Author: Bonni Stachowiak – Teaching in Higher Ed

Marc Watkins on Finding Value and Meaning in a World with AI

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 8, 2026 | | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

Reflections on Mark Watkins' Keynote at a Recent Conference

It was such a pleasure to get to see Marc Watkins' keynote at Harvey Mudd's (Re)Imagining Liberal Arts & STEM Education in the Age of GenAI Conference. Marc's talk was titled Finding Value and Meaning in a World with AI. I have had him on Teaching in Higher Ed before (Episode 613: Skepticism and Curiosity in the Age of AI), and that was such an enriching experience. This opportunity to see him speak gave me even more time than the podcast episodes typically allow, and I also got the pleasure of seeing the visuals that Marc had put together for his slides.

The conference as a whole, as I continue to think back on the experience of participating, was so full of nuance. Marc's presentation was no different. Early in his talk, he talked about the importance of creating space for conversation and quoted Molly Roberts from The Washington Post, who had written a story about the place where Marc works. She writes:

There is no better place to see the promise and the peril of generative artificial intelligence playing out than in academia. And there's no better place to see how academia is handling the explosion in ChatGPT and its ilk than at Ole Miss.

Though Marc spoke with maturity and wisdom, he also had his fair share of warnings. One such cautionary note was involving the extensive use of the free versions of artificial intelligence tools. TechCrunch revealed OpenAI's announcement that ChatGPT use reached 900 million weekly active users in a February 2026 story. Other players are growing as well, such as Google and even Claude, though Marc did point out that users of Claude are still in the minority.

Marc spoke about the opportunities that some companies have given students to use the premium versions of AI. Google has done that. So has OpenAI. That said, this isn't guaranteed to continue. In fact, quite the opposite. And the disparities in qualities of tools, perhaps often without the person even realizing it, are an ethical consideration we should all reflect on.

The instructional scales and traffic lights for use in articulating when artificial intelligence is allowable from an academic integrity standpoint was a key section of Marc's talk. He pointed to the AI assessment scale from Perkins, Furze, Roe, and MacVaugh, and also from the University of Sydney, the two-lane approach. Marc doesn't believe we can ban generative AI, and neither do the individuals who came up with this two-lane approach.

Testing centers can have a more locked-down assessment environment. These centers ask students to remove every gadget and also examine their glasses to ensure that they do not contain cameras. This is a very expensive way to do assessment, and it has a heavy lift, not accommodating for those students who require online learning to pursue their educational goals, nor is it particularly accessible.

Another ethical concern brought up by Marc is around the need that faculty have for support and training. We cannot, in higher education, expect faculty to implement these kinds of large-scale course redesigns on their own without funding and communities of practice being available in addition to faculty AI guides.

One thing I enjoyed about how Marc approached his keynote is that, in addition to speaking with such nuance, he provided a tremendous overview of not just the ethical concerns that get raised with artificial intelligence, but also how things have been changing within the last year or so. He quoted a piece from Liza Long, On Becoming a Cyborg, which explored the ways in which agents can perform tasks and change how we work.

Yet Liza points out how the inexhaustible nature of artificial intelligence raises some issues related to the nature of work. She writes, “I am experiencing a specific form of cognitive exhaustion distinct from ordinary tiredness. This exhaustion accumulates from being the permanently accountable party in a collaboration where my ‘thinking partner' never gets tired, never needs a break, and never feels the weight of the decisions ‘we' make.”

Marc explored the issues around integrity having to do with students' use of AI in addition to faculty members' use of AI. He referenced Jeff Young's podcast, Learning Curve: Is My Professor Using AI to Teach? from October 2025. Students are often unhappy with their professors using artificial intelligence to create courses. From the New York Times, “College Professors Are Using ChatGPT. Some Students Aren't Happy,” outlines the story of Ella Stapleton at Northeastern, who discovered that her professor had been using AI in a way that got her wondering what her tuition dollars were meant to be for if it wasn't to be taught by an actual human being.

This brought up the importance of disclosure, which is something that Marc is a big advocate of. At the bottom of his slides, whenever he had an image that had been generated by artificial intelligence, he included detailed information about his approach. On this “Modeling Discernment and Responsible Use” slide, he said it used to be plain bullets. And then in the disclosure label, he explained that he used Google's Nano Banana in Google Slides to beautify this slide.

