Game Writing and AI with Lauren Malone

In this episode, I share a conversation I had recently with Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa. I met Lauren at a conference in Tampa, where she was presenting her ongoing experiments integrating AI into her communications and media studies courses. In particular, she shared about her use of Google NotebookLM in a game studies course that focused on writing for digital games. Lauren was already on her second semester kicking the tires on NotebookLM in this course, and I wanted to learn more, so I invited her on the podcast. In the interview, she talks about creative thinking with AI, the importance of the struggle in learning, very different student responses to AI, and changes she’s already making to her use of AI as this work in progress continues.  

Episode Resources

·       Lauren Malone’s website, https://lmaloneonline.wordpress.com/

·       Google NotebookLM, https://notebooklm.google/

·       There’s an AI for That, https://theresanaiforthat.com/ 

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.

(00:22):
When we walk into a classroom to teach, we don't usually worry too much about how to use the chalkboard or whiteboard in the room. These are familiar analog technologies and we know what to do with them in our teaching. So we don't talk much about these technologies here on the podcast or elsewhere because higher ed has, by and large, collectively figured them out. When it comes to newer digital technologies like say, generative ai, there's more room for discussion. As we collectively figure out the affordances of new technologies, what they do, how they might support learning, how they might interfere with learning, it can be very helpful to hear from colleagues about their experiments with the technology in question.

(01:01):
In that spirit, I'm excited to share a conversation I had recently with Lauren Malone, assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa. I met her at a conference at the University of Tampa where she was presenting her ongoing experiments integrating AI into her communications and media studies courses. In particular, she shared about her use of Google Notebook LM in a game studies course that focused on writing for video games. Lauren was already on her second semester kicking the tires on Notebook LM in this course, and I wanted to learn more, so I invited her on the podcast. In our interview, Lauren talks about creative thinking with ai, the importance of the struggle in learning some very different student responses to AI and changes she's already making to her use of AI as her work in progress continues.

(01:53):
Lauren, welcome to the podcast. I'm very glad to have you on and to talk about your teaching and AI and what you've been up to lately. Thanks for being on the podcast today.

Lauren Malone (02:02):
Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Derek Bruff (02:04):
Good. Before we get into all that, I'd like to get to know you a little bit better. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Lauren Malone (02:17):
Yeah, I think I've always kind of wanted to be a teacher. I remember in middle school thinking for career day, oh, this sounds fun, but I think the real, I guess, moment came in undergrad. I was an English major and I think a junior, a bunch of sophomores were taking the Shakespeare class, and I kept having people come up to me, can you explain this please? And so I would help them out and yeah, I think that was the moment where I was like, oh, I might actually be good at this.

Derek Bruff (02:59):
That's great. That's great. That's not far from my story. I think I got bit by the teaching bug my first year of college. I had already taken calculus in high school, and so I was able to do some tutoring for my peers who were just encountering calculus for the first time. And there was something a little bit, I don't know what the right word is, but the fact that they went to class and they heard an explanation and it didn't make sense, and then they came to me and I could give them a different explanation. That did make sense. I don't know. That felt good too. 18-year-old work. Yeah. Well, tell us about the teaching that you're doing now. I gather you teach a wide variety of courses and I'm curious about some of those courses and who your students are and why they're taking those courses. Can you give us a little bit of your teaching context?

Lauren Malone (03:51):
Absolutely. So I am teaching in the communication and media studies program here in the Comm department of U Tampa, and I've taught all over the place, just a sprinkle of everything here and there, including things like script writing, writing for interactive media, American cinema, but my classes that are my babies are a fandom studies course, which is really, really fun because there's always just figuring out the group. Every semester is so much fun. Sometimes you get tons of sports fans, sometimes you get tons of music fans, sometimes you just have a hodgepodge, which was last semester. There are fans of everything all over the place, so it's really fun. And then I also teach our game studies classes, which right now are game writing and games and culture. And then next year we'll have advanced game prototyping as well.

Derek Bruff (04:55):
Okay. Alright. Now I listeners to the podcast know that I have a very healthy obsession with board games. When you say games, do you tend to mean video games or analog games or both?

Lauren Malone (05:09):
That is such a great question. Both. So in games and culture, we definitely do more of the analog games, so we'll do board games and tabletop, and we have a couple units of the semester set aside for video games at the end, but it's more getting them to know mechanics, types of games, game genres, the history of games, those sorts of things. Then once they're into game writing, that's when we start getting digital with everything and they actually jump onto some game engines to try them out.

