I'm back from my birthday trip to Costa Rica! I visited the Sarapiqui region on the Caribbean side of the country, and I spent the whole time birdwatching. The birding was amazing, and I picked up 71 lifers while I was there! I saw hummingbirds, herons, trogons, kingfishers, toucans, parrots, manakins, flycatchers, and more. I had a couple of really fantastic guides who helped me find a lot of those birds, and I visited some really fantastic nature preserves while I was there. You can see the...
10 days ago • 2 min read
As I type this, I'm on a plane to Costa Rica for a long weekend of birdwatching as a treat to myself for turning 50. I'm going to keep this edition of the newsletter short and sweet, but you should plan on some photos of colorful birds in next week's edition! It's Publication Week! My new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is now available as a paperback! I received my author copy last week, and I've already heard reports from...
17 days ago • 2 min read
Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one. There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past...
28 days ago • 2 min read
MIT's Report on AI in Teaching and Learning The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (better known as MIT) released a report last month sharing the findings and recommendations of their Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research. I've read a lot of university reports on AI over the last few years, and most of them are forgettable. This one, however, is fantastic. It's very MIT, in that it's grounded in the MIT context, which is not a typical college or university context,...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one. There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
One of the things I appreciate about designing and facilitating workshops for faculty is that doing so gives me the opportunity to take a few ideas and examples that have been bouncing around my head and turn them into a new argument of some kind. Having led eight workshops for various audiences in the last ten days, I've had no lack of opportunities to do that synthesis work! What follows is one of the new arguments I made during my workshops recently. Back in May, I wrote that it's time to...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
You may have noticed this edition of the newsletter is coming out on a Monday instead of its usual Thursday or Friday. That's because, well, it's August! August is the busiest month of the year for those of us in educational development as we work to help our colleagues get ready for upcoming semester. I was running point on seven instructor-facing workshops last week, including a webinar for my publisher, W.W. Norton, on AI syllabus statements as invitations for conversations with students....
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
AI-Aware Teaching in Political Science The ebook version of my new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is out! To celebrate its release I’ve interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI-aware teaching we highlight in the book, and I’m excited to share another one of those conversations on the Intentional Teaching podcast this week. Eric Loepp teaches political science at UW Whitewater, where he helps students understand the complexities and...
2 months ago • 4 min read
What AI Journals Reveal about Student Learning To celebrate the release of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, I've interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI-aware teaching practices we highlight in the book, and I'm excited to share those interviews on the Intentional Teaching podcast this summer. First up is Susan Ray, associate professor of English at Delaware County Community College (that's near Philadelphia, not in Delaware). Susan teaches a mix of on-site and online composition...
3 months ago • 3 min read