I am not sure I've admitted this in too many places publicly, but I'm a bit of a slide deck design snob. I would like to push back a bit on the idea that this particular slide is at all what I would call beautiful. My concerns are geared toward Google themselves and do not mean to imply this is a critique of Marc, who gave a wonderful keynote talk. Whenever I see these supposedly beautified slides, I tend to think that those of us who enjoy creating slide decks are safe from having that role be usurped by AI anytime soon.

If you would like to learn more about Marc Watkins and his wisdom around what he and colleagues called AI-aware teaching, there are a plethora of resources available. The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching by Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and Derek Bruff is now available. Marc wrote a post about it that will give you a good overview. Additionally, he published a post called “We Shouldn't Destroy Ourselves Fighting About AI” that is well worth a read.

I especially like the reflection about a third of the way through the post where he talks about how good work gets lost when we shout–when we have shouting matches over the machines. He's so good about pointing to other people's work and then reflecting in public about the ways that they have shaped his responses to artificial intelligence. He encourages us to be aware of changes as they come and be prepared to move forward. He doesn't specify where we should go, but he does stress that we not stay in the same place.

That has always been what I've advocated when offering a Go Somewhere keynote, or playing the Go Somewhere card game as part of a workshop. Let's move, even if none of us know exactly where we're going… I still hold that Ireland's All Aboard: Digital Skills in Higher Education Map offers a good starting point for thinking about where AI intersects with the various “stations,” even though it came out well before the release of ChatGPT got so many more people using AI than ever before.

If you're looking for more ways to have conversations about AI, Marc offers some questions to spark dialog at the bottom of this post: The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching and Using AIs as Provocative Pedagogy. That, plus subscribe to Marc's newsletter and follow him on LinkedIn.

Hammering My Way into AI-Related Metaphors and a Familiar Song

By Bonni Stachowiak | June 7, 2026 | | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

This isn't the first time, nor will it be the last, that Maha Bali puts into words, ideas I've been wrestling with for a long while. In AI is Not a Tool: It's a Medium-Institution, Maha pushes back on a commonly-used metaphor. We're often told that AI is just a tool and Maha reminds us how a hammer, for example, actually works. If we use a hammer to put a nail in the wall, we can always expect that the nail is going to go in the direction that we started hammering. Such is not the case with AI, she asserts.

In AI is Not a Tool, Maha suggests we get started by reading Abi Awomosu's post: They Say AI is the Next Industrial Revolution. Gen Z Already Knows How Those End. They're not booing AI. They're booing the ‘invisible hand' that is holding it. After soaking in Abi's powerful words, Maha decided to extend some previous writing she's done to articulate her position on AI: neither all-in, or all-out. Maha writes:

Somewhere between techno-pessimism and techno-optimism is the position this piece is arguing for. Not refusal. Not uncritical adoption. Literacy. Sovereignty. The capacity to engage deliberately with a medium you are already inside. To understand its grain, its tendencies, what it does to you when you engage without awareness. Rather than being used by it in either direction: enchanted into dependency or shamed into secret use.

Individual abstention inside a society already saturated with AI infrastructure functions more symbolically than structurally. The medium is infrastructural now. People are already inside AI-mediated systems whether they consciously use AI or not. The struggle shifts from avoid all contact to preserve agency under conditions of contact.

That is why literacy is resistance.

Maha also links to Taz Daniels' Faculty Critical Engagement with AI Pyramid. Taz describes the benefit of the framework as: “[recognizing] that meaningful engagement with AI does not look the same for everyone and that both thoughtful use and thoughtful abstention are valid, ethical, and necessary contributions to higher education.”

In addition to Maha's post giving me a lot to think about today, I'm also reminded of a song from my college days: Hammer and a Nail, by the Indigo Girls. The lyrics of the chorus seem so fitting with Maha's musings, in addition to all the discourse around the importance of friction within educational contexts. See the thoughtful debate between Maha Bali, Jon Ippolito, Jeremy Douglass, Annette Vee, Mark C. Marino, and Marc Watkins for much more to consider when discussing the topic of friction. But now, back to the Indigo Girls and hammers. They sing:

I gotta get out of bed
Get a hammer and a nail
Learn how to use my hands
Not just my head
I think myself into jail
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand
And a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth
If you want a rose

I had fun revisiting these lyrics via the annotations on Genuis.com and seeing even more connections and opportunities for reflection. That said, Dave and I planted some flowers the other day to keep our rose bushes company in the front yard and I'm feeling like I had better back slowly away from my computer and go see how they're doing.

