Take It or Leave It with Liz Norell, Betsy Barre, and Bryan Dewsbury

We’re back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries! 

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are… Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi; Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; and Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. 

We discuss three recent essays on class participation, learning management systems, and generative AI and weigh in with a "Take it!" or "Leave it!" for each one.

Episode Resources

• Liz Norell’s website, https://www.liznorell.com/
• Betsy Barre’s website, https://www.elizabethbarre.com/
• Bryan Dewsbury’s website, http://www.seasprogram.net/ 
• Essay 1: “Making Class Participation Grades Meaningful” by Benjamin Rikfin
• Essay 2: “College as a To-Do List” by Susan D. Blum
• Essay 3: “Saying No to Generative AI” by Cate Denial
• “But How Do I Participate?” by Olivia Bailey 
• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 
• “The Workload Paradox with Betsy Barre and Karen Costa,” Leading Lines podcast 
• OpenAI Operator, https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/ 
• Goblin Tools, https://goblin.tools/ 

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. In this episode, we have another take it or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries. The panelists and I discussed three recent essays on various topics in the higher ed landscape and for each one we decide if we want to take it that is agree with the central thesis of the essay or leave it that is disagree. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of each of the three essays is full of deep and I think useful discussion on teaching and learning.

(01:00):
The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Liz Norell, associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Betsy Barre, assistant Provost and Executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University and Bryan Dewsbury, Associate Professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. I was very excited that all three accepted my invitation to be on this panel and as you'll hear they had lots to say about each of the three topics of today's discussion. You'll hear the titles and authors of the three essays we tackle along with a ChatGPT generated thesis statement for each. That should be enough for you to follow along with our discussion, but if you'd like to read the essays in their entirety or even just skim them, see the show notes for links to all three essays.

(01:53):
Thank you all for coming on Our second hot Takes panel here on the Intentional Teaching Podcast. I'm excited to chat with you today and dig into some recent essays from across higher education and talk about teaching and learning in a somewhat artificially constructed way, but hopefully a way that generates some good conversation and discussion. Today I'm going to jump into our first essay that we're going to discuss. This one is called Making Class Participation Grades Meaningful. It's by Benjamin Rifkin, who is a provost at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and in his essay he argues that educators should incentivize thorough preparation for class discussions and clarify expectations for student engagement to enhance learning outcomes. I've asked ChatGPT to very neutrally summarize Rifkin's thesis statement in that way. Thank you ChatGPT. And I'm curious to know if you all are going to take this or leave it and Liz, I'm going to start with you for this one.

Liz Norell (03:09):
Thank goodness I have been chomping at the bit to tell you in no uncertain terms that I leave this piece. And the number one reason that I leave it is because ableism, ableism everywhere. There is so much embedded in this piece that assumes that students are capable of engaging in whatever the instructor decided was a meaningful way once every 10 minutes and that the instructor has the capacity to both lead a discussion and also keep track of that in a class even as he says in a large class. There's just a lot of assumptions being made here about our ability to be present and attentive and to respond in the way that someone else expects us to. And I am not here for it. I leave it.

Derek Bruff (04:01):
Alright, that was very decisive. Liz, quick follow up. Are there parts of his argument that appeal to you?

Liz Norell (04:12):
I appreciate that he mentioned Cate Denial at the end, but I don't feel like anything before that felt very kind.

Derek Bruff (04:18):
Okay. Alright. Cate Denial, author of a Pedagogy of Kindness. Yes, Betsy, do you take this one or leave this one?

Betsy Barre (04:27):
Yeah, so I hate the binary choice, but particularly for this one actually overall I'm going to leave it as well with Liz. But just to make the conversation interesting, I do think there are some things that I appreciated. I sort of took his concerns to heart, which is that oftentimes faculty when they have participation grades don't have clear transparency about how they're doing it and it's also not meaningful. It's often just box checking and he wants to sort of encourage a sort of transformational learning experience. And so he thinks that his new grading approach to the way he's going to grade participation is going to lead to more transformation. But my argument would be, and part of the reason I'm leaving it is that he's proposing this sign of interesting point system where you lose points so you don't earn them through participation, you actually lose them.

(05:18):
That leads to that kind of transactional approach to grades that we're trying to avoid students have. But the most important thing I think, so I love the transparency piece, but the most important reason I'm leaving it is that I think for participation to be meaningful, it needs to be linked to a learning outcome in the course. So if you're going to grade participation in a meaningful way, it needs to actually be the thing that you're trying to assess. And often what faculty are doing and what he's doing is he's trying to assess something else through participation or he is trying to incentivize behavior. So he is doing both things. Either he wants to assess whether they have knowledge, which is you can assess in a lot of different ways or he's trying to incentivize behavior. And I would say in my classes, actually being able to defend an argument verbally in a group is an outcome of my class. And so for that, I think grading and assessing is important, but I have to provide meaningful feedback and his feedback is like a point system and it's not meaningful because it's not linked to an outcome. So I could talk more about that. So there are pieces that I like in interesting ways, but I think where it ends up is not actually helpful to the goal he's trying to achieve.

