Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 564 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, more than words, how to think about writing in the age of AI with John Warner. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:41]:

In addition to writing a weekly column on books and reading for the Chicago Tribune, John Warner is the author of nine books, including a novel, The Funny Man, A Collection of Short Stories, Tough Day for the Army, and a bunch of other stuff. In addition to writing about books on his newsletter and at the Chicago Tribune, John is a leading voice on how we teach writing as the author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, and the book we will speak bout today, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. John frequently does public talks on these issues and is represented by the Red Brick Agency. John Warner, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

John Warner [00:01:45]:

Oh, always happy to be here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:47]:

You dedicate more than words how to think about writing in the age of AI to your mom. Tell me about your mom and being raised in a bookstore.

John Warner [00:01:58]:

Yeah. So my mom, Sue, she’s still around. She’s 84, still very sharp reading all the time. She, started a bookstore in my hometown of Norfolk, Illinois when I was just about a year old. I was the second and she had already determined last child, and she had no intention of staying home and not working and needed and wanted to do something that gave her the the flexibility to be a mom in the nineteen seventies and and the expectations that surround that that role, but also do something in the community that she thought out of Northbrook needed. It didn’t have a bookstore. She started it with three of her closest friends, all of whom moved within three years, leaving her alone, but it it just became this kind of idea that she made happen in in very short order not long after I was born. And so I I grew up going to the bookstore.

John Warner [00:02:56]:

It was about three quarters of a mile from my grade school, about a mile and three quarters from my house, so I could I could walk there. I could ride my bike there, and I just, you know, you’re a kid. You don’t know better. It just seemed normal. Right? In fact, I did not go to the library until I was in high school because I had no need because whatever book I needed was either in the store or could be ordered. So I was almost like a human display sitting there reading books in my mom’s store.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:19]:

I didn’t grow up in a bookstore, but my mom did work for a few years at a commercial bookstore. And I could just relate to that experience of you I don’t you don’t use the analogy of a buffet. And I will also admit that a buffet is a terrible analogy to use, but just anything that you could possibly wish to take your imagination and go for a journey was right there before you. It’s such a relatable thing, at least, for me.

John Warner [00:03:42]:

Yeah. I I I did have to read carefully so it could be resold Yes. So it can be put back on the shelf. But other than that, there were very few restrictions. And, you know, even I I’m 54, almost 55. The store still exists through a series of other owners almost in the same location. So I it just takes sort of enormous pride and even though I had nothing to do with it, but in in the fact that my mom started this institution in the town I grew up in, and it’s and it’s still there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:10]:

You are about a year older than me, and that was another thing I really treasure about this work is all of the metaphors and the cultural memories that you share throughout. But for those of us that are not of our particular age, would you talk about being raised also on the 6,000,000 Dollar Man and talk about the metaphor of ChatGPT turning us into bionic writers. And one last question because I need to ask three questions all at once. How do I get that sound out of my head? Because you talk about the bionic man, and instantly, the sound comes in my head, but I cannot replicate the sound with my own voice. So there you go.

John Warner [00:04:51]:

So, those of us of a certain age, I think sort of middle Gen Xers at this point were raised right on the TV shows that were on when he got home from school, and one of them was always the 6,000,000 Dollar Man with Steve Austin played by Lee Majors, who, was a pilot who crashed, and they rebuilt him with, quote, unquote, bionic parts. So he was the bionic man. And I think he had, like, one arm, one leg, and an eye or something like that. He wasn’t all bionic, but his bionic parts were, like, much stronger and faster and all this kind of stuff. And it becomes like a touchstone for this idea that humans are fine, but humans combined with machines are obviously better, right, superior than we could be as humans alone. And this is a this is notion that’s been in science fiction for for ages. Is even sort of an animating principle around some of the long standing enthusiasts around artificial intelligence, right, sort of cybernetics and these movements. And the notion that CHAT GPT as a generator of syntax that can do these things that look like writing much faster than we can.