What I Learned About What We Should We Know About AI?

By Bonni Stachowiak | May 26, 2026 | | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

I had the privilege of attending the (Re)Imagining Liberal Arts & STEM Education in the Age of GenAI conference at Harvey Mudd College on May 21st and 22nd of 2026.

The first keynote was Alex Hartemink, Professor of Computer Science (and Biology) at Duke University. He titled his keynote What should we know about AI? A lot of people have been talking about AI fluencies and AI awareness lately, and I was intrigued from the start to see what his talk would center on.

Some Common Questions

Alex focused on a set of common questions that, he posited, would help us establish common ground. He asked things like, “Is AI intelligent, or does it only seem to be intelligent?” “How is AI made today and who makes it?” And one of his last questions was:

Why is AI suddenly everywhere, everything, all at once?

When a slide showing screenshots from a bunch of relatable movies came up, I heard lots of murmurs from the audience. I looked at the image and recognized C-3PO, a familiar figure from my childhood, alongside HAL 9000, TRON bent down in a smoky blue background, Data from Star Trek, WALL-E holding a Rubik's cube, and a movie I had just seen the night before.

The lower right-hand corner is from a movie called Her. I had not seen it before that week, but I had played a clip of it in a number of talks I have given, accompanying the “Go Somewhere” AI metaphor card game. I had finally decided to bump it up in my movie-watching queue because some geeky podcasters that Dave and I both subscribe to did a member special on the movie. I did not want any spoilers, but I was very much looking forward to watching it on the drive home from the conference.

Another image worth a comment is WALL-E. What a memorable movie. I can see why Alex included it in his collection, at least in moviemaking, of our desire to make intelligent beings in our own image.

Enthusiastic Ups and Downs

Alex then showed a timeline. He joked that he was charting enthusiasm and admitted, with a self-deprecating tone, that the exercise was less than scientific. His point was clear, though. Artificial intelligence has been around a long time, and there have been many waves.

We started in the 1940s with models of neurons, moved into the 1950s with symbolic AI and the Turing test, saw an upsurge in the 1960s with ELIZA, and then hit the first AI winter in the 1970s. Expert systems rose in the 1980s. The second AI winter came in the 1990s. Machine learning followed, statistical AI plateaued in the 2000s and early 2010s, deep learning came along, and then in the 2020s and beyond, large language models.

Many of us in the room seemed to know about ELIZA, the early attempt to turn a computer program into a therapist. Alex showed how interest waned after that, all the way to a big surge around deep learning. After 2020, the chart climbs sharply on interest in large language models.

Alex did a lot of definitions of terms, and it was nice for me since a lot of them were familiar. What his talk did was help center me on where we find ourselves today in relation to the past.

Algorithms, Models, and Products

Alex explained that we need to be able to distinguish between AI algorithms, AI models, and AI products. That information was not entirely new to me. It did get me more curious about when people say they are against using AI entirely, wanting to ask them more about what they mean by that, to see if we are sharing a common understanding of these various concepts.

How Stochastic Parrots Produce Human-Sounding Output

Alex gave examples of the different ways that AI gets referred to when we try to describe how it works or does not work. One example came from Emily Bender and her co-authors and their now-well-known stochastic parrots paper. The metaphor asks how a random parrot, telling us back what it hears, can produce such human chat output.

The diagram Alex shared helped illustrate for me a piece I want to remember, for when I'm attempting to describe how AI works. After models have been trained, the output of LLMs is shaped by more than just human chats. That is the large language model fine-tuning that happens after pre-training. There is also large language model alignment, and that is where human feedback comes in.

Two Large Misconceptions

Alex wanted to be sure to address two large misconceptions.

The first, and he said probably the largest, is that when we receive output from an AI tool, we assume that the AI means what it says. I am quoting from his slide here (in describing what it isn't actually doing, despite us thinking that's what's happening):

It's guided by meaning, purpose, truth, knowledge or intention.