Derek Bruff (06:33):
Okay. Alright. Bryan, are you going to make it a clean sweep? Are you going to take it or leave it?

Bryan Dewsbury (06:41):
I think clean sweep would be kind of strong. I'm going to leave it too, but I'm actually going to leave with a lot of kindness because I think there's a lot of good, and I think it comes from a good place. When I read through the article, I think the intent behind the article was really a noble one that I applaud. My issue with it is, I'm trying to say this in a way that is in fact kind, but I actually find it a little bit simplistic. And I don't mean that it's a, I'm not trying to call it a sophomoric type of essay, but I'm saying that when I think about classroom engagement, this to me still focuses on how do I get them to more talk about this passage or how do I get 'em to answer a question in class. When I think about classroom engagement, I'm thinking about the bigger, broader social aims that you could be thinking about with respect to classroom engagement.

(07:32):
And so then you have to ask yourself questions like what might lead someone to engage or not engage? What kind of behavioral norms and cultural norms do you have to consider if you're going to set up an environment that allows classroom engagement? And those to me are not just goals for a 15 week semester. Those are goals for life, for preparing students to be citizens and community members and things like that. So it's sort of in there, but I guess I would've loved to push him to think a bit more deeply and a bit more comprehensive of what engagement really entails and what the power of it and just that a lot of that was just lost in it. But I say I leave it with kindness because all of these subheadings things he talks about is legit, right? Be transparent, have meaningful outcomes. The quiz at the beginning, I get it. All those are kind of card carrying, SoTL type or fac dev type things that we suggest a lot of faculty, but I don't know if I would've put it together in this way. So hence I would leave it, but perhaps this maybe my encouragement to actually writer to dig deeper into what engagement really could be.

Derek Bruff (08:44):
So Betsy and Bryan, you've both taken I think a bit of a consultative role here, imagining what questions you might ask the author here. Liz, did you want to add a little bit to your comments about this piece?

Liz Norell (08:59):
I did. I mean, I could talk about this for a very long time, but I think Betsy's point needs to be highlighted further because what the author here seems to be doing is trying to incentivize students to behave in certain ways and to use grades as a lever for doing that, which means that all of the stuff that we talk about when we talk about grades we have to set aside because now our grade isn't reflecting learning per se, it's reflecting adherence to the norms that the instructor has tried to lay out and that the instructor or the author here says that he gives a rubric defining productive and non-productive behaviors to help insulate against accusations of subjectivity. But what's productive and non-productive strikes me as a deeply subjective assessment. And so this is all using these extrinsic motivation kind of levers to get students to behave a certain way to punish students who arrive late while in the conclusion saying, oh, but we should also recognize that they might have some physical or mental health challenges. There's just not a lot of attempts to incorporate humanity of the students and understanding different ways of being in the setup, the description of the setup of this way to capture participation. And so those are things that I think if I were talking to the author, I would encourage him to think more about.

Betsy Barre (10:34):
Can I just add to that? And so one interesting piece there is that on the one hand he's referencing that students at the end that we need to adjust for different student ways of being in the world, as you put it, Liz, which is so nicely put. And I think the fact that he's willing to do that is a signal that it isn't actually a course outcome of his right, because if it is the actual target skill you're trying to assess, then you're going to say, I need to scaffold to help the students get there. But what he's just like, well, it's just kind of an incentivizing way of getting students to do what I think will be good for learning. Then he's okay with saying, we need to adjust because we don't want to penalize students for access skills. Those kinds of phrases a phrase that I like a lot. And I think the big thing to say in a charitable way back to him is there are actually a lot of ways to incentivize student behavior that leads to good learning and that aren't grades that aren't punitive. And so if we can lean into that to get the same outcome that he wants that we agree on, that will be maybe a better approach.

Derek Bruff (11:33):
So I'd love to hear our panel say a little bit more about that. What are some alternative ways to try to reach some of the outcomes that Rifkin names here that I think are valuable outcomes.

Liz Norell (11:46):
I have had a lot of, I'm three weeks into teaching a new prep for me this semester and relying on the students to do a lot of discussion, but I am finding as I think many of my colleagues are that a whole group discussion is hard. But what is really fun for me, and this has been fun for me in meetings that I've had with other groups of inclusive teaching experts, is using shared Google documents for recording thoughts during class. So last night, for example, in class I asked them to brainstorm things you could say to someone if you were reaching out to a stranger to try to make a connection. And we just got this long list of ideas that everybody contributed to, and then they all wrote a message to a stranger they didn't know in class using that kind of crowdsource. So everybody was in the document participating, but was clearly to do something to help them do the next thing that we were going to do. And so it was deeply engaging, but nobody had to say something out loud in this Google Doc. Everyone was an anonymous dolphin or meerkat, so no one knew what anyone else specifically said. It's a great way to get some deep engagement without some of the social kind of challenges that some students may have.

Betsy Barre (13:11):
So I will say, again, it depends on what goals you're trying to achieve. But I mean even just to go back to the basics of what the author recognizes with his emphasis on transparency. So sort of basics of you explain to your students why you're doing it, convince them that why this skill or this practice is important for them to give them ideas about how to do it. I think a lot of times students think if they're thinking in a box checking way, that participation just looks like this or they don't really know what they're supposed to say or how they're supposed to engage. One of my favorite pieces that I share with lots of faculty is a philosopher, Olivia Bailey has a document that says, But How Do I Participate? And it's a long list of various ways that you could participate and it's really beautiful.

