Late yesterday, I logged into LinkedIn and saw that I had been mentioned in a post about AI. This person was vocal in his ongoing resistance to AI and vented a bit at those who seem to be not thinking critically in their adoption of it. I was listed among those who he said that he respected, in terms of how we were approaching it, despite his disagreement. I felt honored to have been thought of in his mind as someone who is carefully considering how to use or not use it, depending on the circumstances.
That any part of my cognitive dissonance was showing up in anything that made the slightest bit of sense or left a positive impression had me go to bed feeling optimistic last night. When I woke up, his post was gone. He said he had regretted the tone of it and that his harshness wasn’t representative of how he wanted to go into the new year. While I took his mention of my “learning out loud” as an enormous compliment, I recognize that I wasn’t reading his message from the perspective of those not specifically named as among those he had respect for, but rather from the paradigm of those he was criticizing. His desire to consider how he hoped to frame the new year resonated, even if I did wish I had grabbed a screenshot of it to store in my encouragement folder.
As I consider what messages keep rising up in seemingly random places, perhaps as a clue to what to take into the new year, one theme emerges more than any other. I keep seeing references to the word ‘return’ in podcasts I’ve been listening to, as well as in some reading I’ve been doing. On Episode 551, Peter Felten recommended the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: A Novel, by Gabrielle Zevin. The book sounded intriguing at the time, though I’m only just getting to it now, more than a year after our conversation. Such is the life of someone who has the privilege of hearing about wonderful books at least a few times each week. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think the words from a New York Times review (gift link) give you a flavor without me spoiling anything:
Gabrielle Zevin’s novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is a love letter to the literary gamer… This is a story about brilliant young game designers — and Zevin burns precisely zero calories arguing that game designers are creative artists of the highest order. Instead, she accepts that as a given, and wisely so, for the best of them plainly are. “There is no artist,” one of her characters says, “more empathetic than the game designer.”
At one point, the book references a game that lets you skip back and forth between worlds via a code word. There are also some plot points in which the characters wonder what would have happened if they had made a different choice in their life, or even turned a few seconds earlier (giving me Sliding Doors vibes), or said how they really felt. I’m more than halfway through and keep wishing that they could return to themselves and to each other in ways they are ill equipped to do at this point. The song, Return to Me, has been playing in the soundtrack of my mind, throughout these micro-meditations I’ve been experiencing on the idea of returning.
The lyrics keep returning, as I consider those yearnings many of us have around our teaching and our life long learning.
Return to me
Oh, my dear, I’m so lonely
Hurry back, hurry back, oh my love
Hurry back, I’m yours
In Voltaire on Working the Gardens of Our Classrooms, James Lang invites us to return to the familiar cultivating and harvesting we have been doing in our teaching for longer than most of us have known about something called general artificial intelligence. He describes the anxiety and anger felt by many, at the invasion of our classrooms by this technology which threatens to circumvent the very core skills and wisdom we seek to develop through our teaching. One of the older family members in the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow describes her disappointment at the shortcuts that too many people take, when it comes to producing fabric using technology.
The character complains:
“Computers make everything too easy,” she said with a sigh. “People design very quickly on a monitor, and they print on some enormous industrial printer in a warehouse in a distant country, and the designer hasn’t touched a piece of fabric at any point in the process or gotten her hands dirty with ink. Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”
I’m never sure if I’m experiencing the recency effect, or if it really is more difficult to reach students than it used to be… GenAI make it simple to extrude text that meets explicitly stated criteria across many contexts and the idea of spending this one, precious life focused on the fight against that feels meaningless. Loneliness can sneak in, particularly when teaching primarily asynchronous courses, which I do about half the time.
Return to me
For my heart wants you only
Hurry home, hurry home, won’t you please
Hurry home to my heart
Our son (L) got his first mobile phone for Christmas. This morning, we walked to the nearest Starbucks, which is just under two miles from our house. On the way, both kids participated in the augmented reality experience that is Pokemon. They used to play a little when the game first entered the scene on mobile phones, but there’s something all together different about having your own phone, I fully realize. Our daughter used my phone and kept asking as we walked if I wanted her to catch Pokemon or do battle at some Pokestop. Lest you worry that we’ve lost our children forever to these digital worlds and that they will never return to us, last night gave me a hint that it is far more complicated than that.