Derek Bruff (05:43):
Okay. Alright. Alright. So what about your students then? Are they the ones that are in your games courses? Why are they taking those courses?

Lauren Malone (05:55):
I've got a mixture, and this happens every semester that I've taught these. I have a mixture of students who have taken something else with me who were like, oh, I'm taking Dr. Malone's class again, students who are gamers, and we're like, hell yeah, this sounds awesome. And then students who needed an elective and they were like, eh, this sounds cool, but don't play games, which I have the most fun with those students.

Derek Bruff (06:26):
That would be a pretty diverse group of students actually. Yeah.

Lauren Malone (06:29):
Yeah. It's always interesting the first day asking who's a fan of board games, who's a fan of RPGs, who's a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, cozy games, and just seeing a few every semester who don't raise their hand for anything. And then I'm like, so what do y'all got? And they're like, eh, we're just here for fun. I'm like, all right. Way to step outside your comfort zone.

Derek Bruff (06:53):
Nice. And are some of these students planning careers or majors that might leverage this course or does this kind of fall in the elective category For most of them?

Lauren Malone (07:04):
For most of them it falls into the elective category. Some of them use it for the communications and media studies major as one of their production courses for game writing, or if they're taking games and culture, it counts as one of the theory courses, so they can use it that way. But everyone else, it's an elective.

Derek Bruff (07:27):
Yeah. Okay. So we met when I was visiting University of Tampa several weeks ago, and I did this thing at the beginning of my workshop that I often do where I have people look at superheroes and put them into groups, and I said, I pick this topic because generally no one in the room studies were teaches superheroes, and you just kind of put your hand up. But then I realized that later that same day at Tampa, you were given a workshop for faculty on your experiments with ai.

(08:02):
And so I want to kind of dig into that and I want to start kind of at the why level. So there was an influential paper by Randy Bass years ago where he said that essentially in research and scholarship, if we have a problem, that's a good thing, that means we have something to study and look into in teaching. Problems are bad, but he wanted to say, teaching problems are actually good. These are the spaces where we get to explore and better understand our students and try new things. And so is there a teaching problem that you're trying to tackle through your use of ai?

Lauren Malone (08:36):
Yeah, I think the umbrella term can be a connection. I always ask my students at the end of the semester, Hey, what did you think about this? Give them some guiding questions. One thing that came up a couple of times last year was the feeling that the assignments, they understood the assignments, they understood the theory, they understood why they were doing them both, but connecting those two, it was feeling a little disjointed for them. So connecting those two things are the content within the course, but also being able to think in terms of connecting digital literacy skills and trying to get them to think critically about, those are my two main goals with this.

Derek Bruff (09:30):
And I can see that in the courses that you're teaching, students might need to know something about AI because it's affecting how maybe game writing is being done, but there was also kind of a non-AI problem that you were looking at this connection. So tell us about one of your experiments. So let's start with your Google Notebook, LM experiment. First, what is Google NotebookLM? And assume that I maybe have played a little bit with ChatGPT, but I don't have a lot of AI knowhow here. How would you describe NotebookLM?

Lauren Malone (10:06):
Okay. Yeah. So if you think about ChatGPT on the left hand panel, they have your list of all of the questions you've asked it, all of the GPTs you follow, and then the main panel is the chat itself. So picture that, but instead of your history on the left, you have uploaded documents, and so you've got your documents, you have the chat box, and then you have on the right hand side the studio. And so the studio is where you can take notes, you can generate notes, you can have the AI generate things like briefing documents, FAQs, those sorts of things. And my favorite part of it, it will generate an audio overview for you. And so this is something where it basically scans all of the things you've uploaded and turns it into what sounds like an Honest to God podcast. It was very, very creepy.

Derek Bruff (11:05):
Of a particular type, right?

Lauren Malone (11:07):
Yes, yes. It was very, very creepy. The first time I worked with it. I was like, okay, this is definitely one of my quickie. I just want to learn about random stuff, kind of feel to the podcast. But it does a good job at explaining some of the things in layman's terms, big asterisk, but it is fun to use and the students like it as a kind of entryway into the topics, and then we dig deeper into it.

