most semesters, I taught three different courses– or two different ones plus quasi-admin stuff. I rarely taught first year composition during the regular school year (though I taught it in the summer for extra money while our son Will was still at home) because I was needed to teach the advanced undergrad and MA-level writing classes we had. And this was all a good thing: I got to teach a lot of different courses, I got a chance to do things like help direct the first year writing program or to coordinate our major and grad program, and I had the opportunity to work closely with a lot of MA students who have gone on to successful careers of their own.

But around six or seven years ago, the department (the entire university, actually) started to change and I started to change as well. Our enrollments have fallen across the board, but especially for upper-level undergraduate and MA level courses, which means instead of a grad course every semester, I tend to teach one a school year, along with fewer advanced undergrad writing classes, and now I teach first year writing every semester. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about this arrangement is the students I work with in first year composition are different from the students I work with on their MA projects– but they’re really not that different, in the big picture of things.

And of course, as I move closer to thinking about retirement myself, Bob’s teaching arrangement seems like a better and better idea. So, scheduling circumstances being what they are, when it became clear I’d have a chance to just teach three sections of first year comp this coming winter, I took it.

We’ll see what happens. I’m looking forward to greatly reducing my prep time because this is the only course I’m teaching this semester (just three times), and also because first year writing is something I’ve taught and thought about A LOT. I’m also looking forward to experimenting with requiring students to use ChatGPT and other AI tools to at least brainstorm and copy-edit– maybe more. What I’m not looking forward to is kind of just repeating the same thing three times in a row each day I teach. Along these lines, I am not looking forward to teaching three classes all on the same days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and all face to face. I haven’t done that in a long time (possibly never) because I’ve either taught two and been on reassigned time, or I have taught at least a third of my load online. And I’m also worried about keeping all three of these classes in synch. If one group falls behind for some reason, it’ll mess up my plans (this is perhaps inevitable).

What I’m not as worried about is all the essays I’ll have to read and grade. I’m well-aware that the biggest part of the work for anyone teaching first year writing is all the reading and commenting and grading student work, and I’ve figured out a lot over the years about how to do it. Of course, I might be kidding myself with this one….

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Hot Chancellor Porn! (or, another interesting test of free speech, academic freedom and tenure)

There have been many stories in the last day or so about UW-LaCrosse’s chancellor, Joe Gow, and his wife Carmen Wilson (she had an unpaid position), and how they were fired after the Wisconsin system regents learned of their enthusiasm for sharing homemade porn online. I think this one from The New York Times sums things up well:  “University Chancellor Fired After Making Pornographic Videos With His Wife.” Here’s a longish quote:

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. [Joe] Gow and Ms. [Carmen] Wilson said that they believe they were fired over the videos, which included sex scenes together and with others under the username Sexy Happy Couple. Both said they felt it was wrong for the university to punish them over the videos, arguing that doing so infringes on their free speech rights.

“It’s not what we’re about in higher ed, to censor people,” Ms. Wilson said. She added that the videos are only available to those who are looking for such content. “If they seek it out, they’re free to do so,” she said.

Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

“We have that show, ‘Sexy Healthy Cooking,’ where we interview performers and really humanize them in ways that you wouldn’t get in their other work,” Mr. Gow said. “It’s an interesting process, and the people that we work with are completely professional, and very great to work with.”

Now, not that I’m suggesting that anyone actually do this– not at all! not for a second!— but if one were to, hypothetically, google “Sexy Happy Couple” or “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” one just might get a sense of what Gow and Wilson are talking about. Or if someone went to a fairly well known and provocative website that has a name that rhymes with “corn tub” and do a search there, that someone might even get a more detailed view for free.

Gow and Wilson are correct: their videos have nothing to do with their work, and  you have to actively seek out their “cooking demonstrations.” It’s different from what happened with EMU’s former associate provost, Michael Tew, who was convicted for driving around Dearborn in a Jeep Wrangler while naked and whacking off, all with the windows and sunroof open. Tew was charged and convicted of indecent exposure– and imagine being stuck in traffic next to that guy. In contrast, you do have to go looking for these videos, and I agree that whatever happens between consulting adults and a salad spinner in the privacy of their own home is their own business.