The second misconception had to do with the future of AI being inevitable. Alex wanted to remind us that we have a lot of power to shape and imagine a future for artificial intelligence and how it should look. That is particularly true in the context of higher education.

Education and Imagination

Alex reminded us that the roots of the word education come from “to lead out or draw forth,” and in Latin, ex plus ducere. Lead out of what, and draw forth into what? The second word he broke down was imagination. To imagine is to “represent or form an image,” from the root word imago, in the mind. What kinds of minds are necessary to preserve our imagination?

Alex closed his talk with a couple of questions, and I will close this post with them as well.

On imagination, he asked:

What kinds of minds are necessary to preserve our imagination?

And on formation: people are formed. How? By whom? And for what end?

Who forms a person's intellect, imagination, character, will, desires?

I'll be sharing more about the conference in the coming weeks, but want to close this post by thanking the conference planning team for a wonderful event. It was a rough time to be traveling, even if I only drove 1.5 hours to get there. I'm still glad I took the time to be there, though, given how much I learned through the experience.

My 2026 Tech Stack

By Bonni Stachowiak | April 29, 2026 | | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

I'm one of those people who enjoys looking at what people's home screens look like on their phones or how their desk setups are. Yes, I know that's a bit geeky and probably overly consumer-focused, but it is one of my many flaws. That said, I particularly enjoyed reading this recent post from Doug Belshaw, whose work I am just re-familiarizing myself with after somehow losing track of him for at least a few years now. I don't mean to say he went anywhere. I just mean that my RSS feeds probably weren't fine-tuned in his particular case.

He wrote about being intentional about our tech stacks. One thing I appreciate is what he writes in his conclusion:

Being intentional about your tech stack isn't easy. Most people's working lives are often governed by other people making tech decisions for them, and their social lives depend on using tools that other people do. Thankfully, I'm in control of the tools I use for my work and am somewhat antisocial, so I'm in the un-enviable position that I can experiment with whatever I like and nobody cares.

I'm going to talk through my tech stack, admitting upfront that I am in the position he describes where some of my tech stack is due to my workplace. Other aspects are due to not having the same technical fluencies that he does. My tech stack is not going to be the model of living out our values in perfect ways. Neither does Doug claim to be doing so, but I appreciated his intentionality in thinking through his choices and options.

My Tech Stack

Enough of my preamble. Let me share a bit about my tech stack.

Devices

I have a 2021 14″ MacBook Pro with an M1, paired with an LG Ultrafine monitor. I like working on 10-key keyboards. I somehow learned how to touch-type on them years ago and haven't lost that skill, even if I don't use it daily. I use a Magic Trackpad and enjoy having as much consistency between my work office, home office, and travel setup as possible.

I keep with a trackpad even though I use mine with my left hand despite being right-handed. That helps with some work-related wrist issues I tend to have when computing for extended periods. I have the same monitor, keyboard, and trackpad at work that I do at home.

I also have the same webcam at both locations: an OBSBOT Tiny 2. I've enjoyed getting to know its features over the past year, though I haven't fully mastered the gesture controls—it occasionally zooms in tight on my face and I haven't quite cemented how to zoom back out. That's more about muscle memory than anything else.

I have an iPhone 17 Pro Max and I love using it with my AirPods Pro. My favorite thing is how seamlessly the AirPods shift between my computer and my phone. It is so much better than it used to be. I am also a big user of my iPad Pro, primarily for consumption. I've recently taken up digital art classes and have been building my skills in Procreate—which has brought new life to my otherwise underutilized Apple Pencil and is a genuine source of stress relief.

My Apple Watch is a big part of my life, with a heavy emphasis on health (gotta close those “rings”) and getting away from my phone (focus modes for sleep, driving, exercising, podcasting, teaching, etc.).

Documents and email

This is a place where my workplace dictates my choices. We use Office 365, so Microsoft Word is my primary word processor and Microsoft Excel my primary spreadsheet. Our family is also in the Apple ecosystem, so Numbers shows up occasionally. And I collaborate regularly using Google Docs, with some assignments presented as Google Slides templates that students can copy to their own accounts by changing the end of the URL.

