I'm sending out the newsletter early this week because folks might be interested in attending a virtual event I'm participating in tomorrow.

AI-Aware Teaching at the Perusall Exchange

Thursday, May 14, 12pm Central: As part of Perusall Exchange 2026, my Norton Guide to AI-Aware teaching co-authors and I will be interviewed by Eric Mazur as part of a live recording of the Social Learning Amplified podcast--and you can attend! Just follow this link to register for the Exchange, which will include tomorrow's live recording.

I'm excited about this for a few reasons.

One. This will be the third podcast recording I've done with my co-authors Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, and I really enjoy talking about AI-aware teaching with them! And we've definitely figured out this joint-interview thing now, right? We'll have minimal awkward silences where we decide who's going to answer the question just posed.

Two. I go way back with Eric Mazur. Eric is a Harvard physics professor who has been popularizing effective STEM teaching practices for close to thirty years now. This is the guy who invented peer instruction! He spoke at Vanderbilt University when I was in grad school there, and that talk transformed my approach to teaching. He described his peer instruction approach, which involved asking students to discuss multiple-choice conceptual questions in pairs and share their answers through the classroom response systems of the day ("clickers" we called them), and I thought, "Yes, that's what I want my class sessions to be like!" We didn't have clickers at Vanderbilt at the time--nor did my students have smart phones or even laptops--but my calculus class met in a computer lab once a week, so I coded up a website that could serve as a classroom response system. There was no AI-assisted vibe coding back then, but I had more free time and had spent my summers doing web programming in ColdFusion--which is apparently still around? Not long after that, I was teaching in the math department at Harvard University, where we had access to a clicker system, and then I was off to the races. Helping faculty at Harvard and Vanderbilt make good use of clickers let to my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, back in 2009, and then a career at teaching centers focused on active learning and educational technology. Eric Mazur played a pivotal role in that career! And he's been a good colleague ever since.

Three. I don't go quite as far back with Perusall, the social annotation platform, but I've had some very good experiences teaching with Perusall. Perusall was co-founded by Eric Mazur who, after figuring out active learning in his classroom, decided to transform how students interact with his physics textbook outside of class. His experiments with social annotation, in which students collaboratively highlight and comment on part of the textbook, led to the launch of Perusall. Fast forward to 2020, when higher ed moved teaching online as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic (a pandemic I still label as such because we'll probably have a different pandemic at some point in the future) and I started recommending social annotation as a useful teaching strategy for the online instruction we leaned into that year. That was the summer that the provost turned to our teaching center and said, more or less, I'm going to purchase licenses to a few technologies that will support teaching this year--which ones should I pay for? My team and I were at the ready with our short list of tools we knew to have great potential, and Perusall was on that short list! I found it very useful in the spring of 2021 in my cryptography course, and I wrote about my use of Perusall to support asynchronous active learning on my blog. All that to say, I'm a big fan of social annotation in general and Perusall in particular, so I'm excited to be part of their Exchange event this week.

So, please join Eric, Annette, Marc, and me for what will be a great conversation about AI-aware teaching tomorrow, Thursday, May 14th, at 12pm Central! You can register for the event here.

An AI-Aware Teaching Community Read

But wait! That's not all! This summer Perusall is hosting a community reading experience for The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching! This is a four-week event where, for a small fee, you can read and annotate our book on the Perusall platform with others readers. It's all asynchronous, and Annette, Marc, and I will be participating, responding to reader questions and comments in the annotation space for the book. I've participated in a couple of these community reads as a reader, and they're great fun. Again, I really love interacting through social annotation, and Perusall has a great platform for that. I am excited (and a little nervous) to see paragraph- and sentence-level comments from readers through this book event!

The read-along starts July 6th and runs four weeks. For $15 US, you'll get eight weeks of access to the Perusall version of the book along with a discount coupon for the print copy, which will be available in late September.

​You can register for the Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching book event here.

Other Ways to Read the Book

Outside of Perusall, the book is now available to pre-order! The ebook is expected to be available July 1st, and print copies are expected to start shipping on September 24th. Here's how you can get a copy:

1. Our publisher Norton is pleased to offer the guide as a free ebook for all instructors currently using a Norton textbook. If that's you, you'll receive access from the Norton team when the ebook is available July 1st and can contact your local Norton representative with any questions.
2. If you would like to pre-order the ebook so that you have it July 1st, you can now do so through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and perhaps other retailers.
3. If you would like to pre-order the paperback version of the book, you can now do so through Norton, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and likely other retailers. If you go through Norton, be sure to use the code AIFREESHIP at check out to get free shipping!
4. If you would like to order multiple copies for a campus reading group or some other faculty development effort, Norton has an option for you: On orders of 10 or more print copies, we offer 50% off the list price and free domestic shipping. (Such orders must be on a nonreturnable basis.) To take advantage of this offer, contact Peter Wentz at pwentz@wwnorton.com with subject line “Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching.”