Anyway, Gow and Wilson were both removed from their positions– though Gow is on a paid administrative leave and Wilson had some kind of “special assistant” position and was never a paid employee anyway. Gow and Wilson are arguing that they were fired for exercising their rights to free speech. In an interview published in USA Today (perhaps not surprisingly, neither of them have been shy about telling their story), Gow said “he decided to test that commitment [to free speech] since he had planned to leave the chancellorship soon anyway. ‘I felt a little bit more open about ”let’s raise these free speech issues and see how the board responds,” and now we know,’ he said.”

Like most college chancellors/presidents, Gow was also a tenured professor– in the Communications department. So what Gow was planning on doing was to return to the faculty, presumably to teach. And to be clear: Gow was fired as chancellor, but they couldn’t fire him from the faculty because he has tenure. At least not yet– the UW system regents has hired a law firm to figure out if they can strip him of tenure and kick him out for good.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

Typically (and I’m assuming this is the case with the UW system), tenured faculty are the only ones who have this kind of job security as it relates to free speech in the name of academic freedom. Tenured professors like me are happy to remind anyone and everyone of the importance of this kind of academic freedom for all kinds of reasons, but especially to foster the pursuit for knowledge. People don’t make new discoveries, write new plays, paint new things, or experiment with new ideas if they are afraid they’ll get fired or in trouble for saying the wrong thing. But I think it’s also important to remember that these protections do not exist unconditionally for anyone else on campus.

Students can be punished in all kinds of ways for speech acts, and Gow’s and Wilson’s case might very well be an example of that. If a bunch of students were filming porn in the dorms and they got caught, they might very well be expelled. Staff and administrators don’t have the same level of job security, and that is especially true with administrators.

Administrators can have a “real life” outside of the job, of course. They can have an active online presence, have a homemade YouTube cooking show, maybe even be in a band (as Gow and Wilson were, apparently). But unlike faculty, administrators are “at will” employees. They risk their jobs when they publicly criticize the university, or when they do anything else that might be considered, well, freaky. That’s why EMU’s Michael Tew was relieved of his duties as associate provost, and it’s also why Gow didn’t make his lifestyle public before he was ready to step down from the job.

But firing him completely, that’s different. Unlike EMU’s naked driving enthusiast, Gow and Wilson didn’t do anything illegal. I’m not especially interested in watching their show, but that’s obviously a speech act that deserves protection. So no, I don’t think Gow should be removed from his faculty position, and I think this is a clear example of why tenure matters.

Should Gow and Wilson been allowed to stay in their leadership positions? I honestly don’t know.

One of the questions I’ve always had about academic freedom is why are tenured professors the only ones on college campuses who have this? After all, students, staff, and administrators are all people who are (in theory) pursuing knowledge in one form or another. Why don’t they have the same level of freedom to say what they want? And what’s wrong if the guy in charge of the university and his wife post (and sell) porn videos online that no one at that university ever has to look at?

But on the other hand, it does create an awkward situation. I don’t think I’m a prude and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with porn that is consensual and that doesn’t involve minors. But it might be kind of weird to work with or take a class from either of these two now, especially if you did that google search I warned you not to do.

At the end of the day, I predict there will be some kind of “negotiated” settlement. I think that’s what happened with Tew at EMU. He was immediately removed as the associate provost, but as I understand it, he actually wasn’t fired entirely but instead returned to his faculty position– sort of. He never actually taught a class or anything; I believe he went on leave and he was allowed to retire.

My guess is that after this story is no longer in the news cycle, Gow and Wilson will make some kind of deal that will allow them to more gracefully exit the institution and retire, which would give them more time to devote to their hobbies anyway. A win-win situation, perhaps?

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So, What About AI Now? (A talk and an update)

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk/lead a discussion called “So, What About AI Now?” That’s a link to my slides. The talk/discussion was for a faculty development program at Washtenaw Community College, a program organized by my friend, colleague, and former student, Hava Levitt-Phillips.

