Student-Designed AI Chatbots

I've heard a lot of different objections from students to bringing generative AI into the classroom, but there was one I hadn't heard until I talked to my friend Windy Frank, who teaches in the College of Bible at Lipscomb University here in Nashville. She asked her students to design custom AI chatbots based on figures in the Old Testament such as Jonah (with the whale) and Daniel (with the lions). Her goal was to motivate students to study relevant primary and secondary sources and to connect to the emotional components of the stories of these figures. Most of her students were on board, but a few balked at the use of generative AI as a learning tool. And some of those students who objected did so on religious grounds. They weren't comfortable coaxing an AI chatbot to speak in the voice of characters from the Bible.

This week on the podcast, I talk with Windy Frank about her student-designed chatbot assignment. It's a very thoughtful assignment, one that brought a few surprises. The AI Daniel-bot, for instance, came up with some unexpectedly relevant names for those lions when asked. I also talk with Sarah Gibson, faculty fellow for AI and professor of communication at Lipscomb. We talk about Windy's assignment in particular and about Lipscomb's approach to generative AI more generally. They share what led the Lipscomb faculty to push the administration to provide AI tools for the entire campus--and how the university responded to the students with religious objections to AI.

​You can listen to my conversation with Windy Frank and Sarah Gibson here, or you can search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app. And if you use Apple Podcasts, please "follow" the show, since that helps other listeners find the podcast.

Thinking about Thinking

Next week on Thursday, February 19th, I'm serving on a panel webinar for Every Learner Everywhere, an organization supporting student success in higher education through advances in digital learning. The panel is titled "Thinking about Thinking: Using Formative Practice to Grow Metacognitive Learners," and we'll explore the intersection of formative assessment, metacognition, and digital technologies. We had our pre-meeting recently, and I'm very excited to learn from the other panelists: Jessica Bernards, Jennifer Byall, and Christina Durón. We are all math educators, but the strategies we'll share cut across disciplines.

"Thinking about Thinking" is a free webinar scheduled for February 19th at 1pm Central. You can read more about the webinar and register for it here.

Top Voices to Follow in Higher Education

I recently served as a judge for a fun initiative from Vevox, a classroom response system platform whose motto is "value every voice." They solicited nominations for their annual "Top Voices to Follow in Higher Education" program and recruited me, Viji Sathy, and Laura Milne to help them identify the top 50 "voices" from among the hundreds of nominations. I had a lot of fun serving as a judge for this and learning about educators from around the world who are doing great work in teaching and learning. I read about educators responding to generative AI's impact on learning, building structures to help more students success, creating pathways for workforce readiness, developing discipline-specific teaching strategies, and more. And I picked up quite a few more people to follow on LinkedIn!

You can find the final list of Top 50 Voices to Follow in Higher Education on the Vevox website.

Teaching Toolkit in the Age of AI

I'm working with NCFDD for the first, which is I think one of those organizations whose acronym used to stand for something but now is just a string of letters? I should ask. But I'm pretty sure the "FD" used to stand for faculty development. NCFDD provides a variety of programs to support all aspects of the faculty career, including but not limited to teaching. They've offered a "teaching toolkit" short course for a while now, and they recently asked me to help them update it to be responsive to the challenges and opportunities now posed by generative AI.

The result is a new-ish short course, "Teaching Toolkit in the Age of AI," and it will run for four weeks starting March 2nd. Follow that link to learn more about the course and its topics and formats, and to register if you're interested.
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