Around the Web

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too. This week, this is the entire newsletter!

• ​Education as the Lighting of a Fire: Personal Connection Strikes the Match - This is a preprint of a study by Steven Most and Nathan Clout of the University of New South Wales Sydney. Two groups of participants heard the same recorded lecture. One group was given a "relatable" backstory about the lecturer, the other was told the voice was AI. The groups did equally well on the post-lecture quiz, but the participants who understood the lecturer to be human expressed more interest in learning more about the topic. "These findings," the authors write, "highlight the importance of perceived personal connection for fostering intrinsic motivation during teaching and communication." You can only draw so much from a laboratory study like this, but I like the direction of it. For most students, learning is social, and the relationships students build with their teachers and fellow students matter a lot for motivation.
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• "Mr. Chatterbox, or, the Modern Prometheus" - In this post, copy writer Ted Venturella gives the backstory on a recent project of his: Mr. Chatterbox, a "chatbot trained from scratch on Victorian-era literature." Venturella is not an AI expert. As he writes, "I'm just a man with a laptop, Claude Code, and a dream of the 1890s." This is just the kind of quirky project I would expect to see from the digital humanities community a decade ago--long before ChatGPT changed our relationship with AI--except now it can be done with much less technical background. And, as Ethan Mollick wrote about Mr. Chatterbox, "none of the things people hate about AI are here: it is not trained on copyright information, it is not controlled by companies, it is not using a lot resources, it is small and fun."
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• "The Danger of Keeping Score" - This episode of On the Media, a podcast I've been a fan of for a very long time, features an interview with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen about his new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. I've known of Nguyen for a while through the board gaming world, and it was was fascinating to hear him apply a bit of ludology (the study of games and play) to other areas of life. The big takeaway for me was Nguyen's point that when we apply a metric to some activity, it implies a set of goals for that activity. With a board game, the way the points are scored tells us how we should go about playing the game. A good game designer uses those points to direct players to enjoyable interactions with the game and with other players. I heard in this idea a lot of applications to the grading systems and points-based rubrics we use in education. The 22-minute episode is definitely worth a listen.
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• "College Students Are Writing with AI--But a Pilot Study Finds They're Not Simply Letting It Write for Them" - Jeanne Beatrix Law's new piece in The Conversation shares the findings from a think-aloud study exploring how undergrad students at Kennesaw State University actually use generative AI when writing. I love a good think-aloud study! These involve asking students to engage in some academic task and to verbalize their thoughts as they do. These studies can provide so much insight into how students are learning. In this case, the stud revealed something I heard loud and clear from a couple of recent student panel discussions I facilitated: "Generative AI is entering student writing not as a wholesale replacement for human authorship, but as part of a negotiated collaboration." See the Conversation article for lots more detail.

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