(13:59):
And so sometimes I'll discuss that with my students and they're surprised by some of these things of ways of engaging. And then finally, I think generally speaking, if you're interested in the kind of whole group discussion, that's not the only way to participate. I want to be clear about that the author recognizes that that's important, but if you are interested in that as an outcome, really giving your students the confidence to do it well and so that he even I will props to the author, he uses that great recommendation of have them work in groups before they talk in the larger group, there are a number of strategies that will give students the confidence they need. And I will say 20 years of teaching, my introverted students often thank me at the end of the semester because I helped them get to a place so I didn't just throw them in the deep end. I helped them get to a place where they could hear themselves speak in a group. And that's something that I think sometimes we either don't give them that option because we say, oh, we want to protect you. I'm going to protect you from having to do that, or we throw 'em in and to be able to say, this is something you're not comfortable with, but I'm going to help you get there, actually is helpful for them and helpful for everyone. So that's an approach I think that doesn't involve grades

Liz Norell (15:07):
In the think pair share. We often forget the think.

Betsy Barre (15:11):
Yeah,

Liz Norell (15:11):
the Part where you have time to think to yourself before you have to tell it to someone else.

Bryan Dewsbury (15:20):
Yeah, I mean, I'll probably sound like a broken record in a lot of my comments because, and I think part of it is the way in which I think about the class and what it could be and what tends to make me leave a lot of articles like this is we are just starting from a completely different place in terms of what I think the classroom can empower and what you think classroom human power. And so a lot of this is still centered around there's a lot of content and you want 'em to engage with the content and the content is more exciting if you can do back and forth and all of that is true, but that is sort of a step towards the bigger thing that I care about. If you bring up the word engagement, the question to me you want to ask in this social situation, the example now is a classroom.

(16:11):
What is the added value of them engaging and what does engagement mean? Engage with who each other yourself and for each of those dyads, what is the value added of that happening and what are the sort of organic natural circumstances that make somebody comfortable to do that in a way that lifts them up and pushes them further down the road socially, intellectually, spiritually, all the things that you care about. Then if you're willing to really engage those kinds of questions, then a lot of the things that Liz and Betsy have shared, it actually will come up naturally. You'll figure out, no, you don't want to just start having people raise their hands in the first five minutes of class. You do want to get to know them and have them figure out group dynamics. You do want to create options for more private engagement. You do want to actually teach students what it means to do what we call [???] active listening and slow down. There's a whole lot of things we can spend the next 45 minutes talking about, but I think it matters most the place you start from and that perhaps would be the conversation I would want to have with them before we get to the specifics of Think Pair Share and Google Docs and things like that, all of which are great.

Derek Bruff (17:24):
Yes, I feel like there's a lot of assumptions about the purpose of participation and engagement in this essay that could really be interrogated and unpacked and done so with students, right? Yeah. So no one has asked me yet, but I was a leave it on this as well.

Betsy Barre (17:43):
Oh, we should, we'll ask you every time now,

Derek Bruff (17:50):
and for many of the same reasons that you've just articulated, I think one thing rhetorically that caught my attention was that Rifkin says he wants to take a transformational rather than transactional approach to class, but the grading schemes that he describes are very transactional in nature.

(18:09):
And so I feel like while there are some kind of good motives behind this, there's a kind of learner centeredness that could be a lot different to try to get there. And I'm going to use that as a segue into our second essay, which also has some things to say about the transactional nature of higher education, teaching and learning. This one is from last August by Susan Blum. She's a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and author of, well, editor of the book Ungrading, but also author of the book, Foolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic Joyful Learning. The essay was called College As To-Do List, and here again is ChatGPT's thesis statement for this, Susan Blum contends that the prevalent use of learning management systems reduces higher education to a series of tasks, thereby diminishing the joy, adventure and meaning in learning. Betsy, I'm going to go to you first. Do you take this or do you leave This?

Betsy Barre (19:14):
Yes, so I am a recovering person who would leave it, let's put it that way, and I'll explain that further. But I am a newly converted, and by that I mean pretty strong take it. I guess it depends on how you interpret the thesis though. So I don't know if I agree with ChatGPT. We should also assess ChatGPT's summary of the thesis.

Bryan Dewsbury (19:33):
Leave it.

Betsy Barre (19:33):
Yeah. I'm not sure if I like ChatGPT's summary of the thesis, but at any rate, no, that one was pretty good. So my temptation to leave it or the reasons for leaving it would've been that we know that structure is good for students, not just all students, but also reduces equity gaps. And that usually means transparency, giving step-by-step guides. We know that no structure privileges some, makes things hard, stresses students out. So mental health issues are important.