Derek Bruff (11:41):
And the podcast, at least in the default settings, there's a kind of male sounding voice and a female sounding voice, and they're very chatty and they're talking about your topics and they're very excited. I think

Lauren Malone (11:54):
They sound a little bit like Good Morning America,

Derek Bruff (11:56):
Right? Yes. So a particular, and after I heard a couple of these, I thought, I wonder if maybe I've heard some podcasts actually that were created this way. It kind of hit a particular version of the form quite well, and it's really the feature I think in Notebook LM that got a lot of attention last fall is the kind of study podcast feature. But I gather you didn't even start with that in your description. You talked about these kind of other components. And so what was it about Notebook LM that made you think it might be useful in your courses, especially around this kind of connecting theory and practice question?

Lauren Malone (12:37):
The idea that you could share them so you can be in other people's notebooks, but what I was really looking at was specifically at first for games and culture, they have a world building assignment, and they were having trouble diving into the world building. So it was very much my hometown, plus make it magic, make it sci-fi equals, see, I made a new thing and it was like, no. So I wanted a way to turn it into more of a research-based project that would hopefully help them find new things and new ways of thinking about world building and therefore help the final project that they have to do. So that was the initial kind of nudge to use it where I was like, oh, this would work really well, because we can all have Classroom Hub with the world building stuff, but then they can find their own articles, and they can find articles on sci-fi, on fantasy, on video games, on whatever the stuff is that they need for their own development. And then we can all see each other's stuff so we can talk about it in class.

Derek Bruff (14:00):
So I do want to circle back, I think I know what you mean by world building, but can you say a little bit more about that as a project for students?

Lauren Malone (14:08):
Yes. So video games, it's basically the idea that for the game, for the movie, whatever media you are engaging with, you are engaging with a story that takes place in a certain time in a certain setting or small set of settings and world building is the idea that there is something beyond that narrative. So you've designed a world that it makes sense in terms of knowing other stuff, like the culture feels real, the technology feels real, the so on and so forth. So thinking it in terms of what can I do to make sure that people are immersed in my game world rather than just feeling like they're clicking through a story?

Derek Bruff (15:02):
Sure, sure. I'm reading a biography of JRR Tolkien right now, and I gather he kind of built his world and then wrote a novel based in that world. He did a lot of world building upfront to figure out the culture, and I mean, he was fascinated by languages. And so probably a level of world building your students don't pull off in a semester, which is fine.

Lauren Malone (15:24):
No.

Derek Bruff (15:26):
So what did the assignment look like before Notebook lm and what does it look like with Notebook lm?

Lauren Malone (15:33):
So initially the assignment was just you have a website or you are going to create a website. You need different pages for the different sections. Here are the different things involved in world building. You're going to puzzle them together in the way that best suits your game idea. And it was pretty detailed list of stuff. So there were lists for social structures, there were lists for government, things to think about, economies, all of this, but getting them to step beyond, well, it's capitalist and there's a black market. It's like, okay, it can be that, but let's kind of add some oomph here.

(16:20):
So they would put all of the stuff onto the website and maybe generate some pictures or maybe find some stock images that kind of gave us the feel of their game. With Notebook lm, we've sort of moved that project back. So we started it earlier and they had lots of time to work on their website, and we've spent more time, or we are spending more time on the idea of what are all of the different ways that we can world build and using the folder that is the class hub to kind of look at a lot of different things. It's funny you bring up Tolkien because that is one of the things that we look at is sub creations. So looking at a lot of different ways to think about world building, giving them some creative thinking, creative writing challenges that they can add to their notes that then tie back into some of the stuff they're asking the AI to generate. And so it's a little bit longer process and it's way, way more research focused than it was initially. But I was really impressed with last semester's, some of last semester's games or game pitches. They were really good.

Derek Bruff (17:40):
Okay. Okay. So let's get a little more concrete about, you said, is there a central notebook that the class has access to, and then each student would have their own notebook where they can do their own individual work. Is that right?

Lauren Malone (17:55):
Yep.

Derek Bruff (17:57):
And you have kind of preloaded the central notebook with a bunch of documents, is that right?