I covered some of the territory I’ve been writing about here for a while now and I thought both the talk and discussion went well. I think most of the people at this thing (it was over Zoom, so it was a little hard to read the room) had seen enough stories like this one on 60 Minutes the other night: Artificial Intelligence is going to at least be as transformative of a technology as “the internet,” and there is not a zero percent chance that it could end civilization as we know it. All of which is to say we probably need to put the dangers of a few college kids using AI (badly) to cheat on poorly designed assignments into perspective.

I also talked about how we really need to question some of the more dubious claims in the MSM about the powers of AI, such as the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this past summer, “GPT-4 Can Already Pass Freshman Year at Harvard.”  I blogged about that nonsense a couple months ago here, but the gist of what I wrote there is that all of these claims of AI being able to pass all these tests and freshman year at Harvard (etc.) are wrong. Besides the fact that the way a lot of these tests are run make the claims bogus (and that is definitely the case with this CHE piece), students in our classes still need to show up– and I mean that for both f2f and online courses.

And as we talked about at this session, if a teacher gives students some kind of assignment (an essay, an exam, whatever) that can be successfully completed without ever attending class, then that’s a bad assignment.

So the sense that I got from this group– folks teaching right now the kinds of classes where (according to a lot of the nonsense that’s been in MSM for months) the cheating with ChatGPT et al was going to just make it impossible to assign writing anymore, not in college and not in high school— is it hasn’t been that big of a deal. Sure, a few folks talked about students who tried to cheat with AI who were easily caught, but for the most part it hadn’t been much of a problem. The faculty in this group seemed more interested in trying to figure out a way to make use of AI in their teaching than they were in cheating.

I’m not trying to suggest there’s no reason to worry about what AI means for the future of… well, everything, including education. Any of us who are “knowledge workers”– that is, teachers, professors, lawyers, scientists, doctors, accountants, etc. etc.– needs to pay attention to AI because there’s no question this shit is going to change the way we do our jobs. But my sense from this group (and just the general vibe I get on campus and in social media) is that the freak-out about AI is over, which is good.

One last thing though:  just the other day (long after this talk), I saw what I believe to be my first case of a student trying to cheat with ChatGPT– sort of. I don’t want to go into too many details since this is a student in one of my classes right now. But basically, this student (who is struggling quite a bit) turned in a piece of writing that was first and foremost not the assignment I gave, and it also just happened this person used ChatGPT to generate a lot of the text. So as we met to talk about what the actual assignment was and how this student needed to do it again, etc., I also started asking about what they turned in.

“Did you actually write this?” I asked. “This kind of seems like ChatGPT or something.”

“Well, I did use it for some of it, yes.”

“But you didn’t actually read this book ChatGPT is citing here, did you?”

“Well, no…”

And so forth.  Once again, a good reminder that students who resort to cheating with things like AI are far from criminal masterminds.

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A Belated “Beginning of the School Year” Post: Just Teaching

I don’t always write a “beginning of the school year” post and when I do, it’s usually before school starts, some time in August, and not at the end of the second week of classes. But here we are, at what seasonally always feels to me a lot more like the start of the new year than January.

This is the start of my 25th year at EMU. This summer, I selected another one of those goofy “thanks for your service” gifts they give out in five year increments. Five years ago, I picked out a pretty nice casserole dish; this time, I picked out a globe, one which lights up.

I wrote a new school year post like this was in 2021, and back then, I (briefly) contemplated the faculty buyout offer. “Briefly” because as appealing as it was at the time to leave my job behind, there’s just no way I could afford it and I’m not interested in starting some kind of different career. But here in 2023, I’m feeling good about getting back to work. Maybe it’s because I had a busy summer with lots of travel, some house guests, and a touch of Covid. After all of that, it’s just nice to have a change of pace and get back to a job. Or maybe it’s because (despite my recent case) we really are “past” Covid in the sense that EMU (like everywhere else) is no longer going through measures like social distancing, check-ins noting you’re negative, vax cards, free testing, etc. etc. This is not to say Covid is “over” of course because it’s still important for people to get vaxxed and to test.  And while I know the people I see all the time who are continuing to wear masks everywhere think lowering our defenses to Covid is foolish and it is true that cases right now are ticking up, the reality is Covid has become something more or less like the flu: it can potentially kill you, sure, but it is also one of those things we have to live with.