John Warner [00:06:02]:

Right? Like, if you say write me a sonnet about a Chevy Corvette as I did and and put in the book, It can do it in seconds. Right? And it would take me hours, days, weeks, perhaps forever to write a sonnet about a Chevy Corvette. So we think, like, this thing must be better. But one of the key messages I want us to examine is that being able to do these things more quickly or more efficiently or amaze us with the kind of magic is not better for humans. Right? I mean, Steve Austin was great. He was a superhero and all that kind of stuff, but what a drag to have to solve every problem in the world because you’re like the one super guy that has to go around doing these things. The idea that we have to kind of endlessly try to perfect ourselves or improve ourselves in the fashion of becoming machines just it it doesn’t make sense to me, even as exciting and fascinating as this kind of technology may appear to be.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:59]:

I told my friend at work about reading your book. She is a little bit older than we are, but still can relate to the cultural things. And I brought up Tang. And Tang, for those not familiar, Don will tell you about this drink in just a moment and why that metaphor is important. But both of us started to experience the chalky feeling in our mouths and the and almost the how if you didn’t stir Tang up enough, it would leave these little chunks for lack of a better word. And I told her, I said, this is so interesting to me because I don’t know if John wrote about that where it didn’t get stirred enough, and and you’d have those those gran gran what do they call it? Like, the little little things in here.

John Warner [00:07:43]:

The granules.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:45]:

Granules. That’s the word I’m looking for, the granules in the mouth. I said, or if just my reading process was so engaged that I could no longer separate my own experience from the reading from yours. So tell us about Tang and why it is a helpful metaphor in our thinking about AI.

John Warner [00:08:07]:

Yeah. So, again, for those of you who who don’t know, although Tang is still around, you can buy Tang. But Tang was a fad when I was a kid because it was the drink of astronauts where because you you couldn’t have fresh orange juice on a rocket ship heading to the moon, but you could have powdered orange stuff that got mixed with water, and it was like you were drinking your orange juice. And they had this very powerful ad campaign around Tang being the drink of astronauts that worked like a charm on my older brother and I. And so we would beg for Tang even though we had a nice refrigerator stocked with fresh orange juice all the time. So when you drink Tang, you take the powder, you put the water, and you stir it up. It’s I’m of the age now where I have my daily glass of Metamucil, which is basically, like, tang with fiber. And it’s just orange flavored water in when it’s all said and done, but it’s okay.

John Warner [00:09:03]:

Like, if you never had another orange drink, you’d be like, okay. I guess this is what orange drink tastes like. But it’s not the same thing as orange juice. Right? When we talk about, like, a substitute, like an orange juice substitute, we recognize the Tang is is superior in some ways. It’s portable. You can have it on your rocket ship or your submarine or something like that, but it is inferior in other ways. It is not fresh, it has fewer vitamins, it’s extremely artificial, and this kind of stuff. And the metaphor in the book is that ChatGPT is kinda like Tang while writing, human writing is orange juice.

John Warner [00:09:39]:

And my worry in that context is that because of our fascination with the outputs of this technology, we may create generations of people that drink Tang and say that’s orange juice rather than understanding that there are important distinctions between Tang and orange juice. Not that we shouldn’t have Tang and we shouldn’t have that we should get rid of Tang, we can keep Tang. But then if we call Tang orange juice, we’ve done something. We’ve degraded the notion of what orange juice is, and I think this is true of writing. If we treat the output of large language models like CHET, GPT as writing, as opposed to syntax generation, which is how I characterize it, then we’re allowing the meaning of writing and the experience of writing to be degraded for humans. And over time, if we keep doing this and keep doing this and keep doing this, I’m worried we’ll forget. We’ll forget that writing is something different than than syntax generation, and we will come to accept Tang as orange juice. And we should prevent that from happening, and the easiest way to prevent that from happening is now.

John Warner [00:10:49]:

The the easier part was like last year, but let’s start now. Let’s start as soon as possible so that we can have this new technology be used to us in ways that doesn’t erase our our previous ways of being in a way those are useful to us.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:05]:

To that end, John, I invite you to read a short section from the book where you make this distinction and really clarify for us a premise around what writing and reading are to us as humans.

John Warner [00:11:19]:

What ChatGPT and other large language models are doing is not writing and shouldn’t be considered as such. Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we’re trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act, not writing. Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives, but the lives of others in the world around us. Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:00]:

There’s yet another metaphor that you actually, in this case, you’d like to replace for us, and it’s right there in the name artificial intelligence. Instead of thinking about AI, ChatChiPT, as intelligence, you ask us to replace that term in both our thinking and in our writing with automation. Could you explain a bit as to why that’s a better metaphor for us?