Lauren Malone (18:02):
Yep. So those are the main world building documents, the main kind of scholarly articles on them. And then over the course of the semester, they will find their own scholarly articles, but most of what they're actually looking at are things like the different game blogs and that sort of thing, and talking about, Hey, they did this thing that was really cool, and so when you play this game over here, you get this experience. And so it's a lot of linking things in that way. And initially I did, everyone has their own notebook and then everyone gets access to everybody's notebook and the class hub, I will not do that again, Ruby. We'll be putting them in small groups for peer review to cut down on the chaos. And then in terms of how they use the ai, obviously they can ask it whatever questions to try and get a better understanding of certain things, but a lot of them use it for frequently asked questions, and then they take those and think about those and think about how they can build in some of those things into their own stuff.

(19:17):
And I also have them generate certain things in class. And so will talk about, for example, geography, mapmaking for world building, and I'll have them look up or I'll say, Hey, ask your notebook to give you the name of a fictional country and three cities based on one of your readings that you have here. And so they'll do it, and we'll kind of talk about that in that way. And it's a good way to keep it in front of them and have them not feel as if, okay, this is a cool piece of technology that we'll come back to once a month, but it's a kind of central part of class.

Derek Bruff (20:02):
So now I'm imagining some AI skeptics in the room who are like, hold on. Now, the concern I saw a lot with Notebook LM out of the gate was why would you want a student to listen to a eight minute podcast recap of a scholarly article instead of reading the scholarly article themselves? Aren't they missing out on the skill building that comes with reading something hard and trying to synthesize it themselves? How would you respond to that? What are the skills that your students are missing out on here or not missing out on? Probably,

Lauren Malone (20:39):
I guess, response that I have to that, and what I am trying to do in my classes is we start up top with the AI and it's like, go ahead, generate whatever you want. And beginning of the semester, I'll generate the audio overview of a few articles, and that's their homework. That's all their homework is to listen to the audio overview, make a few notes, and I do tell them that I will check their notes, but make a few notes and we're going to talk about it in class. But then in class, I have printouts of the articles that we're talking about and we spend time talking about note taking, talking about annotations, talking about what it means to do close reading of an academic article, and they have to comb through the articles in groups and do activities based on that too. So they are getting the reading. I use the AI more as an entryway into the reading, especially when I'm giving something that I know is chockfull of jargon. So the easy accessible entry, and then going into diving deeper and talking about, and again, talking about, Hey, was that audio overview accurate? Did it get some things wrong? Did it conflate some things? And having that digital literacy discussion and thinking critically about how we're using these tools.

Derek Bruff (22:09):
So you talked about, again, this kind of theory and practice piece. So when you're having students do these things that are part of, it sounded like almost like design thinking or creativity exercises. You're building a world, let's talk about geography. What can we do there? Right? Let's talk about economics. What can we do there? And so what role does the AI play there? Is it doing that kind of synthesizing piece for them? Are they getting ideas from the ai? What does that interchange look like and what skills are you trying to build with the students There?

Lauren Malone (22:52):
Definitely the brainstorming step of things, which is funny to me because that's all I hear people talking about in terms of teaching with AI is let them brainstorm with it, but then no one ever actually explains how, so, yeah. So the brainstorm step of things is usually I have them do something on paper and then I have them put it into the ai and we talk about, okay, what are the things that you brought to the table that the AI couldn't, what are the things that maybe the AI enhanced out of your ideas where it took it and maybe made something a little bit clearer for you? So having those sort of meta discussions, a lot of them also do really fun stuff. And we also, I want to foreground what I'm about to say with, we do talk about the ethical considerations behind ai, and one of the things that I tell them is if you are going to use an image generator that is anything other than Adobe Firefly, you have to put it into Google reverse image search and find me an artist to credit that has a similar style to that.

(24:02):
So we talk a little bit about credit and intellectual property, all of that stuff, the environmental impact,

Derek Bruff (24:10):
Just to confirm the task is not see if there's an artist I should credit, but it is find me an artist that I should credit because there is one.

Lauren Malone (24:20):
Yep.