Normally in these kinds of new school year posts, I mention various plans and resolutions for the upcoming year. I have a few personal and not unusual ones– lose weight, exercise more, read more, and so on– but I don’t have any goals that relates to work. I’m not involved in any demanding committees or other service things, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way. I’m also not in the midst of any scholarly projects, and I can’t remember the last time that was the case. And interestingly (at least for me), I don’t know if I’ll be doing another scholarly project at this point. Oh, I will go to conferences that are in places I want to visit, and I’ll keep blogging about AI and other academic-like things I find interesting. That’s a sort of scholarship, I suppose. I’d like to write more commentaries for outlets like IHE or CHE, maybe also something more MSM. But writing or editing another book or article? Meh.

(Note that this could all change on a dime.)

So that leaves teaching as my only focus as far as “the work” goes. I suppose that isn’t that unusual since even when I’ve got a lot going on in terms of scholarly projects and service obligations, teaching is still the bulk of my job. I’ll have plenty to do this semester because I’ve got three different classes (with three different preps), and one of them is a new class I’m sort of/kind of making up as I go.

Still, it feels a little different. I’ve always said that if being a professor just involved teaching my classes– that is, no real service or scholarly obligations– then that wouldn’t be too hard of a job. I guess I’ll get to test that this term.

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Computers and Writing 2023: Some Miscellaneous Thoughts

Last week, I attended and presented at the 2023 Computers and Writing Conference at the University of California-Davis. Here’s a link to my talk, “What Does ‘Teaching Online’ Even Mean Anymore?” Some thoughts as they occur to me/as I look at my notes:

  • The first academic conference I ever attended and presented at was Computers and Writing almost 30 years ago, in 1994. Old-timers may recall that this was the 10th C&W conference, it was held at the University of Missouri, and it was hosted by Eric Crump. I just did a search and came across this article/review written by the late Michael “Mick” Doherty about the event. All of which is to say I am old.
  • This was the first academic conference I attended in person since Covid; I think that was the case for a lot of attendees.
  • Also worth noting right off the top here: I have had a bad attitude about academic conferences for about 10 years now, and my attitude has only gotten worse. And look, I know, it’s not you, it’s me. My problem with these things is they are getting more and more expensive, most of the people I used to hang out with at conferences have mostly stopped going themselves for whatever reason, and for me, the overall “return on investment” now is pretty low. I mean, when I was a grad student and then a just starting out assistant professor, conferences were extremely important to me. They furthered my education in both subtle and obvious ways, they connected me to lots of other people in the field, and conferences gave me the chance to do scholarship that I could also list on my CV. I used to get a lot out of these events. Now? Well, after (almost) 3o years, things start to sound a little repetitive and the value of yet another conference presentation on my CV is almost zero, especially since I am at a point where I can envision retirement (albeit 10-15 years from now). Like I said, it’s not you, it’s me, but I also know there are plenty of people in my cohort who recognize and even perhaps share a similarly bad attitude.
  • So, why did I go? Well, a big part of it was because I hadn’t been to any conference in about four years– easily the longest stretch of not going in almost 30 years. Also, I had assumed I would be talking in more detail about the interviews I conducted about faculty teaching experiences during Covid, and also about the next phases of research I would be working on during a research release or a sabbatical in 2024. Well, that didn’t work out, as I wrote about here. which inevitably changed my talk to being a “big picture” summary of my findings and an explanation of why I was done.
  • This conference has never been that big, and this year, it was a more “intimate” affair. If a more normal or “robustly” attended C&W gets about 400-500 people to attend (and I honestly don’t know what the average attendance has been at this thing), then I’d guess there was about 200-250 folks there. I saw a lot of the “usual suspects” of course, and also met some new people too.
  • The organizers– Carl Whithaus, Kory Lawson Ching, and some other great people at UC-Davis– put a big emphasis on trying to make the hybrid delivery of panels work. So there were completely on-site panels, completely online (but on the schedule) panels held over Zoom, and hybrid panels which were a mix of participants on-site and online. There was also a small group of completely asynchronous panels as well. Now, this arrangement wasn’t perfect, both because of the inevitable technical glitches and also because there’s no getting around the fact that Zoom interactions are simply not equal to robust face to face interactions, especially for an event like a conference. This was a topic of discussion in the opening town hall meeting, actually.
  • That said, I think it all worked reasonably well. I went to two panels where there was one presenter participating via Zoom (John Gallgher in both presentations, actually) and that went off without (much of a) hitch, and I also attended at least part of a session where all the presenters were on Zoom– and a lot of the audience was on-site.
  • Oh, and speaking of the technology: They used a content management system specifically designed for conferences called Whova that worked pretty well. It’s really for business/professional kinds of conferences so there were some slight disconnects, and I was told by one of the organizers that they found out (after they had committed to using it!) that unlimited storage capacity would have been much more expensive. So they did what C&W folks do well: they improvised, and set up Google Drive folders for every session.
  • My presentation matched up well to my co-presenters, Rich Rice and Jenny Sheppard, in that we were all talking about different aspects of online teaching during Covid– and with no planning on our parts at all! Actually, all the presentations I saw– and I went to more than usual, both the keynotes, one and a half town halls, and four and a half panels– were really quite good.
  • Needless to say, there was a lot of AI and ChatGPT discussion at this thing, even though the overall theme was on hybrid practices. That’s okay– I am pretty sure that AI is just going to become a bigger issue in the larger field and academia as a whole in the next couple of years, and it might stay that way for the rest of my career. Most of what people talked about were essentially more detailed versions of stuff I already (sort of) knew about, and that was reassuring to me. There were a lot of folks who seemed mighty worried about AI, both in the sense of students using it to cheat and also the larger implications of it on society as a whole. Some of the big picture/ethical concerns may have been more amplified here because there were a lot of relatively local participants of course, and Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are more or less at “ground zero” for all things AI. I don’t disagree with the larger social and ethical implications of AI, but these are also things that seem completely out of all of our control in so many different ways.
  • For example, in the second town hall about AI (I arrived late to that one, unfortunately), someone in the audience had one of those impassioned “speech/questions” about how “we” needed to come up with a statement on the problems/dangers/ethical issues about AI. Well, I don’t think there’s a lot of consensus in the field about what we should do about AI at this point. But more importantly and as Wendi Sierra pointed out (she was on the panel, and she is also going to be hosting C&W at Texas Christian University in 2024), there is no “we” here. Computers and Writing is not an organization at all and our abilities to persuade are probably limited to our own institutions. Of course, I have always thought that this was one of the main problems with the Computers and Writing Conference and Community: there is no there there.
  • But hey, let me be clear– I thought this conference was great, one of the best versions of C&W I’ve been to, no question about. It’s a great campus with some interesting quirks, and everything seemed to go off right on schedule and without any glitches at all.
  • Of course, the conference itself was the main reason I went– but it wasn’t the only reason.  I mean, if this had been in, say, Little Rock or Baton Rouge or some other place I would prefer not to visit again or ever, I probably would have sat this out. But I went to C&W when it was at UC-Davis back in 2009 and I had a great time, so going back there seemed like it’d be fun. And it was– though it was a different kind of fun, I suppose. I enjoyed catching up with a lot of folks I’ve known for years at this thing and I also enjoyed meeting some new people too, but it also got to be a little too, um, “much.” I felt a little like an overstimulated toddler after a while. A lot of it is Covid of course, but a lot of it is also what has made me sour on conferences: I don’t have as many good friends at these things anymore– that is, the kind of people I want to hang around with a lot– and I’m also just older. So I embraced opting out of the social events, skipping the banquet or any kind of meet-up with a group at a bar or bowling or whatever, and I played it as a solo vacation. That meant walking around Davis (a lively college town with a lot of similarities to Ann Arbor), eating at the bar at a couple of nice restaurants, and going back to my lovely hotel room and watching things that I know Annette had no interest in watching with me (she did the same back home and at the conference she went to the week before mine). On Sunday, I spent the day as a tourist: I drove through Napa, over to Sonoma Coast Park, and then back down through San Francisco to the airport. It’s not something I would have done on my own without the conference, but like I said, I wouldn’t have gone to the conference if I couldn’t have done something like this on my own for a day.