Multilitteratus Incognitus

When I first started teaching graduate courses back in 2012 (wow...time flies), my hallmark course was titled The Design and Instruction of Online Courses .  Most of my students were folks who were learning to be instructional designers, or faculty who wanted to learn to teach online and had some years of teaching in person under their belt.  One of the most common things I heard in that class was that it was easier when teaching on campus to determine if students were engaged or paying attention.  Just by looking at them, you could determine this by their facial expressions and body language. Eh...OK🤷‍♂️.  While I don't disagree that some people may have this ability some of the time with some of the students in front of them, I still think that people tend to overestimate their ability to do this. Fast forward to today, browsing through the r/Professors subreddit, one tends to find posts asking fellow redditors how they can tell if their student's work is generate...

Old Timey School House ( Lego version ) I came across a post on LinkedIn the other daaaay (read this in a Letterkenny cadence, if you know what that is  😆 ).  Here's a direct link to that post if you'd like to engage with it and its author . Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to get my mojo back when it comes to discussing issues like this. For a brief time, we had MOOCs (well, cMOOCs) with a daily recap of what was happening on Twitter using a specific hashtag, blogs, and other places on the web (Downes' gRSShopper, if anyone remembers this). Now things are difused though LinkedIn posts, people's blogs or substacks  branded blogs, or on Discord; and there isn't a place that collects this discussion.  Anyway, don't mind my "old man yelling at clouds" moment. So, one of the things that I've been observing over the last decade (or more) is that a tried and true narrative exists any time there is a new technology out there. Namely, ...

Academic AI-Slop (ChatGPT Produced) Happy end of the semester, and almost the end of the calendar year! Alright, I'll own up to it. The title of this post probably doesn't hit the mark ;-) One more calendar year is in the can, and for me, it was a year of (potential) endings, a year of (potentially) new beginnings, and a year where things changed much more so than I expected in my teaching practice. I won't dwell too much on the endings and beginnings in this post because those things are best viewed in retrospect, so they might take a few years to distill down to a post.  I did want to reflect a bit on my teaching practice. As I look back at the year of teaching, I think this year marked an inflection point: the year I started seeing AI-slop as student submissions.  Interestingly enough, it wasn't my graduate students, but my faculty learners  in some of the various workshops I facilitate that submitted such work as part of their coursework.  Can I prove it?  N...