Teaching with Technology with Lauren Malone (Bonus)

I recently talked with Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa, about her experiments integrating generative AI into her teaching. Before she was a faculty member, Lauren spent a couple of years as an academic technologist, and in this bonus clip she share how that experience has affected her approach to teaching with technology as an instructor.

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Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:00

For my Patreon supporters, I hope you enjoy. I recently talked with Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa, about her experiments integrating generative AI into her courses. Before Lauren was a faculty member, she spent some time as an academic technologist. And in this bonus clip, she talks about how that experience has shaped her approach to teaching with technology as a faculty member. Before coming to Tampa, you spent a couple years as an academic technologist. And I'm wondering if that experience shows up in how you teach today.

Lauren Malone: 1:01

Yes, every day. Yeah, trying to, I think, partially trying to centralize everything is a part of that. So we've you know, look in either one place or two places that are connected for all of the stuff for this class. Um, and then I don't know, just being, I think it has made me more willing to try different things and to have, um, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the tech we use, uh, just because, you know, doing this and I did some, something similar before, before that job. Um, you get a lot of pushback about a lot of different things. And it's not just a matter of, oh, well, the students are going to use AI to cheat. It's a matter of, well, they need to take notes by hand. It's like, okay, let's talk about accessibility for a second here. And so the, the, uncomfortable conversations around technology are something I've gotten really good at. I actually, the workshop that I did at UTampa, I started with that fact. I was like, listen, if you want to argue, I'm ready. I'm ready to argue either side of anything.

Derek Bruff: 2:23

Yeah. Well, and it's, as someone who worked at a teaching center, right, that I get to see faculty in lots of different disciplines and lots of different teaching contexts who make different teaching choices, right? And so it's a little easier for me to kind of imagine other cases that we might need to deal with, right? And I imagine that your academic technology experience is the same way, right? You've seen things roll out in lots of different ways. And so it allows you to kind of predict and respond to certain types of concerns that might get raised.

Lauren Malone: 2:55

Definitely. And it's easier to also honor those different teaching perspectives, right? So I think that... It's easy to fall into either of the extreme camps of like, I'm using AI for everything or I'm no, AI is totally prohibited. And that's fine if you do. But I also think there's a lot of people in that middle ground and being able to honor different teaching perspectives, honor different teaching styles and methods makes it easier to catch those people in that middle ground and say, okay, I get that you haven't decided whether you think this is the second coming of Christ or the ultimate evil, but here's a way you might want to use it if you want to just try it out for yourself. So yeah, it's definitely given me sort of that perspective in terms of seeing all of the different ways that we teach. Yeah.