(19:58):
And also I just think generally, and this is why I say I am recovering, is that I'm just a person who has just historically loved to think about project management and time management, and if I could just get that new time management tool that will help me out, then all my life will be perfect. And so every year I try some new thing that's going to figure out how I can figure all this out. And so if you get a good time management system, you get more done. And if you get more done, you get more learning done. And so I can see why students like that, why we like that. And so I'm in sort of tempted to say this is important, but my larger why here. So I could get into specifics. So I agree with basically her central reasons, but one thing I would say is that I wonder to what extent, and I guess maybe this is a slight disagreement, is Canvas causing this or is this actually a symptom, a larger cultural problem?

(20:48):
And so I want to tell a story about before Wake Forest transferred to Canvas, we were thinking about changing the LMS and there was a upper level business course that was a design thinking course, and that professor was on that committee. And so he decided to make his whole course about having his students design the perfect LMS. And so they were in project groups and they were designing LMSs, which was very weird, but very interesting for a teaching center director. So they invited me into the final presentations. And what was most shocking to me, I was just really surprising, is that all of the groups, their primary focus when they were talking about what they most needed from an LMS was task management. It was all about task management and project management. And I got to get all this stuff done and I got to figure out how I'm going to fit all this into my life.

(21:40):
And I think that's, that's why I'm obsessed with this too, that's why I'm doing time tracking et cetera, is that we just as a culture have not come to terms with scarcity in our own finitude that we have to make choices, that we can't fit everything in, that we can't do all the things we want to do in life, that I can't have a job and have kids and have a full-time student. And if we could just have the most flexible everything, we can do all of it to the peak of our ability. I think we've taught our kids that, so when they come to us, they don't want to, it's all fomo. They don't want to give everything up. And so they're trying to squeeze way too much in. So teaching them, I'm like a big fan of the book 4,000 Weeks, which is how many weeks we have to live by Oliver Burkeman about, we just have to say you have to make choices. I know it's scary. 4,000 weeks, that's all we got. You have to make choices in life.

Derek Bruff (22:31):
That's how many I had a few years ago!

Betsy Barre (22:34):
Exactly. We don't have anywhere near 4,000 now. And it's a really lovely book about how the to-do list is never going to be done. And if you keep trying to focus on, if I could just get the to-do list so I could get more in, then your whole life is totally joyless and it's all about inbox zero and getting more in instead of just saying you're not going to be able to do and everything, pick a few things and focus on them and enjoy them. And that's true with learning. That's true with life. So I think, well, I don't think campus is causing that. So maybe I disagree. I disagree with her on that front. I do think it reinforces that and I'm really worried about that. So I want to think about how do I break them away from it. They do approach their learning that way because they're approaching their life that way. So that's a long answer, but I feel really strongly about it. So I'll be done here.

Derek Bruff (23:20):
Bryan, do you take this or leave this one?

Bryan Dewsbury (23:26):
I'm going to leave this one because, and I mean you said this off the top, maybe you said it offline, that even though we've given these binary choices, the reality is there tends to be good and medium arguments in all these things. And so thanks giving us this space to really unpack that. I'm leaving it for two reasons. One, I think a problem is being identified that is not necessarily the fault of one technological feature of the students' lives. I think there's a bigger conversation between tech and ed tech and institutions of higher education that needs more words and more time and more sophistication, quite frankly than I've seen in many discussions. And it's not just limited to this. My university uses Canvas. You have a choice as an instructor how you want to do some of the things that are described in this article.

(24:25):
So there's some agency you have in thinking about this, right? The other reason I'm leaving it is I think higher ed is still, I don't really have a measure for this, but I think we are still and have always been, but are still quite naive to how tech will be central to our lives and the lives of our students going forward. And so it's a hard thing to say because I'm with her in terms of I'm very much a humanist and I understand the whole joy of learning thing, but I also have friends who work in AI in the west coast, the stuff that's going to be the case in the next 10, 20 years. I don't know if we could really conceive of what it is. And so Canvas is, but I know Canvas is not ai, but to the extent that it is sort of in the same ballpark of things that can upend and disrupt what higher education and teaching looks like, I think we have to remove the wool over our eyes and have a real come to Jesus moment. It may not affect those of us who are maybe only have 2000 weeks left. Thanks for that.

Betsy Barre (25:35):
Sorry.

Bryan Dewsbury (25:39):
And I think some of the resistance comes from to the extent that it means we can't do the things we do, the way we do it now, and what does that then leave us to do, right? I understand that that fair is going to exist, but it doesn't make the reality any less real. And I worry sometimes when these types of things are raised that I'm seeing the evidence of that naivety right now. I'll just give you one quick example before I talk to Liz here. I remember when I started being a faculty member in 2014, and this was when Pearson was down my throat to use a $250 textbook. And I remember I would say to them, but you can YouTube all of this.

(26:31):
Why should I convince somebody to for out all this money for something? They have very good lectures on YouTube. Three, four years later, 25% of the editorial team gets fired. They move to digital learning. You kind of saw the writing on the wall, but I think people, we have these sort of archaic conservative models in higher ed people just love to latch onto, and it's almost as though we have these images of exploring the meaning of life in some New England Hill in the winter. Look, I get it. I love that too. But it's also 2025. And so maybe is there a world where you can still think about things like the joy of learning, but also recognize, have some real deep hard discussions about the quality of the technology, the presence of the technology, when it's good, when to use it, when it's appropriate, how to preserve the things that make us unique, what makes us unique? These aren't easy questions to answer, but those are the questions we have to answer, not just sort of pick on one thing and say, well, this is cause in the student's lives to be chunky fight. So it is, again, it's a kind leave it, but it's because I want a bigger conversation.