Web browser

My workplace also dictates my web browser choice, and this is the one that causes me the most friction. I much prefer Safari, but it is essentially unusable at work—I believe because Cloudflare is configured in a way that makes pages load unbearably slowly, while Chrome works ok much of the time. If you use browser extensions, you'll understand why maintaining two separate setups isn't worth it. I tried for a while and eventually succumbed to living predominantly in Chrome. My hope is that with additional upgrades to the internet infrastructure at work, there might be a future where I can be less dependent on Chrome as my browser.

My favorite extension recently is the Obsidian web clipper, which lets me clip content from what I'm reading directly into my note-taking tool. I could do an entire post on extensions and probably will someday—but I had better behave myself and move on.

Blog

My blog runs on WordPress, as does my entire website, Teaching in Higher Ed. A colleague and I are very much looking forward to doing some redesign this summer. I've also really enjoyed doing more blogging than usual this past year and have been reading a lot about digital gardens. My mind is alive with ideas and possibilities.

Analytics

Dave and I made the decision some time ago not to use Google Analytics on our respective websites and to use Fathom Analytics, instead. The privacy implications just aren't worth it for what we'd gain in terms of data. Instead, we get non-identifiable data, are GDPR compliant, and visitors to our website don't get a bunch of pop ups asking them to accept cookies or other such hindrances.

AI

My AI journey started with ChatGPT, mostly using its large language model features. I ultimately moved to Claude and am presently on the $20/month plan, though I regularly run out of tokens and have occasionally bumped up to the $100/month plan temporarily when designing things for my courses, such as games or exercises.

I work to not be overly reliant on any one company. We know how fickle they can be, saying they hold certain values and then reversing course. I have ethical concerns about AI, and those are not assuaged by my use of it. Anyone looking for resources around these concerns would be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive and easy-to-navigate resource than Leon Furze's materials on teaching AI ethics).

My recent Claude usage has been predominantly in Claude Cowork. I enjoy taking the productivity approaches and principles I've written about in The Productive Online and Offline Professor and exploring how AI can amplify them, all while being very cautious about what I do and don't give AI access to, keeping a close watch on it at all times. I have not set up any automated tasks, and I don't use AI to act on my behalf while I'm away from my computer.

A lot of my longer form writing is taking place by creating drafts via transcription. On my phone and Apple Watch, I use an app called Whisper Memos. I like it a lot because it puts paragraph entries in automatically, but leaves my original wording intact other than that. as in I do not have to audibly say where paragraphs should go.

As far as transcribing when sitting at my computer, I am new to MacWhisper, which Teddy Svoronos talked about on Episode 617. it's been great so far I am just needing to fine tune my setup so it can work for my use cases best but I highly recommend it and can see why he makes so much use of it. Way back on Episode 521, Leon Furze talked about dictating most of his blog posts while he's running (for more about Leon's process, see: Artificial Intelligence Has Changed the Way I Write Forever. While I'm not doing running in either of my writing workflows I sure do get a lot of words down for these early drafts through the power of transcription/dictation using these two apps.

Code repositories

Doug mentions code repositories in his post. I have a GitHub account, though as I've mentioned on previous episodes of Teaching in Higher Ed, I can barely use it. I have written an open textbook for my business ethics class in Markdown, using LiaScript to turn it into an interactive, searchable, browsable resource with version control—which is, of course, what GitHub is really good at.

I'm very much a novice user. I also store a couple of games and exercises for hard-to-understand concepts from my classes there, but I'm not linking to those materials here. Partly because they feel clunky and there is still so much more for me to learn. And partly because my versioning commit notes occasionally let my sarcasm slip through when I keep making the same mistake over and over (and those comments were meant only for me).

Meeting scheduling

For a number of years now, Dave and I have both used Acuity Scheduling for our respective podcasts. I like it for how granular it lets you get about scheduling preferences and confirmations (whether they go out via email, text, or both). I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't like to fine-tune things, but since I'm working with both a Microsoft Outlook calendar for work and an iCloud calendar, personally, I need that level of control. People who sign up to come on the podcast deserve a seamless experience, and the last thing I want is friction around something as simple as setting a time to record.

I'm also a devoted user of Fantastical. It's more expensive than a basic calendar app, but it brings together all my calendars using what it calls calendar sets (different groupings I can view all in one place). It also has a meeting-poll feature I use regularly, which lets me offer a few time options and find what works best for a single person or a group.

