Teaching in Higher Ed

Permission to Go Slow

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robots statues made out of pottery in a garden

I'm beginning a series of posts about my experimentation with Claude Cowork, specifically, but also about the landscape of AI agents, more broadly. However, I want to say something before we get into caveats and considerations, security settings and privacy policies, and all the rest of it. Something I'm not hearing explicitly stated anywhere near enough in conversations about AI.

You do not have to do any of this yet. Slow down.

There is enormous pressure, most of it implicit, to jump in, try the tools, connect the apps, grant the access, and figure it out as you go. The tech industry moves fast and can seem like it rewards people who move fast with it (move fast and break things, anyone?). But curiosity about AI does not require you to immediately hand over access to your files, your calendar, your email, or anything else. It is completely okay (and I would argue, even necessary) to be in a learning phase.

Marc Watkins, Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at the University of Mississippi, describes this as cultivating skepticism and curiosity in the age of AI on Episode 613 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and in his writing about how generative AI is impacting education.

Speed Disguises Itself as Progress

Sam Illingworth, a Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies in Edinburgh, runs a newsletter called Slow AI. His subtitle says it plainly:

…knowing when to use AI and when to leave it the hell alone. Everyone is teaching you how to use AI faster. Nobody is teaching you how to think about what you lose when you do.

Sam tells us that most of the advice about AI is wrong. Not because the tools are bad, but because nobody is asking what we give up when we use them.

If you are feeling behind because you have not connected an AI tool to your calendar or your email yet, I encourage you to follow Sam's advice and slow way down. There are serious security and privacy concerns at play and these issues deserve our careful attention. Sam has also written about what happens when organizations distribute AI tools before anyone knows how to use them safely, and then call the chaos adoption. That is true at the institutional level. It is also true at the personal level.

Connecting things before you understand what you are connecting is not getting ahead and winning some kind of race. It is just moving fast and almost assuredly breaking things in the process.

There Are Real Costs Worth Understanding First

Leon Furze, an international consultant, author, and speaker, has written one of the most thorough and accessible series I have come across on AI ethics. His Teaching AI Ethics project covers bias, environmental impact, copyright, privacy, human labor, and power. It was originally written for educators and students, but it reads clearly for anyone who wants to understand what is actually happening underneath the hood of these tools. The updated 2026 series is available as a free, open-access ebook: Teaching AI Ethics – A Guide for Educators.

Furze's work is a good place to start if questions like these are on your mind: Who does the labor that makes these systems run? What does it cost the planet to train and operate them at scale? Whose work was used without permission to build them? He also encourages us on Episode 572 to not solely refuse to learn anything about AI because of these ethical concerns, but to remain curious and in a position of learning. He shares:

We can take a personal moral stance, but if we have a responsibility to teach students, then we have a responsibility to engage with the technology on some level. In order to do that, we need to be using it and experimenting with it because otherwise, we're relying on third party information, conjecture, and opinions rather than direct experience.

While Sam and Leon tend more on the experimental side of things (with curiosity and skepticism at the forefront), there are other voices worth centering.

Critics Worth Listening To

Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna are the co-hosts of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 and the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want. I talked with both of them on Episode 576 of Teaching in Higher Ed, where Emily described the two sides of the same coin:

The boosters say AI is a thing. It's inevitable, it's imminent, it's going to be super powerful, and it's going to solve all of our problems. And the doomers say AI is a thing, it's inevitable, it's imminent, it's going to be super powerful, and it's going to kill us all. And you can see that there's actually not a lot of daylight between those two positions, despite the discourse of saying these are two opposite ends of a spectrum.

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal and co-founder of the AI Now Institute, has been one of the most consistent and credible voices raising alarms about what happens when AI agents, tools that act on your behalf, get access to large parts of your digital life. She has called it “putting your brain in a jar.” She is worth following if you want someone who speaks plainly about the structural risks, not just the individual ones.

Kate Crawford, co-founder of the AI Now Institute and author of Atlas of AI, takes a more structural and academic approach. Her work examines the economic incentives that make data collection the default, and what is lost when we consent without fully understanding what we are agreeing to.

Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter at the New York Times who covers privacy in a way that is accessible and human-scale. Her book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy, about facial recognition technology and what it means for privacy, is a compelling read. Her ongoing reporting tracks the kinds of policy changes that affect everyone who uses these tools.

Kashmir's TED talk with her collaborator, Surya Mattu, What Your Smart Devices Know (and Share) About You is well worth a watch, to remind us of what's at stake.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the most reliable starting point I know for guidance on privacy and security. They publish regularly and write for non-technical audiences. Well worth a look is the Tools section of the EFF website, which includes tangible ways to defend ourselves against the threats to our privacy and security online.

What This Series Is About

Over the next few posts, I am going to walk through the specific considerations I have worked through as I have decided what to give Claude Cowork access to and what to keep off limits. That will include thinking about your employer, your own personal privacy, and other people's information.

