In a writing group I joined recently online, the question of writing software for beginning writers came up. There’s a lot that beginning writers worry about because they haven’t found what works for them yet, but I don’t think software needs to be one of them. Not because there aren’t a lot of choices ofContinue reading “Writing Software For Beginners: No Need to Specialize”
Category Archives: Technology
Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda
The quarter has ended and I’ve had a chance to reflect on what happened since I last reported on teaching AI in my classroom. It got weird at the end of the quarter. Some teachers would be alarmed. I’m actually encouraged and comforted. As I reported before, I taught lessons in which my students explicitlyContinue reading “Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda”
Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2
In my last post, I talked about how I explored what ChatGPT could and could not do with the assignments I give my students. Now I want to talk about another little “experiment” I did with my students themselves that showed so much about how we receive AI and what we perceive as good writing.Continue reading “Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2”
Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1
I recently did a sort of impromptu experiment with my three sections of English 101 that revealed quite a bit about how framing—not to mention knowing authorship—affects how our students perceive a text. It may, in fact, illustrate why it matters if AI-generated text is labeled as AI-generated. In any case, it was a reallyContinue reading “Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1”
Perceiving Academic Journals
I started college in 2005, just at the cusp of learning management systems; things like Blackboard were in use, but most courses still had physical syllabi passed out on day one, and most assignments were still printed out on paper and handed in physically. In the same way, online journals were increasingly popular at theContinue reading “Perceiving Academic Journals”
Paper Vs. LMS: Tech Tradeoffs
A few years ago, I abandoned paper in my classroom almost entirely. First I stopped taking major assignments in paper form, but a while after that I also started encouraging my students to bring their phones, laptops, and tablets to class to participate in class activities via a Google Doc instead of collecting class activitiesContinue reading “Paper Vs. LMS: Tech Tradeoffs”
Fall 2021 Postmortem + New Semester’s Resolutions Spring 2021
As I’ve said before, I actually don’t consider the Covid semesters my “worst semester ever”; that honor is forever reserved for Fall 2019. However, although Spring 2020 was actually ok (all things considered), I will start by saying that Fall 2020 went badly for reasons that I probably could have prevented, and it is myContinue reading “Fall 2021 Postmortem + New Semester’s Resolutions Spring 2021”
Genre, Learning, and Why Your Students Are So Tired
It’s a bit of a cliche right now, due to the pandemic, that we have to “relearn” how to do things that were normal. But it’s also, like many cliches, not wrong. And as teachers struggle to find a mode of instruction that meets ever-changing guidelines and protects themselves and their students but still preservesContinue reading “Genre, Learning, and Why Your Students Are So Tired”
Asynchronous Accommodations
At the beginning of the semester, it’s routine for me to receive several letters from our office of disability services requesting accommodations for students. These letters are form letters where they just drop in a list of accommodations from a fairly standard list of options, such as time and a half on exams and quizzes,Continue reading “Asynchronous Accommodations”
You Don’t Need To Watch Your Students
A lot of us are teaching online for the fall. Not as many of us as should be teaching online in the fall, of course, but a lot of us (and as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re not, plan to teach online anyway, because it’s a definite possibility). And I know I’ve said it beforeContinue reading “You Don’t Need To Watch Your Students”
Dr. Cox's Desk 