John Warner [00:12:26]:

Yeah. So this draws heavily on the work of Emily Bender, who’s a artificial intelligence scholar and and linguist. And rather than seeing the process by which large language models fetch syntax and arrange it into sense making as thought or reasoning or being creative or anything like that, we should see it as an automated process governed by probabilistic algorithms. It really is, for some folks, including me, hard to wrap your head around that that’s what these things are doing. They’re just acting on probabilities, what the the programmers called weights. So based on the weights, it’s going to get different words in sequence. And this is nothing like what happens when humans write. It has no relationship to it whatsoever.

John Warner [00:13:13]:

It’s a kind of mimicry based on the unfathomable amount of syntax that this pattern matching process has been able to swallow up and make use of. And so when we imbue the technology with things like smart or it knows things, it is not smart. It knows nothing. And in fact, there’s there’s all these examples of of very basic things that these models can’t do, not because they’re dumb, but because the way that they process is not capable of doing these things. So while it’s incredible in a lot of dimensions, it also cannot count the number of R’s and strawberry accurately because it doesn’t count, it doesn’t do math, it doesn’t do all kinds of things and it’s not concerned with accuracy or truth or anything like that. And so we have to keep that in mind, and automation is a much better frame using vendor’s framework because what we’re doing is automating certain things that would otherwise have to be done by people, and that automation is doing them differently. Now the the product may look similar, but we can’t lose sight that the process was different and that there are compromises around what that output is based on these different processes. So as long as we can keep in mind, this is just a process of automating response to a particular prompt, we can keep the capabilities of the technology in clearer sight and and better context and ultimately make better use of this stuff without kind of denying the unique properties of what humans are capable of doing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:57]:

You talk about in the book and, of course, in many of your other books as well about writing as thinking, and I’ll invite you to read another section from from your book.

John Warner [00:15:09]:

Sure. Writing involves both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea. That is, when writing, you set out with an intention to say something, but as part of the attempt to capture an idea, the idea itself is altered through the thinking that happens as you consider your subject. And this this is something that I talk about all the time because just about everybody has experienced it at some point where you’re writing and you realize, oh, something and and it’s it’s sort of seems kind of mystical and inexplicable, but it it really is just thinking. It’s just thinking they’d manifest while we’re writing, and it became one of the things that I often try to emphasize to my students. I would have an assessment where like the goal for this experience is just for you to have that sensation. So you know what it’s like to think while you’re writing. And then when it happens, I want you to record it.

John Warner [00:15:59]:

We’re gonna talk about it afterwards. And obviously, nothing like that happens with chat GPT. It’s just assembling syntax based on probabilities. So the notion that we can discover an idea when we plug it into chat GPT or the chat GPT is going to discover something for us, it it may combine words in a way that we haven’t seen before, but that’s not the kind of thing that happens when humans are are writing and thinking.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:23]:

One of the tensions that you talk about a number of times that really struck me so much, it it has to do with when we think of ourselves as teaching writing, which by the way, I don’t, and I realize that’s a problem. So so, I mean, all of us teach writing. It’s kinda like who’s responsible for retention at a university. You know what I’m saying here? But those of us who really identify as teachers of writing, You talk about this tension that so many may find themselves in of teaching writing for correctness, for accuracy, for all all of those things. And I I found myself really thinking that I I’m struggling. I’m struggling so much, Dawn. I mean, I I I have not had since November of twenty two any perfect answers to any of these challenges where we find ourselves. But I love it so much when I can just focus on the writing and not worry about the correctness.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:20]:

I I’ve had a student who I am fairly sure has dyslexia or something going on where they would spell words just entirely not correct. And I could have made the choice to say, you have to make every single thing that you are writing down perfect from a grammatical spelling type of thing, and I think I don’t know that I would have found myself in the same place. And, again, I don’t pretend to have the right answers, and some people I may be making really, really angry right now. But would you talk about kind of this tension between we wanna cultivate writers and writing, and yet there is such a thing as something that is grammatically correct. So how are you thinking about those things?

John Warner [00:18:06]:

Yeah. I mean, the the key, I think, is to realize that there is no easy answer to these questions. Right? We’re we’re talking about a a variable human process. And when we say writing, we have to recognize the context and occasion and purpose for a piece of writing varies incredibly. Right? And so the the values we may bring to a piece of writing will be very different depending on those factors, right? The tension of school is that we have to grade these things in some way. We have to say, is this worthy of whatever score that we have decided to use on something? And the correctness of something is a very easy and when I say easy, not like easy, like simple to grade, but convenient. It’s it’s obvious. It’s apparent.