Derek Bruff (24:21):
Okay. Because tools like Midjourney and Chat, GPT have trained their image generators on images that are on the internet,

Lauren Malone (24:30):
Literally everything. Yeah. So we talk about environmental impact, and a lot of them choose to use it less after that discussion. But even the ones who use it less, sometimes they do really interesting stuff with it. So we were talking about the maps for the geography, so they have fun putting things together and making their map themselves, but then they're like, oh, Dr. Malone, I'm terrible at naming things. Can I use this to names? I was like, see what it gives you? And so they then have fun with whatever it spits out, and then they get into arguments with their friends who they're sitting around about, no, that doesn't sound like a sci-fi name, or, that's way too long. People aren't going to be able to pronounce it. So again, brainstorming, throwing ideas at the wall, seeing if there's something that maybe sparks something in you. But I think that even there is a, I guess a level of me that is resistant to having them do all of it with ai. So that's my, I guess one little, Ooh, should I be doing this? So I do still have them do just plain old pen and paper or a lot of fun brainstorming stuff on whiteboard, those sorts of things. My game writing class right now, they're about to do their character profiles for their video game that they're pitching. And that is one of the ones where I say, we're not doing AI for this because I want you to suffer. I want you to sweat a little bit.

Derek Bruff (26:20):
The struggle is the valuable part of the process there.

Lauren Malone (26:23):
Yeah. So I know that you desperately want to ask Notebook, LM or Chat GPT to name all of your characters for you, but you're going to do it yourself or you're going to find something else online that helps you do that. So again, trying to bring in that digital of there are other tools out there that will help you and sometimes are way more effective in helping you do the things you need to do. So I've done this already with one class. We'll see how it goes with this class. I have had people just copy paste wholesale and turn it in, and I tell them, some of my classes have a full fully permissive AI policy where I'm like, go for it, because what we're doing in class is going to be the kind of bulk of what you're doing for this. So AI is really an efficiency tool in this class. And then there are classes like the game writing class that are hybrid where it's like, we're going to use it sometimes and then sometimes we're not going to use it, and there will be very clear delineation between what is what. But I have had a few times where students just threw it into perplexity or whatever and gave me whatever perplexity, spit out, and then had to have the conversation of, I know what this looks like.

(27:57):
Also you've been doing writing for me in class. You don't write like this. So what's the goal here?

Derek Bruff (28:07):
Right, right. How are your students responding to this use of AI in this course?

Lauren Malone (28:15):
Like I said, other than

Derek Bruff (28:15):
The ones who are maybe trying to shortcut some homework, but in general?

Lauren Malone (28:20):
In general, I think, so I have had some that are no AI whatsoever, and I'm like, bet that's cool. We'll figure out another way for you to do the exact same thing. But I think in general, they think I'm trying to trap them, and I think it's a week six in our semester right now, and just in these past two weeks, I've gotten them to a point where they're comfortable talking to me about using ai,

(28:57):
Even though I'm the one that introduced this into our course conversation to begin with. And so the first thing that they turned in that no one cited anything, and I was like, Hey, I'm going to give y'all another night. I want everybody who used AI to go back and cite their sources. I need to have the citations before I can grade this. And they did. And I think almost everyone used it in the class I'm thinking about right now. And so there's this, they want to use it, and I can tell the ways in which they're using it, but they're not willing to admit it probably because they're not allowed to in most classes. But

Derek Bruff (29:48):
I was going to ask, It's probably a Message they're getting from other faculty that say, this is forbidden.

Lauren Malone (29:54):
Definitely. But even when I am telling them, yes, but here's how we're going to do it, it's still taking this long for them to finally be like, Hey, so last week the question was, Hey, I kind of want to think about the names for my cities. Can I put that into ai? Is that an okay way to use it? And it's like, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Let's go through it a little bit. And this week it's more of, okay, so I had AI spit out these names for cities. I'm thinking of designing my major city around the concept of Settlers of Catan. So how would I draw that? I can't draw. How do I make that? I can't draw? So we're kind of moving forward in that conversation. So yeah, it's been an interesting couple of semesters. I've been testing things out this year. But yeah, I think going forward it's going to be small groups focused, and that'll probably help a little bit, and we will probably do some more in-class AI work to kind of bridge that initial, oh God, I used it, but I'm just going to turn it in and it'll be fine.

(31:16):
I was like, no, no, you got to cite it.

Derek Bruff (31:20):
Well, I think part of the AI literacy or AI know-how is that your students are probably going to go into professions, whether it's games or not, where there will be a variety of AI tools available to them. And so part of what they need to learn is when it's a good time to use the tool and when it's not for this part of the process, it's not a good time. Or in this part, you know what the ideation is key, the visuals that I put with the ideation or not as important as the ideation. So I'm going to have AI generate some visuals for me. But that's a lot of metacognition for students to know their own process and then where the AI might intersect with that process in productive or non-productive ways.