Fantastical recently added the ability to layer emojis on top of calendar events, including ones I've been invited to. Since I love color-coding, it's a fun new way to visually scan what's happening in my calendar. There's still some bugginess with events from other people, but for things on my personal or podcasting calendar, it has been a delightful addition.

Time tracking

Doug mentions time tracking. I have always wanted to build this habit, but each time I've tried, I start a timer, walk away, and then it tells me I've been on email for seventeen hours. (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.) I aspire to have a time-tracking habit firmly established and to gain that additional layer of awareness about where my time goes.

Accountancy software

Dave and I recently switched to a new way of tracking our personal finances. It's too early to report out on that, but I'm noting it here so that if I revisit this post in the future, I'll remember it may be of interest to others and was included in Doug's description of his tech stack.

Social media and messaging

Like Doug, I post on Mastodon. I occasionally post on Bluesky. I am intrigued by people like Alan Levine who have set things up to post simultaneously to both platforms. I've read about this practice but haven't cemented it in my own workflow. I tend to prefer Mastodon and haven't quite sorted out how the cross-posting would work in my case. I suspect this post from Alan re: the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin will be important in at least part of my learning process with all this.

I'm also on LinkedIn. I did decide to leave Twitter after amassing over 8,000 followers across many years and having a rich community there—but the values mismatch and the environment it has become finally took their toll. I decided to give all of that up and begin anew on these other platforms.

I am intrigued by apps like WhatsApp and Signal and have set up accounts, but I don't get notifications from them and have had some difficulty integrating them into my workflow. I am also deeply reluctant to share my contact information—or anyone else's—with apps, and that caution has kept me from fully experimenting. But I recognize that most of the world communicates beyond Apple Messages and am open to reconsidering this for privacy and other reasons.

If you're interested in a deeper look at how someone thinks through their social media presence, you would be hard-pressed to find a better source than Brian Alexander's post: What I'm Doing with Social Media and Related Platforms in Late 2025. I have gained great inspiration from Brian over many years across posts like this that he revisits on an annual or other cadence. His post makes me want to dedicate an entire future post to my full social media landscape. For now, I'm sharing it here and have bookmarked it for future blog post ideas.

What's Next?

I'm doing a bunch of experimentation on how AI can and can't amplify my productivity approaches. It started with refining my Obsidian daily note and there's much more in store with that project. This Summer, I'll be building something that will enable people to learn more about what I've been up to in more detail. As I mentioned, the Teaching in Higher Ed website will be getting a much-needed redesign, but will continue to be on WordPress at its core. Knowing me, I'll continue to play and experiment all the while.

Trying Out PopClip After Watching a ScreencastsONLINE Tutorial About It

By Bonni Stachowiak | April 10, 2026 | | X Facebook LinkedIn Email

ScreencastsONLINE just continues to pay dividends for me in my Apple-device-filled life. In this case, it was a brand new tutorial for a utility that I have known about for a long time: PopClip.

PopClip is a Mac utility that adds a floating action menu whenever you select text, making common actions like copy, paste, search, and share faster. It’s especially useful if you work with text a lot and want quick, mouse-driven shortcuts

If you are a Windows user but intrigued by this idea, there's hope for you yet. For Windows users, SnipDo is the closest thing to PopClip I'm aware of. It’s the best match if you want the same “select text, then get actions” workflow, though I haven't tried it before.

Dave had mentioned something to me about PopClip recently (that he was thinking about getting into it). And lo and behold, here comes the update for the latest videos on screencasts online. And there was one about PopClip. I watched it and was ready to dive in and play.

Lee made it super easy to understand how it works and how to customize it to your liking. Here are the topics that Lee covers in the PopClip Updates Screencasts Online tutorial, in case you're interested:

PopClip Overview
Installing Extensions
PopClip Settings
Obsidian Extension
Perplexity Extension
ChatGPT Extension
Open In Browser Extension

I have access to PopClip as part of my SetApp (ref link) subscription, but it is also available on their website to buy as either a standard or lifetime PopClip license.

Past Concerns About PopClip No Longer Are An Issue

I'm unclear at this point whether PopClip has changed a lot since I looked at it or whether I just never understood how it worked in the first place. No matter my concerns about it have been resolved as follows.