John Warner [00:19:00]:

Right? And so we often let these apparent criteria stand in for more meaningful criteria. One of the just general recommendations I make around assigning writing and assessing writing, in some ways, this is easier for writing teachers because I can say things like, in this experience, where I don’t care if you’re gonna prove to me sort of mastery of subject knowledge because I’m teaching history or political science or criminology or what have you, I can just say I want you to have an experience that reveals to me that you’re developing as a writer, I I can get away with that. That’s harder in other subjects, but we can think about the values that attach to the artifact we’re asking students to produce. So so one of the one things I joke about when I I go and talk about this stuff in audiences is how when we look at a piece of writing in the world and we think it’s good, we don’t praise it for things like it having five paragraphs or having the thesis at the bottom of the first paragraph or never using a contraction or not using a first person pronouns or that kind of all these things that students are forbidden from doing for the purposes of writing school essay. That’s not how we respond to these things as an audience. And so if we’re going to ask students to produce written artifacts, we must first, I think, look at them from the standpoint of audience. What is this thing for? Who is it for? What is its purpose? What is its message? Who is its audience? The rhetorical situation. And then assess them according to those criteria and those values.

John Warner [00:20:39]:

And so if correctness is important in that context, we can still value correctness. We’re gonna value correctness because it’s important in that context, not just because correct is better in the in because we’re in school. And I, you know, I bring this stuff to my different work all the time. I I I write a column for the Chicago Tribune. I write a blog for Inside Higher Ed, and I I write my own personal newsletter every week. The Chicago Tribune column and the Inside Higher Ed blog have copy editors who go in and fix my mistakes. My newsletter does not, and there are mistakes in my newsletter every week because proofreading is not a strength. And, but mostly because my audience doesn’t care because the expectation for that medium is different than a column in a newspaper.

John Warner [00:21:25]:

Right? And so we can be thoughtful about how we assess these things depending on what we want students to demonstrate to us in terms of their thinking, in terms of their learning. So if it’s something a student is writing for a teacher to demonstrate knowledge and engagement or depth of of engagement, we can maybe say, may correctness isn’t necessarily the thing that I care about now as long as I can see evidence of death. We can set the the thermostat differently for these things. Like, oh, I don’t care about absolute correctness, but I don’t under I I can’t quite grasp what they’re saying, so I I need to I need to move that up a couple of notches before they’re there. And it’s just a problem to be solved over and over and over again because there is no solution. I I think of teaching that way. Teaching is just sort of iterative attempts at getting students engaged in learning, and it’s a moving target all the time. The students of today, particularly after the pandemic, are not the students of five, six years ago.

John Warner [00:22:27]:

We have to just recognize the reality of the conditions on the ground and do our best. And part of that is also giving ourselves grace to recognize there are no answers to these things, that that it is gonna be a process.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:39]:

You talk about that very thing in the book, but you also shared so candidly and come in a such a compelling way just about every class. Every person is different. I mean, talk about the complexities and the messiness of learning that really stood out to me. Earlier, you shared about your mom, and I’d like to have you now share about what happened after the death of your dad and particularly about when you went back to teaching, how you found yourself simultaneously in two very different places.

John Warner [00:23:13]:

Yeah. So my dad at the he turned 64 and skied his his favorite pastime, like, twenty days in the month of January, announced that he was gonna work towards retirement. He had been a quite a successful lawyer and employment litigator in Chicago where he grew up. And I don’t remember the exact month, but by June or July, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to his spine and other organs, and by November, he was, dead. And this was happening simultaneous with my wife finishing her veterinary residency, us buying our first house, moving to Greenville, South Carolina from Blacksburg, Virginia, and me starting a new job as an instructor of technical writing at at Clemson University. And so oh, and the other I I also published a book. I forgot about that. My book, Foundling Your Muse, was was coming out in the midst of all of that.

John Warner [00:24:07]:

And so he passed in November, I’d been home for about a week because he was in hospice, and we knew it was the end, and we had a memorial, and he gave a eulogy at the memorial where I because I I like to joke and have fun. I said he invented the remote control, which involved him telling me to get up and change the channel, John channel seven, John channel five. And then I went back to teaching sort of the next day, the day after the memorial, or two days after. I think it was on a I think it was on a Saturday, and then we, went back to work on Monday. And I remember standing in front of a class just thinking, this is so strange. This guy who’s sitting here talking to these students, telling them very regular things about what we’re gonna do and the topic and and the work, just had his father die, not unexpectedly, but relatively suddenly at a at a fairly young age. And he’s doesn’t seem to be feeling anything. He’s just going about his business.