Derek Bruff (27:45):
Liz, your turn.

Liz Norell (27:47):
Okay, I was going to take it, but then I sat with it.

Betsy Barre (27:52):
I like it.

Liz Norell (27:54):
And I am a fan of Susan Blum's work and have a good relationship with her. So Susan, this is not at all personal, but I'm going to leave it because I don't buy the notion that to-do lists sap joy from learning.

Derek Bruff (28:16):
Alright! That's a hot take.

Liz Norell (28:18):
I have next to me my to-do list, which I carry with me everywhere. I take a great amount of joy in checking things off it, but it also, every day when I look at my to-do list, it's not a do this and then this and then this, this. It's a here's everything that you could choose to do. What do you want to do with this time right now? So it feels like it's taken a universe of overwhelm and narrowed it so that I can make a choice in each moment of what needs my attention or what do I want, what will give me joy to find from it. And Betsy, I am in a forever search of the single planner that's going to change my life and finally help me get it together. Finally, I've bought many of them, none of them have done it, but I do think that I understand where Susan's coming from and I don't think that the kind of project management perspective that an LMS brings necessarily means that the joy is gone from learning.

Bryan Dewsbury (29:27):
Yeah, I just follow up on that real quick. Sorry, Betsy. No, go ahead. Because I agree hundred percent. Sorry, with what Liz said about to-do list not taking joy away as a to-do list fanatic myself. My wife calls me kind of a robot when it comes to that, but sorry, that's just how my brain works. So I'm with you on that. But I also want to make very clear that I know Susan Blum's work and I don't have the relationship with her that Liz does, but I am a big, big, big fan of the part of this essay that talks about the joy of learning. That's why I am doing the job I have, because learning is joyful. I like it as a person when I learn and I'm always learning and I want to teach students what it means to have joy in the learning process.

(30:17):
So can't, there's no way I can agree with that part of it more. I just guess wanted to separate that from, yeah, tech's going to sort of circumvent that and I was sort of challenge moving forward is what key features of that learning processes innately and uniquely human and what all the nuances that is a part of that and in what role is tech going to play or not play or kind of play in the future. That's a different structural discussion that doesn't throw any shade in any way on the part of her essay that talks about the joy of learning. Betsy, sorry I interrupted

Betsy Barre (30:55):
You. No, that's fine. And actually I realized before I speak, I should ask Derek, my role now is to ask Derek what his,

Bryan Dewsbury (31:01):
And again, we forget again. We forget. Yes,

Betsy Barre (31:03):
Derek, take it or leave it.

Derek Bruff (31:05):
The host was trying to get out of making a judgment here. I came down on Take it and I mean, I agree with you, Liz. My to-do list I think gives me great joy and the structure that I build into my life, especially these last couple of years I've been finding has really helped me enjoy the things I enjoy more. I've talked at length on this podcast before about my year long slow read of War and Peace, that was all about structure and accountability, but I never would've finished that book otherwise, and I wouldn't have had that experience or that community that I found of other War and Peace slow readers. And I can think of other parts of my life where I feel like the structure of the checklist actually helped me allocate the time I need to do the things that are really important to me.

(31:53):
I think though her core argument that there is a to-do-ification of higher ed, I buy that. And I think part of the reason I buy that is that she has this really compelling anecdote about talking to one of her students. And I've had this trouble where I really want to know what does my course look like from my student's perspective. And yes, there's a student view button, but no, it doesn't work that well. And when she had a student share her screen with her and show her here's how I navigate Canvas for the five courses and other activities, I find that very compelling that there's something in the student's view that is overwhelming. And so I wish Susan Blum had a solution that she proposed here.

Bryan Dewsbury (32:46):
Derek, Derek, lemme disagree with you a Little bit on that.

(32:49):
Okay, so I'm going to disagree with you just a little bit there because I read the same part and I felt, well, I actually think it's sort of a good thing because very likely these students are going to go into a professional world where you'll need, and you'll be helped by a digital tool that allows you to opt your productivity because when things are due, organized meeting, things like that, I get it. It could kind of go overboard, Microsoft Outlook, I'm looking at you, but I didn't see it as inherently a bad thing and I thought maybe it was a little bit unfair to the organizing software to just view it that way and then kind of extrapolate from that. I don't know, Liz, Betsy, you all had thoughts on that particular thing.

Betsy Barre (33:38):
Yeah, so one thing just to say is we've done a few times, especially during Covid, I don't know if you did this Derek, but we put ourselves as students in Canvas. So part of it was for, so we actually wanted the faculty who were going to be leading to actually experience what it was like to be a student. And one thing, and I'm often in these courses, quote courses as a student and you see in your dashboard, especially if you're in multiple, as a teaching center director, I have 45 tasks due when I sign in and it stresses me out like what the heck are these? And that's the first thing you see when you sign in and it's like all the tasks. So it's actually there's a way in which I completely agree, Bryan, that we need to teach our students, we should not be ostrich in the sand.