Popping Up When Not Needed

I remember years ago, downloading it and playing with it and instantly deciding it got in the way of my internet reading habit of constantly clicking and dragging across text as I read it. That often helps me focus when needing to consume something dense or otherwise hard to discern. I've learned I'm not alone on that click and drag habit, by the way, but now PopClip seems to be ready for someone like me to tap into the power of what it has to offer, while still getting to keep my pattern of doing this.

You have granular controls over where pop clip appears once you you click and drag across text and release your mouse or trackpad. You can determine if you want PopClip to appear automatically. Even after about 15 minutes of experimentation, I would say leaving this as the default really helps you leverage the real power of PopClip but if you had certain websites that you visited where it wasn't going to be particularly helpful you can have rules set up where it gets disabled based on a specific app, such as a browser, or specific websites that you would like to disable it on. I haven't done that again because of the controls under appearance. you can change the size of the pop clip as it pops up or you can change the color or whether or not it gets positioned above or below the text.

Getting carried away with extensions

Another concern I had was being so inspired by all these different possibilities that I got carried away and installed a bunch of extensions that would then do away with the simplicity of PopClip. As I look at my installed PopClip extensions right now, after only having the app for less than an hour, I've got 15 different actions. However what I'm realizing because of the ScreencastsONLINE tutorial I watched is that not all of the actions appear every single time pop clip may be evoked.

PopClip is context specific and only brings up the relevant actions for what you're in the middle of doing. A simple example of this is that spell check is only going to come up when you've selected a word that is misspelled. Otherwise, it remains in the background, invisible to you. You can also configure the order that your extensions appear such that your more commonly used ones are closer to the front of the line.

This 5-minute YouTube preview video of Lee's ScreencastsONLINE tutorial gives you a look at the extensions he suggests in the tutorial and is well worth a watch.

Early Experimentations

Installing PopClip and getting started was a breeze. This is particularly the case because of it being part of my SetApp subscription, as I mentioned earlier. The built-in actions are all easy to use and understand. I think if it were only the case that I would be offered easier ways to cut, copy, and paste, however, I probably would have skipped PopClip, entirely. Those basic keyboard shortcuts have been burned in my brain a long time. That said, PopClip has a lot more to offer than just those essentials. The other nice thing is it doesn't take long at all to both learn and to begin to get some of the features and functions into one's muscle memory.

Here's a bulleted list of some of the PopClip actions I think could be potentially potentially particularly helpful for my use cases. I'm sure I'll be finding more as well.

Open link: In working with various LLMs and also coming across this issue in other cases, I find sometimes a link is presented to me but is not clickable. All I have to do with pop clip is select the text to activate pop clip or use the keyboard board shortcut I have established, and then I'm able to use this pop clip action to easily open the website. site. This was very easy to install and understand from the beginning.
Title Case and Uppercase: These two functions are things I don't do that often, but when I do, I have to open up an entirely a separate app and try to remember how to use it. It's typically been so long. Now I can easily select text and have it modified in less than a second or two using these two actions.
Timestamp: This one is also super simple, but will save me a ton of time. Anytime I attend a conference or go to a meeting, I always have the file name begin with a four-digit year followed by a dash, a two-digit month followed by a dash, by, you guessed it, a two-digit day. and now that's just going to be a simple muscle memory thing for me that I'll be able to pull up much faster than me sitting there trying to type it despite how fast I type on my 10 key. I can now get something like this in less than a second or two: 2026-04-10.
Perplexity App: I have not been a big user of perplexity, but many people I highly regard do make use of it, this seemed an easy way to have other options when experimenting with artificial intelligence and wanting to see how its approach to a given prompt might vary from the others I use more frequently.

This is the first piece of writing I have done since installing PopClip and can already ready tell that it is not only not going to get in my way, it's going to be a tremendous his help to me. I imagine there are many more pop clip actions in my future.

One last thing I wanted to mention is I was talking earlier about getting PopClip into to my muscle memory, that's such a big part of computing for me. When watching Lee describe how he uses PopClip, He mentioned using command L to highlight the URL for the website he's currently on. I delighted when I saw that since that's something I do a gazillion times per day, but do not have that keyboard shortcut in my muscle memory. I have since added it to my keyboard shortcuts that I keep in the Tot App by the Icon Factory, so that as I'm learning new ones, I can remember to practice them and instill them into my habits.