John Warner [00:25:04]:

Right? And I recognized at the time that that because of that disassociation that I was clearly freaked out in some way, but I was not I was not particularly feeling it in any way. Perhaps as a defense mechanism, perhaps at some stage of grief, I don’t know. But it’s very strange. I mean, it’s a very strange sensation and even remembering it, it feels strange all over again.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:23]:

I sent the following paragraph about grief to a former student from many years back who lost his mother in college while he was in college two weeks before I met him, And he really treasured these words as you attempt to describe this grief process that you went through. So I’m gonna read this paragraph from more than words. Over time, if you are fortunate, the grief is more absent than present. And as you realize this, you occasionally even miss it, the companion you never quite cared for but got used to having around. If enough time passes, it may take the form of an echo, an almost welcome reminder of the person who mattered so much to you.

John Warner [00:26:08]:

Yeah. I think of that like things like the occasion of publishing a book. These these are these are those sorts of occasions. Right? One of the if my dad was still around, he would he would get a huge kick out of this book, right, which I appreciated. He’s a quiet, reticent, stoic, Midwestern type of of multiple generation Midwesterner. But he also was and I I wrote an essay about this some years after he passed. He he was also sort of my biggest fan without necessarily even telling me that, but I I years later, I don’t think this is in the book, but years later, we were my mom was moving out of the house that she had shared with him into a into a new place and started going through his desk and stuff. And he had this big, like, legal file folder of of stuff I had published, either in print or a lot on the Internet that he had printed out because he could barely use a computer and just kept.

John Warner [00:26:57]:

And so it’s it’s that sort of thing. But it does it does remind you, like, that you are permanently bonded to these people who are in your life, and I’m I’m sort of grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to to write and think about these things as a way of remembering them with not without some lingering pain, but primarily with gratitude for the life that I’ve been able to have due to having good parents like my mom and dad.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:21]:

You write with a lot of humility, and you are speaking today with so much humility and that we don’t have this figured out. One thing that really resonated, though, as a guide for people to think a little bit practically about what do we do now comes from Adam Grant’s book, his 2023 book called Hidden Potential. And I’ll read just one sentence from more than words. We benefit from three big principles, making sure practice is purposeful, varied, and fun. Would you tell us about what that looks like on a basketball court and also in our teaching?

John Warner [00:27:59]:

Yeah. So the example Adam Grant uses in his book, Hidden Potential, is Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors, who does these workouts sort of with his personal coach where he sets up challenges that seem impossible, like making a certain number of layups, shots from the free throw line, three pointers, all in a kind of set amount of time. So he’s constantly sprinting around the court shooting the ball. And anybody who who has watched him play basketball sees that he’s kind of a perpetual motion machine. One of his chief skills is that he never stops moving. And at some point, the defense gets tired of chasing him, and that’s when he gets a shot. The key is not just shooting a thousand three pointers every day, but it’s making the doing of the shooting fun. So in addition to, like, those games he plays with his trainer, he tries trick shots and impossible things to keep it fresh.

John Warner [00:28:54]:

And those criteria, it’s interesting, it’s really the opposite of what we’ve done with students for a couple generations now where they write five pair of essays over and over again. But even I I think I underappreciated how important those criteria for for practice are until while I was writing the book, I was also trying to relearn playing the drums. I had played drums in a band when I was in Chicago in my late twenties, so it had been almost twenty twenty almost twenty five years since I played the drums. And at the time, I was self taught, and it was not particularly good. I could play the I could play the songs our band did because they were our songs, but anything else happened in the grade. And I started taking drum lessons at the School of Rock, which is mostly children but does allow adults in to take lessons and play in a band. And while I’m writing the book, I’m also practicing the drums every day and seeing sort of the the growth. Right? Because I I was at the relative beginner part of of my my practice and growth curve.

John Warner [00:29:53]:

Seeing the way I was getting better and the variety of practice I was using, playing all these different songs and techniques and stuff, it really reinforced me, like, oh, yeah. This stuff does work. Right? Like, as we get older and we we try fewer new things, I think we tend to lose sight of the fact of our own apprenticeship in the work we do. And it was a really good reminder that we do need to build these things, and there’s a way to build them that is not drudgery, that is not just repeating the same thing over again, that we’re we should figure out ways to be human as we practice these things. And students above all, right, they’re they’re young, they’re trying to figure things out, there there’s nothing that should stop us from making writing fun and interesting. It doesn’t mean pandering, it doesn’t mean easy, It means challenging and engaging. And there’s nothing inherent to writing as hard as it is and as big a pain in the butt as it seems sometimes that makes it something that should be miserable. There’s there’s nothing inherently true about writing that makes it that way.