(34:19):
We need to teach our students about technology. They're going to be project management apps they're going to need to use, but there is a way in which technology makes choices for us. It structures the way we should think about things and that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, but it does mean we need to know that. And that by putting the task list at the first page on the homepage, right, it's like to-do list. It's not an exploration. It's not like let's have a way to collaborate with my colleagues and have a conversation. It's like to-do list and here's the things that are overdue. So I do think we could think about could we redesign the technology and that's what we were hoping the students in that class would do is to think about how to design the LMS to prioritize learning rather than task list I think is really important. So I'll just stop there, but I have other things to say too about this so interesting. But I do think it is pretty dominant for those of you that have ever been on the other end.

Derek Bruff (35:10):
The other element of this that I don't think we've touched on yet, but Betsy, you reminded me of the, I had you on my old podcast during the pandemic time to talk about this workload paradox where

(35:23):
Many faculty were actually cutting back on the kind of weight of assignments for students because it was a hard time all around and often breaking those assignments into smaller, more manageable chunks and yet students, their workload had never been higher. I think one reason was if I think about my own course and how I'm trying to help my students, I may not be thinking about the other four or five courses that my students are taking. If all of us are scaffolding things into tiny little assignments, that's a lot of cognitive load for students to handle that. And so that's one of the reasons I like this anecdote because I think it's not just seeing the technology from the student's view, but seeing the rest of their academic life all at once when usually I just have a little slice of it.

Betsy Barre (36:09):
Well, so one interesting thing is one interesting worry, I have different ways of, and I actually appreciated both Bryan and Liz talking about how they make their to-do list. Liz held up a paper. It was paper, she was writing it down, which was really useful is that there's an act in making the list that something as important is happening and there is a difference between the list being given to you. Here's the things you have to do versus here's the things I want to do and the worry that I have is that it's not just, I mean again, it's a larger cultural thing that our students in K through 12, my siblings, they're high school and elementary school teachers, the more we are giving people lists of things to do and they aren't practiced at coming up with their own list. When they get to a place where they don't have the list, it's even more stressful because like, wait, you didn't tell me what I needed to do.

(36:58):
And I think that's part of the concern too, is how do we build in the skills for them to figure it out? And I often think about this with Canvas. There's a lot of conversation about we need to make it more organized. So every course looks the same. I'm sure that's a conversation that's been had on some of your campuses. And then I think when I was in school, every syllabus definitely did not look the same. It was crazy and chaos. We just didn't have any technology. And so there was a skill I had to have. And our Center for Learning Access and Student Success at Wake Forest actually people have written about this activity that they do with students is they encourage them to make a master syllabus where they pull all of their syllabi and they work through all of their syllabi and create their own to-do list from all five classes. And so in January and this week, here are the things I'm going to have to do across all five classes. And having to do it rather than just having it given to them is also really good for retrieval, for knowing, for making choices for planning. And so I do feel like this is preview of our conversation about ai. There's a worry that when you offload these things that you're losing that skill and that's important too.

Derek Bruff (38:08):
On that note, I'm going to call an audible and we're going to move on. We have mentioned AI and we have mentioned Cate Denial. So now it's time to talk about Cate Denial's essay. Cate Denial is a professor of American history at Knox College. She is author as we have mentioned of A Pedagogy of Kindness, which is a really fantastic read, really glad I've read that recently. The essay she posted, and this was on her own blog, it's called Saying No to Generative AI and ChatGPT tells me that Cate Denial asserts that generative AI offers no educational benefits in her classes as it lacks the capacity to enhance student learning or engagement. Briyan, I'm going to come to you first because you seem to have some strong opinions about technology. Are you going to take this or leave it?

Bryan Dewsbury (39:01):
I mean, I hate to make it three for three on all of mine because I don't want people to feel that there aren't any articles out there that I will take. But to defend myself here, I think articles by definition, the idea is to bring up something provocative and have us really think deeply on it. But this to me would actually be my strongest Leave it. Well, I think I understand the sentiment from which it is written, but the question, even though I know that your ChatGPT summary is a ChatGPT summary, that it has no capacity to, I forget what you said, Derek, like the enhanced learning, that is actually a factually incorrect statement.

(39:53):
And not only is it incorrect, the capacity of those tools to aid the learning process is getting better and better. And let me give you a very specific example because I am not an AI expert, not even a user. I've actually never put anything in ChatGPT. I'm thinking I'm going to be the last person who hasn't done that yet. And this is not because I'm a luddite, so I'm trying to avoid it. I got my first iPhone with the iPhone eight, right? I'm a kind a wait and see kind person, so I'm not against it. I just want to see what's going on and then I'll get involved. But I was talking to a friend of mine and he was showing me that OpenAI just released something called, they released two things. One is called Deep Research and the other is called Operator. He showed me he works for a company the way he has to do market research on a product and basically tell the company's administration what it sells for, how would customers have viewed this other thing. So that can inform how we go about that tool was able to produce a report that was double, triple in detail and quality that what he typically spends two and a half or three weeks doing.