But I wanted to start here, with this: none of this has to happen on anyone else's timeline. You are not only allowed to go slow, but it is prudent to do so, particularly given the pace of change related to the AI tools' capabilities. You are allowed to decide that some things are not worth the tradeoff, at least not yet. You are allowed (and urged) to keep some parts of your life outside of any of this entirely.

At the same time, I would ask that you heed Maha Bali's advice and not engage in AI-shaming, should you choose to engage further with these posts about my experimentation. Maha is a Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning & Teaching at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and a full-time faculty developer. That translates to her being expected to help people “make thoughtful decisions about how they're going to teach and assess in a time where this thing exists.” Some of us have jobs that require we remain simultaneously curious and skeptical about AI and we aren't afforded the opportunity to ignore what's happening across higher education.

On Episode 529 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, James Lang, Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame and author of six books, discussed a beautiful piece he wrote: Voltaire on Working the Gardens of Our Classrooms – Are you a Pangloss, Martin, or Candide?

I'll admit I've long since forgotten the Voltaire specifics, but I walked away reminded of something I already knew: teaching isn't a race. We're not supposed to go fast and break things, because people can get hurt in the meantime and we can wind up forgetting why we got into this work in the first place.

Jim shares about his own teaching:

I have skills and experiences that I have developed over a lifetime, and a commitment to supporting teachers and learners. I still see those skills and experiences making a positive difference in the lives of other humans. You might be feeling the same way. You feel storm clouds gathering above you, and are worried about the future of education, but in the meantime you are connecting with students and creating learning in the gardens of your classrooms.

He continues the garden metaphor throughout the piece and ends by encouraging us to go work in our gardens. It is in that spirit that I seek to share what I'm learning about agentic AI, as it relates to the various roles I hold, while encouraging all of us to go slower than we might normally, and to be curious and skeptical as we do our tending.

Featured photo attribution:
Photo by Naoki Suzuki on Unsplash

Being Known: Conditions for Flourishing in Learning + Teaching

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branches of bright pink flowers in a tree

Dave sent me his notes from an evening event at our kids' school about college preparation. Mind you, neither of our kids have entered high school yet. Things are certainly different from when I was preparing for college.

Our son is helping me digitize the last huge lateral file cabinet of documents from my younger days. These files contain everything from class notes written in cursive from my undergraduate classes to printed papers with handwritten feedback from professors. I'm having all these flashbacks of particular professors and coursework and the ways I was shaped by all of these experiences.

A single page with four short paragraphs, was mixed in with old brochures and catalogs. As soon as I noticed it wasn't exactly five paragraphs, my mind flashed to John Warner's *Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities* and how proud he would have been that I hadn't adopted the commonly-used structure. That said, I'm not sure this was my greatest piece of writing, or that John would have been proud of much else. It got the job done, however. The document was written during my senior year of high school and contained my college essay. I applied to a single university, the same university my parents had attended. I had visited a few times that year, since a friend who was a year ahead of me was enrolled.

Contrasting the relative lack of effort put into my school selection process with what many young people go through today is wild. Given that the first college-related event has already commenced at our kids' school, I figure that I probably am going to need to continue to adjust my thinking and understanding of what it looks like today to pursue higher education.

Friends who have children older than ours have vividly described how stressful the process can be of walking alongside young people during the college application process. I also understand that today's supposed measures of quality don't hold up very well to scrutiny. Prestige and selectivity may dominate the conversation, but I’m increasingly drawn to questions about belonging, mentorship, and growth.

Brennan Barnard has advice regarding The Question Every College Applicant Should Ask. As a college counselor, he chronicles his visits to ten college campuses over six months and is most interested in the answer to a key question:

How easy is it for a student to be known here? You can see that in class sizes, advising structures, and whether students can quickly name an adult who’s made a difference in their experience.

The more I sit with that question, the more it feels like a proxy for something deeper: whether an institution creates the conditions for students to flourish. I finished reading Flower Darby's latest book last night, in preparation for an upcoming interview with her. In The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes, Flower quotes Denise Maduli-Williams from San Diego Miramar College, who describes the unique opportunities she has in her online classes to build relationships with students. Denise shares:

I feel like I know my online students better than my in-person students. I have more interactions with them, they get to know more about me through the types of activities we do, and I’m able to individualize content, links, and resources for differ­ent students’ needs.

That sentiment resonated with me, as I considered how many more students' dog names I know, when they take online classes with me. I find fewer students have cats, but one last semester had a guinea pig (who sadly passed away during our semester together). I also know where they work, what music they're into, and the nervousness they feel about their upcoming job interview. Those kinds of interactions aren’t incidental. They’re structural. They create the conditions in which students can take risks, feel supported, and grow.

My role as an educator is centered on knowing students, as well as helping them feel like they matter. As a parent, I'm going to make sure to ask how easy it is for a student to be known at the various places we might explore. On my reading list will be Jeff Selingo's Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You, or at the very least, I'll explore whether it might be a good resource for our kids. My goal will be to not get overly swept up in other factors that turn out to be poor proxies for what truly matters: whether a place cultivates the conditions for students to thrive.