John Warner [00:30:59]:

And remembering these aspects of of practice that should be fun and varied go a long way to getting students engaged with that work.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:09]:

Another way that we’ve seen these metaphors breakdown has to do with what’s referred to as personalized learning, but in your estimation is anything but personalized. Tell us about the breakdown of the metaphor of personalized learning as it relates to wanting AI to take our place as teachers.

John Warner [00:31:30]:

Yeah. So personalized learning is the this is not a new term. Right? It’s it’s been a goal of of education technology attempts for decades, if not longer. You you can even go back to the forties and fifties of the teaching machines of BF Skinner and Sydney Pressey that Audrey Waters writes about in her book Teaching Machines so interestingly and persuasively. The idea that engaging with an algorithm in the case of BF Skinner was just a kind of box where you would twist knobs and dials, but now we have things like Conmigo and other tutor bots. And that this is personalized, I think is is flat wrong. It’s actually impersonalized. Because for the student to move forward in that universe, we ultimately must please the algorithm and we must please the programming.

John Warner [00:32:23]:

And that is not personal. That’s inducing students to depersonalize themselves in order to fit this particular box and travel down this prescribed road. I’m not saying that this sort of technology has no purpose, but the idea that it is a substitute for the experiences of teaching and learning that happen with humans and community, I think, could not be more misguided. And and really, we we have quite literally decades of evidence for the failure of personalized learning. The notion that large language models powering these tutor bots changes the relationship students will have to this material, I think is entirely unproven and is more likely false than true at this point. And so similar to seeing artificial intelligence as automation, I think we should see personalized learning instead as a kind of inducing students to program themselves to please the algorithm as opposed to something that is truly learning in the sense of of true personal development. Like, what are you, the individual student, getting out of this experience that is meaningful to you and useful to you and allows you to move forward with the path you design your life. That that to me is what education is for.

John Warner [00:33:40]:

Right? But this is a this is a big debate we’re having as a as a culture in society. It’s what is education for. Right? If it’s just to credential you, and CHAPPGPT can do everything necessary for the credential, then what is it what what is education for? I think it has to be more than that. It’s meant so much more than that to me in my life, and it’s really so I wasn’t even a good student. I was kinda a lousy student, but I was I was given enough freedom to figure out who I am and what I’m interested in and and develop certain capacities over time. As a as a mediocre student and a no better than above average intelligence, that’s all I want for students, is a chance to have the same opportunities I did to become the person that they desire to be, to keep striving for that. It it’s not I don’t know. It shouldn’t be that hard, but a lot of times they look at the systems we have for for achieving these things and it’s like they’re backwards.

John Warner [00:34:34]:

They’re upside down from what we actually need to achieve these things.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:38]:

To that end, could you help us distinguish the difference between reading student work and processing it?

John Warner [00:34:45]:

Yeah. So this is based on what I was experiencing in my own teaching where I was teaching first year writing, I had too many students, I was doing very similar assignments semester to semester, and I’d see the same mistakes over and over again. And so in Microsoft Word, I developed 30 or 40 different, like, keystroke macros where, like, a a block of text would go into the marginal comments based on my keystrokes because I would repeat the same things over and over again, and and this was a tool of efficiency. Right? So So when I would see a mistake, like a student, rather than identifying a claim, like so and so says that this is true, they would instead summarize the content, which is this is an article about. I wanted them to identify a claim. I would say not no claim or no claim verb or something like that in my in my macro. And I I recognized that I was no longer reading my students’ work. I was skimming it looking for the mistakes I knew they were going to make.

John Warner [00:35:42]:

I was processing it like an algorithm, and I was just deeply unhappy with with my own work. I was alienated from the work I was doing. Here I am somebody who loves reading, loves writing, loves teaching writing, and I was loathing reading my students’ writing. This became a real sort of come to Jesus moment for myself, and this was probably around, I don’t know, 02/2004, ‘2 thousand ‘5. I’m like, you gotta you you can’t do this anymore. You you must change. And so I did. I I just started experimenting and saying, I’m gonna read students’ writing and I’m gonna respond to students’ writing like a person who’s read it as opposed to somebody who processed it.