Derek Bruff (41:11):
Wow.

Bryan Dewsbury (41:11):
I mean this is not hypothetical it did that, right?

Derek Bruff (41:16):
Yeah.

Bryan Dewsbury (41:17):
Operator can mimic everything you do on your computer. So you can literally tell it, can you check? You can actually get it to buy me another case of paper towels from Amazon and they would know your credit card because all of that is saved. You'll get your passwords. And I don't want to go all too many to three people or Matrix reloaded. I grew up in that. We all grew up in that time, so we know what's up, right? John Connor's come.

Betsy Barre (41:49):
Yes.

Bryan Dewsbury (41:50):
But I think we have to be at least very aware of its power and the fact that that power will increase. And I'm saying I'll leave it with a hard leave it, but I actually don't use ChatGPT in my class, not because I'm anti it or anything, just the way my class is actually not needed. The things we talk about and the way we ask questions between each other. Those aren't ChatGPT-able questions. So the tool has its use and it has its place in the broader landscape of how people live their lives. But I can design a class where I actually not, I don't have to go to battle with it, but the things that I can do now and I will continue to be able to do, we had to come to Jesus on that. Man, we can't go to war. We've lost that. Not that I was interested in fighting, but I think that's in the past. So yeah, that's a pretty strongly for me.

Derek Bruff (42:48):
Alright, Liz, take it or leave it.

Liz Norell (42:51):
Okay. I am going to take it with an asterisk.

Derek Bruff (42:56):
Nice.

Liz Norell (42:56):
And my asterisk is that, I mean, I love what Cate has to say here, and I think that she has persuaded me that the work that she's asking her students to do is mostly the hard thinking work. And just from what I know of her, I am convinced. But she says that there's nothing that I ask my students to do in classes that benefits from being done by generative ai. And so my asterisk care is, and I have to give my hat tip to Sherri Restauri with whom I was on a panel at OLC Accelerate that there is a really great website called Goblin Tools that I had never used before, but it is powered by generative ai. It's powered by ai. And I also just want to tell you this really quick story to explain how great it is. So Goblin Tools has lots of different kinds of tools that can really be helpful for students who have executive functioning skill challenges, deficits, whatever.

(44:07):
And so last night in my class, one of my students, I was showing this to them and I asked them for an example of an assignment they had to do for a class. And one of my students said, I'm supposed to read the Tempest and look up vocabulary words in the OED. And so we went to goblin tools and it has a to-do generator. What are the steps? And so we put that in and we set the setting to, it uses a spicy meter. So how neuro spicy are you from one to five. So we put it at the highest and it gave us this wonderful list of the steps you would take. So it was like, okay, acquire a copy of the Tempest, find a comfortable place to sit, turn the page and begin reading. Do you have access to the dictionary? Read carefully for vocabulary words, right? So it's just this wonderful tool that for some of the work that we may ask students to do, not knowing how to get started can be a huge hurdle. And that's not so much the thinking or the deep thinking, it's just the barrier to entry. So with the caveat that there are AI tools that can be helpful in getting students started for the kind of work that Cate's talking about. I'm going to take it,

Derek Bruff (45:34):
Betsy, take it or Leave it?

Betsy Barre (45:36):
I'm going to leave it. And I just really quickly to follow up on what Liz said, I think her asterisk essentially is that I think that there could be a more expansive view of what it means to use ai. And I think a lot of times our debates about this get really stuck in even the language used of using AI to do something. AI did something for me. And so thinking about AI as a tool that does things for you, that does work for you is instead of it as a conversation partner or there's just a lot of different ways to think about what AI it means to use ai. But there's a lot of things I could say about a lot of stuff. But the one thing that I want to focus on for leaving it is the ethical argument as an ethicist. I feel like that I got to say something about that and I really appreciate.

Derek Bruff (46:21):
There was A big meaty paragraph on the ethics of AI In Cate's piece.

Betsy Barre (46:25):
Yes. And there's a lot, I mean Bryan sort of alluded to this too. I actually think on ethical grounds, we can argue the opposite direction and not just because we disagree with some of the premises, but also that if there are big ethical questions at the heart of ai, we want our students to understand it because they're the ones that are going to be going out and setting policy and making, they're the ones that are going to have to make tough decisions in their businesses and their corporations and their nonprofits about whether we should use these tools. And so especially as educators, if it really is as ethically concerning as we think it is, we absolutely have to teach about it. And that requires us to teach them how to use it in some way. So that's not in fairness to her. She wasn't really sort of addressing that.

(47:05):
But I just want to note that. And then the other thing to say is I think there are some strong ethical intuitions that most of these folks who want to ban it start from, which is sort of skepticism of capitalism, a skepticism of techno optimism and a skepticism of devaluing the human. And I want to embrace, I want to say thank you, Kate. Those things are good to be skeptical of. That doesn't mean they're always bad, but they're good to be worried about. But I think what then tends to happen is you have those strong moral intuitions, and so you look for ethical harms or for reasons why it doesn't work or just because I want to make myself feel better because worried about this. And I think the specific cases that she gives are not as particularly harmful as she people think they are, or at least compared to other things we're doing all the time that are also deeply harmful.