L had been asking me to go for walks four or five times a day, as each time offered a new way to level up, or otherwise collect various types of Pokemon characters. When we got home from dinner at our favorite Japanese restaurant, he asked if I would walk and I reluctantly obliged. It was close to 9 PM and I was exhausted, especially after having gone to Jazzercise with my Mom that morning. However, I decided to go and packed the handwarmers he bought Dave and I for Christmas in my pockets. When we reached the point halfway down the steep hill near our house, I pulled out my phone to spin the “thingy” that lets you collect items such as berries and pokeballs (not sure that’s their official name). It surprised me that L’s phone remained in his pocket and I reminded him not to forget the loot off to his right.
“I didn’t bring my phone,” he said, indicating that he just wanted to enjoy the walk with me. It was later in the walk that he lamented that his screentime limits don’t let him use apps after the 9 PM cutoff. I had tried to give him the app-specific permission the other night on a walk and it hadn’t worked. I’ll never know if he really was looking forward to walking with me, or if this was some subversive plot to gain greater autonomy over his screen limits. Either way, it was a wonderful walk. I left with the familiar nuanced feelings of being a parent to two curious, kind, and smart kids.
My darling
If I hurt you I’m sorry
Forgive me
And please say you are mine
This semester, I was treated to some of the most unique writing I’ve read in a long while from any of the students taking classes with me. I teach a class called Personal Leadership and Productivity in which students set up a GTD (Getting Things Done) system during the semester and make use of the GTD Workflow Processing and Organizing Diagram quite a bit. I even used Canva’s AI code generating feature to create this game to help support their learning about the GTD workflow diagram, since this is an often-confused concept from the course. One exercise from David Allen is the mind sweep, in which you use trigger lists to empty your mind. Allen tells us:
Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
Freeing our mind up for having ideas involves the mind sweep, so students go through the process about five times during the semester. Thus far, this seems an assignment that is likely not worth trying to get AI to complete it for them, so I rarely see what appears to be AI-generated text. However, I would describe much of what I see as varying in levels of transparency and detail. One student this semester had the most unique and delightful responses I’ve ever read. This is when I let you down easy, as I won’t be sharing what she wrote here. I didn’t ask her permission and doing so would have felt like I was taking advantage of all these treasures she shared with me.
Return to me
Please come back bella mia
Hurry back, hurry home to my arms
To my lips and my heart
This semester, I also added some times in which students had to sign up to meet with me and a small group of others from the class for what I referred to as the Personal Leadership Learning Labs. I later heard Meghan Donnelly on the Think UDL podcast call these assessments Conversational Quizzes and I like that name quite a bit. When I met with the student who brought me so much joy with what she shared in her mind sweeps, she told me how edifying my words had been to her, as she read my feedback on these assignments. She just happened to be the only student who had signed up for that particular time slot, so I was able to speak freely with her about some of the things she had shared.
I didn’t want to scare her with my exuberance over her being so authentic in her writing and sharing with me in real time. It had just been so long since I had experienced in such a visceral way the highs and lows of college life. I missed the unpredictability and messiness of the writing I would see prior to the vast emergence of chat-based large language models. However, I also recall being frustrated in my younger days of teaching at what seemed to be careless grammatical errors and rushing through assignments. Now, I more enjoy seeing typos, though have to remind myself that most students are well aware that they can add in these clues of humanness in writing through their prompts to avoid being identified as having used AI in ways that don’t live up to the expectations outlined in the assignment.
Ritorna me
Cara mia ti amo
Solo tu, solo tu, solo tu
Solo tu, mi amor
The more I reflect on these desires to return to another time when it was easier to connect with students, the more I’m convinced that it has always been incredibly challenging. Dave Cormier describes the longer arc of these challenges, which are just that much more visible through the rapid expansion of chat-based large language models in his post In Search of Quality Points of Contact with Students. He writes:
I think the crisis is 25 years in the making and AI is the lens through which can finally see the problem for what it is. We have spent 250 years (give or take) trying to find ways to scale up our education system to try and teach more people, often with fewer resources.
Cormier goes on to describe how important letting students know why we are asking them to learn things and also how vital engagement is… That’s probably one of the reasons I felt so connected to the student whose mind sweep was rich with stresses, ideas, and celebrations of her own, unique life. And to why I understand the need to vent on social media, sometimes, even if we ultimately decide it isn’t quite what we want to bring into the new year, after all.