John Warner [00:36:21]:

This ultimately led to stuff I’ve written about in my other books around the writer’s practice, but we’ve now have a technology that can do this better than I ever could process student writing. And there’s some enthusiasm for this. Oh, well, this can get through it more quickly, and the feedback is is a lot like what what I would do. These are the things that I think we need to strongly question because if the thing that cannot think, cannot feel, cannot read, that only works on algorithmic pattern matching processes is giving the feedback. Clearly, this is not feedback that is unique to human beings and unique to how we read. And so I think we have to think about reading student writing and responding to it as people, as audiences, as readers, how how we how we do any other writing in the world rather than treating it as, like, this is student writing and I have to correct it or I have to I have to find the errors and identify it as I spent so many years doing. This is the challenge. Right? If this technology can do these things, then either they’re not worth doing, or if they’re worth doing, we have to think about how we measure and assess them differently, or we have to do something different.

John Warner [00:37:37]:

I think those are our choices. And I was on the do something different train long before ChatGPT showed up, so it’s a natural place for it’s a comfortable place for me to be. I think it’s less comfortable for others, but I I do think now that this technology exists, it’s it’s imperative.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:52]:

One final set of metaphors before we get to the recommendations segment. I’ll invite you to share and also read a bit from your book. You reject the pivot and you embrace Frogger.

John Warner [00:38:09]:

Some of these I’ve forgotten about. It’s been a while since I read my own book, but yeah. So one of the the kind of truisms of the business world, particularly the tech world, is the need to pivot. Right? Like if your if your business is failing, you gotta pivot. You have to find a new audience or a new use for your product or or something like that. And when ChatGPT first appeared, there was a lot of enthusiasm around humans pivoting. Like, well, if this can do this, we should do we should go do something else. And the something else was, like, often nothing.

John Warner [00:38:43]:

Like, we’re just gonna let this thing do it for us while we go, I don’t know, watch TV or or sit in a like, the characters in Wall E, if you remember that, where they’re just sort of, like, in floating barcaloungers drinking soda and and anesthetized with media. There is no pivot for humanity. We’re going to be humans whether we like it or not, and we are going to live our life through a series of experiences which convey some manner of of meaning to ourselves. And so rather than thinking about pivoting, I I have this image in my head of the old video game Frogger. You you picked out all of my Gen X references. Where with frog Frogger is a game where you you start at the bottom of the screen, and you’re a frog, and you’re trying to get to the top of the screen. And you might have to, like, cross a busy highway or a river with logs and alligators and kind of stuff floating on it, and then they go at different speeds and variations and this kind of stuff. And at the time, it was cutting edge and super fun, right, in the nineteen eighties.

John Warner [00:39:44]:

And I I just think that’s what life is more like. Right? Is that if you’re gonna win at Frogger, you gotta sort of rush across the highway, then you might jump on a log in the stream, but oops, there’s not another log to jump ahead to the top of the screen, you gotta jump back. And then we’re gonna jump forward, we’re gonna jump back more, and we’re just gonna try to keep keep moving generally in the direction of progress while recognizing that we might not always be moving in the direction of progress at every single moment. And again, this technology is an opportunity for us to do that. Right? The idea that this technology is de facto progress for humanity, I think is false. It may be, Certainly, it will be in some ways, but the idea that we’re on some sort of trajectory towards artificial general intelligence, some sort of godlike machine that can do everything better than we can, I think is unlikely? But even if it were, let’s imagine this. Ten years from now, we have an artificial general intelligence that can do everything Bonni, Yuge, and I can do better. It could it could do it could do this podcast just by sort of reading both of our our our work and listening to all your podcasts, like, I’m gonna put that podcast together.

John Warner [00:40:56]:

We still have to live. We still have to have a day to day experience of the world. We still have to have access to our own minds. We still have to relate to other people. This is the stuff of being human. So life is not going to be obviated even if there’s certain things machines can do rather than us. So if this is even if that’s going to happen, we have to figure out what are we doing? What are we doing to not fall into the sort of wall e or apocalypse or an idiocracy, right, where we’re incapable of doing anything because we haven’t retained any any knowledge or self awareness. It’s not that I’m anti technology, but I’m pro human.