(47:50):
I don't want to be the person who just says, well, what about him? But I do. I think there's a way in which we basically have to say, we're going to lose some things when we use this. Absolutely. That's all technology, and then we're going to gain some things. And instead of just, so it's about the balance and thinking through what are we willing to lose for what gain, and she sort of moves in that direction. But I think with the absolutism, you don't really get enough there, which is what I would want to see in a more longer than a blog post ethical analysis. So it's not her fault, it's a blog post, but yeah. Wait, sorry, one final thing, but I do also appreciate that sometimes if everybody is saying one thing, it can sometimes be useful to have someone just be like the town crier or somebody who's just complaining about it in the other direction. Yeah.

Bryan Dewsbury (48:35):
Well, if I could respond, I know we close the time. I want to respond just real quickly to the first two things that is shared as an ethicist, which I'm not. So thank you for your perspective. The first one, we talked about some of the charitable paragraph and the ethics of ai, and that to me actually was indicative of maybe why I said leave it for all three essays because the essays are bringing up things that are important, but it wasn't having the conversation that we actually need to have.

(49:08):
Because once you get to the ethics of ai, you are leaving out about the whole part, about only people who were trained to develop this in the first place. That's the conversation. And so the people, the great colleagues of mine I know across the country who are teaching intro, computer science, intro to coding, intro to tech, and teaching all the young men, and I say young men because their classes are mostly male. They told me that who want to go into Silicon Valley and make a gazillion dollars. The mentality and the mindsets and the attitudes they go with that is the stuff that we need to be more concerned about, and we are living the proof of that right now. The second quick thing you point about the history, we had to maybe step back and look at, okay, when they made the Ford Model T, the people who made horseshoes went out business, you could go through history and see all the times when as you got technically better, this business just went away there. Really book I read several years ago, Reclaiming Conversation. She's an MIT professor, does some robot research in Japan. So I think that there's some balance there to think about, there's some pros that comes to this and as time goes on now, where I do agree with Kate in terms of sounding a little bit of an alarm is the pace of technology.

(50:31):
Just it's mind boggling, right? I was in an internet cafe in 1998 opening a Hotmail account with Dial Up, right?

Derek Bruff (50:38):
Oh, that's a flashback.

Bryan Dewsbury (50:41):
Now I've Done this podcast on my phone, right? So anyway, I'm with Liz, man, do a part two, Derek, make It happen. I'm with Liz,

Derek Bruff (50:53):
Right? For the listener, we've got two other essays that we prepared to talk about, but we're running out of time, and so we may have to have a part two. This is really rich.

Liz Norell (51:02):
Let's do it. Let's do it.

Derek Bruff (51:05):
I believe I need to weigh in on Kate's.

Betsy Barre (51:07):
Yes. I was just going to say I didn't know if you wanted to. Yeah, we do want to hear it at the end. I like it.

Derek Bruff (51:12):
Okay, so again, lots of caveats, but I'm going to take it, I applaud Kate for taking the time to really investigate. It appears she has done, she's really looked at AI and what roles it would play in the very specific content, the specific courses that she's teaching, the skills she wants her students to develop. I've had a couple of interactions with her on social media around this topic, so I have a little more details, but I feel like she is making an informed intentional choice. And I also have concerns about some of the ethical stuff that she raised that I think are more complicated than how she framed them. But the core reason for her walking away from AI is that in her course, the things that she's wanting her students to learn, she doesn't see it helpful for that. And I would say, I think what I'm not seeing is a kind of acknowledgement that her students are going to be very different and they're going to come at the learning process from different points of view.

(52:07):
And AI might play roles for some students that are more helpful than for other students. But I appreciate the fact that she's taken the time to look at the disciplinary knowledge and skills that she's trying to teach and examine the role of AI in that. And I'm okay with someone saying, no, it's not for me right now. If they've done that, I appreciate that. She says, your mileage may vary. It may be very different in other courses. I hope that she would want to come back in a year or two and revisit this decision. As Brian points out, that technology is changing rapidly. So if I had to pick one, I picked to take it on that.

Bryan Dewsbury (52:41):
Well, you have to pick one. It's your show. You set the rules. Got to follow your own rules, dude.

Derek Bruff (52:47):
So true. So true. Well, Liz, Betsy, Bryan, thank you so much for coming on and digging into these essays with me. This has been really delightful, and I hope very thought provoking for our listeners. Yeah, thanks for doing this. This was fun.

Betsy Barre (53:00):
Yeah, thank you. It was great.

Derek Bruff (53:04):
Thanks to our three Take it or leave it panelists, Liz Norrell, Betsy Barre, and Brian Dewbury. I really enjoyed our conversation and all the nuance that you all brought to these hot takes in the world of higher education. In the show notes for this episode, listeners will find links to all the essays I cited during the panel, a few of the resources that our panelists mentioned, and links to more information about each of our great panelists. I would love to hear from you about today's Hot Takes, which ones would you take and which ones would you leave? You can click the link in the show notes to send me a text message. Be sure to include your name so I know who you are, or just email me at derek@derekbruff.org.

(53:42):
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.