Lauren Malone (32:05):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think the other thing, and it's especially coming up in my games classes is I've told them, I was like, listen, there is literally an AI for everything. There's literally a website called There's an AI for that, that's just a big database of all the AI that are coming out every single day. And I was like, you can go online right now and spit me out a whole entire platform, or probably over the next two days just using ai, however you don't know that it's going to be good, first of all. And I told them, we're going to have a Game Jam at the end in the second half of the semester. So Game Jam for those who haven't done one before is just some sort of dedicated space of time where a group of people build a game usually centered around a certain theme, but not always. So they get the second half of the semester as their game jam.

(33:04):
And I told them, I was like, there, if you go onto Itch IO right now and look through every single game jam that's coming up this year, 90% of them are going to say No ai. No AI whatsoever, whatsoever. And the ones that don't will say, absolutely use ai. We're going to try out these new tools. So it is very black and white, and so being able to find tools that are not based on generative AI is part of what I have them do. Because of that, I was like, you'll be in these situations where for one reason or another, people don't want you using AI for what you're turning in, and it's going to be usually very, very obvious if you do so. Yeah. So that's part of the conversation that we have as well.

Derek Bruff (34:08):
Wow. You're also naming a community that has largely decided we're not going to use AI for these tasks, and you're trying to orient students to how they might exist in that community. How are they going to navigate that norm that is developing over time? And part of that is finding tools that don't use ai, which is getting increasingly hard to do.

Lauren Malone (34:32):
It's so hard. Yeah. Part of why we do this is I'm like, if you find something, please tell me. Because everyone, and the terrible thing is, I don't know for a lot of them if they actually are using AI or if they know that AI is the new buzzword, so they just slap it on their website powered by ai, and it's like, great. Well, now I can't use you because,

Derek Bruff (34:59):
So last question. Let's think about someone in the middle there, maybe someone who's been a little hesitant to dip their toes into AI and maybe doesn't want to build an entire multi-week assignment around Google Notebook. Lm, what advice would you give someone for starting to weave this into their teaching more intentionally?

Lauren Malone (35:16):
Do not do anything you haven't done before. So do not introduce something as an assignment, as a class activity, anything that you have not already tried. So if you want them to use chat GPT for, let's say you're doing an in-class activity, you want them to use chat GPT, try it out. Make sure that you've used chat GPT before. And I know that might feel very captain obvious to people, but I think especially when we hear new ideas, we get excited about them, we get excited to bring them to our students, and we don't always take the time to plan things out. So yeah, my biggest thing with AI is always, if you are interested in it and interested in using it for yourself, bringing it into class, try it out and try different ones. Don't just go on chat GPT, even though there's lots of different GPTs under OpenAI, but look at Claude, look at perplexity. Look at what some of the art generators look like. Look at there's an AI for that, and just see the multitude that are out there and play with some of them and make sure that you understand what you're asking of your students before you ask it of them.

Derek Bruff (36:45):
That's very good advice. Thank you, Lauren. This has been really great. Thanks for sharing your experience and your experiments and your reflections. I really appreciate it.

Lauren Malone (36:54):
Thanks for having me.

Derek Bruff (36:58):
That was Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa. Thanks to Lauren for taking the time to talk with me and for sharing her experiences teaching with generative AI this year. Lauren was only the second or third faculty member I ran into who was using Google Notebook, LM in their teaching, and it was interesting to hear how she and her students have been using the tool beyond the audio overview feature that got so much attention last fall. I hope her experiences have given you some food for thought about the roles that AI might play in your courses. Before Lauren was a faculty member in communications, she spent some time working as an academic technologist. In the bonus episode for this interview, Lauren reflects on that time and how it has informed her approach to teaching with technology as a faculty member. You can listen to intentional teaching bonus episodes by supporting the show on Patreon or, and this is new,

(37:51):
Subscribing to the bonus episode feed through my podcast host Buzzsprout. If you look on your podcast app, you'll probably find a link for doing so, but if not, you can find one in the show notes. I'm hoping this new subscription option will make it easier for folks to support the show. It's just a few bucks a month, which helps with production costs, and you'll get access to all the Intentional Teaching bonus episodes.

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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 and socials and to the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. 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.