John Warner [00:41:35]:

Right? Like like, the technology should serve us, not the other way around. And and my worry is that the money, the power, the authority behind this technology is threatening to leave humanity aside. And so this little book is my attempt to remind us that we may be worth preserving.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:55]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I would like to recommend More Than Words, How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. As I shared with John before we started talking today, it felt I felt just so much that got evoked from this book. It reminded me a lot of reading Ross Gay’s book, A Book of Delights. It brought me a lot of hope reading both of these books thinking this is something that only humans could do. An AI, you could get an AI to write a sonnet about Tang, but I don’t think an AI could quite produce the physical responses that I had as I was reading. For those who have difficulty as I have with thinking of yourselves as writers with a lot of self deprecating message, I left this feeling hopeful in terms of my own growth and my own development. And rather than thinking about what might a distinct way that was encouraging me and made me want to challenge myself in less self deprecating ways, but still yet challenge myself and and think through some of the ways that John challenged us as thinkers.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:21]:

I I kinda started to see so much more of writing as a practice, writing as the act of being human. Right? I mean, there were so much that came out of it. And, John, I’m so grateful for this book. I I was sending all of these messages on Blue Sky, a social network that that just as I was going through it because I wanted somebody to talk with about the book, and now I’m glad that the book’s out there so people can do it. We’re gonna be doing a book club at my university. And, oh, by the way, someone is gonna be doing one virtual. It’s either Dave or David Buck. I

John Warner [00:43:54]:

David Buck.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:54]:

Okay. I get confused because I

John Warner [00:43:56]:

on Blue Sky and find him, and there’s a sign up that’s starting in June, and I’ll be participating as much as possible. So it should be it should be fun.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:05]:

I will definitely put that in the show notes then. Tell Lou Noah we were exchanging messages, and she let me know that when she finds out, she’s gonna tag me. So I’ll definitely put the information in there about his book club. But thank you so much for this book. If you’re listening, this is just one to pick up. It it is exactly what we need in this time to think through our values, our practices, make sure that there’s alignment, and to be grappling with this together in community. So that’s my recommendation. And, John, I’d like to pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to recommend.

John Warner [00:44:38]:

Well, I really appreciate that. The, you know, the thing you’re talking about to me is is one of my consistent messages around writing and how I think writing should work in in schools, which is that every human is a unique intelligence, and developing a unique intelligence is sort of a work of of teaching and learning. And honoring that, I think, is sort of the highest calling of of a teacher, even recognizing all the other things that we wish for students’ capacities we wish for students to develop in in the practical sense. Right? And that notion of the unique intelligence is is at the center of of my recommendation. And my and my newsletter in honor of the book’s release, and we’re we’re talking the day after the book was released. I’ve been doing a series of posts of the books that helped me write the book, and one of those books is by Wendell Barry, and it’s called Life is a Miracle, an essay against modern superstition. And Barry is just a writer that I I I can’t say I’ve read everything because he’s probably written about 35 books, but I’ve I’ve I’ve read a lot of Barry. And in a lot of ways, I’m very different from him.

John Warner [00:45:39]:

He’s religious. He actually doesn’t use any technology hard to hardly to speak of. He lives a he’s a ecologist and thinker and writer and philosopher and all these things. He lives in Kentucky. But Life is a Miracle, an essay against modern superstition is an extended look at this idea of consilience, which is a concept of the biologist Edward o Wilson, who believes that ultimately all questions of humanity will yield to science. That is science can help us figure out just about everything and that this is a good thing. And Barry challenges this notion by setting up a a divide between what he calls creatures, humans, and and other living things, not only there’s many creatures who are not humans, and machines, which are things like computers and algorithms and and that sort of thing. And that there is are important differences between creatures and machines and that creatures have responsibilities in the world that don’t convey to machines.

John Warner [00:46:40]:

And what I love about Barry’s work is he often indicts my own attitudes. He’ll write things that make me think like, oof, you haven’t been thinking about that enough, but in ways that open me up to thinking about them. And Life is a Miracle is is a is a great example that you really could pick up any one of his books. He’s got a a sort of collective best of collection that you could start with. But given that Life is a Miracle is is central to the concluding chapters of More Than Words, that’s my recommendation for this time.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:10]:

Thank you again for this book, John. Thank you for your work more broadly and for the times I’ve been honored enough to get to speak with you. Such a joy today to connect on this important work.

John Warner [00:47:21]:

I will do it any time. I would do it weekly if you’d have me.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:27]:

Thanks once again to John Warner for joining me for today’s episode. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thank you for listening. And if you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes show notes, and this one will at least have Tang in it. And you’ll also receive some other resources that go above and beyond those show notes.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:07]:

Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.