SIFT + AI for Fact-Checking: What I Learned Testing a Claim About Nursing Pay

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Male, African American nurse assists a patient in a wheelchair

I used to be among the people who thought that privacy wasn't really much of a thing to be overly concerned about. What did I have to hide anyway? What did “good” people have to hide if what they're doing is all on the up and up? I hope I don't lose potential readers with the naiveté of that mindset. I have very much changed my mind over many decades now and do what I can to help students, friends, family members, and anyone who might otherwise be persuaded by what I share through my podcast and writing to recognize the issues surrounding privacy that affect all of us and what it means to be a free nation.

I was listening to The Ezra Klein Show, as he discussed the “internet none of us asked for” with two experts matters of ethics. I'm teaching business ethics right now, so my ears were perked even more than they might have otherwise been. The episode is titled: We Didn't Ask for This Internet and features Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu. From the episode description:

Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.

What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?

Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.”  Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”

In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.

I thought that a claim made during this episode would be a good one to use in my continued efforts to grow my own information literacy, as well as to pass on what I can to the faculty and students I get to teach and learn alongside…

The Claim: Contract Nurses Are Discriminated Against, Based on Their Likely Desperation to Accept Lower Pay

When I teach Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework, one of the most challenging hurdles for students is to be able to assess the claim being made. They often think that the article's headline is the claim. In this example I'm using today, there's the claim that was made, combined with my feelings about what I was hearing (or what I interpreted being said, as I listened to the podcast, in the middle of doing other things).

Here's how I remember the claim:

Contract nurses are discriminated against, based on their likely desperation to accept lower pay. Their credit scores and other indicators of just how desperate they might be to take less compensation than someone else competing for the same job allow potential employers to discriminate against them or otherwise game the system toward a race to the bottom for pay.

While listening, I was in the middle of cleaning out our refrigerator and had my hands covered in muck, so wasn't able to capture the notes of this scholar and her work. Once I got back to my computer, I was able to find the name of the researcher they mentioned (Deborah Rhode). Tim shared an examples from her scholarship regarding the ways in which nurses' financial data is mined and analyzed to predict for how low a wage they will accept on an hourly contract type of arrangement.

Two Methods of Fact Checking

I thought it would be helpful to document the process I would go through of fact checking this in two ways:

  1. Using the SIFT fact checking framework
  2. Via Mike Caulfield's emerging “Critical Thinking/Doing with AI” experimentation

So two ways of assessing how likely it is that what I heard was true. I am going to start with SIFT and then move on to the AI tools that Mike Caulfield has been working on.

Fact Checking the Claim via SIFT

If you're not familiar with the name Mike Caulfield, he created the fact checking framework known as SIFT. Here's what that might look like in testing this claim:

  • STOP // “S” stands for stop, as in we shouldn't immediately pass on what we hear when we're listening to the Ezra Klein show with our hands covered in food waste. We should hang on to a moment and wait to see if it is actually accurate.
  • INVESTIGATE // The “I” stands for investigate the source. In this case, I would be thinking about Ezra Klein and his podcast and fact checking process done by the New York Times. They credit a fact checker for the podcast. I don't know much about that process, but I just know in the credits, they always list a person as well as the researcher themselves that was mentioned.
  • FIND // “F” stands for find trusted coverage. So I would want to be looking at other news organizations and what they may have shared to support the claim of nurses being discriminated against in this way regarding their compensation.
  • TRACE // And finally, T for trace back to the original source. In this case, I imagine the researcher would be fairly easy to find and would be likely to have done quite a bit of scholarship assessing this claim.

If you would like to see me walk through how I approached this fact checking using SIFT, watch the Using Mike Caulfield's SIFT Framework to Test a Claim About Wage Discrimination Against Nurses video on the Teaching in Higher Ed YouTube channel.

Watch: Using Mike Caulfield's SIFT Framework to Test a Claim About Wage Discrimination Against Nurses

Some of the resources and references mentioned include:

Fact Checking the Claim via Mike Caulfield's Critical Thinking/Doing with AI Experimentation

Some of you may know that Mike Caulfield has been experimenting with what artificial intelligence can and cannot currently do when it comes to our fact checking efforts. The short version is that the standard AI response that comes as a result of a Google search with a question mark after it, the AI summary, if you will, is not particularly good at an individual's fact checking efforts. However, he has built a custom GPT and other tools that put some parameters around the prompts and he also encourages us to have more of a back and forth as we consider our own pursuit of knowing if what we are looking at is what we think we're looking at and whether or not it is accurate.

This is the second of two videos exploring different approaches to fact-checking a claim I heard on The Ezra Klein Show (“We Didn’t Ask for This Internet,” featuring Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu). In the first video, I used Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework. In this one, I experiment with his emerging work on how artificial intelligence can — and cannot — support fact-checking.

Watch: Fact-Checking w/ AI: Testing Claims Using Mike Caulfield’s New Critical Thinking with AI Approach

Some of the resources and references mentioned include:

Learning Out Loud

As I wrap up this post, I'm reminded of how challenging we can make it for ourselves when we commit to a life filled with learning out loud (or maybe that's just me?). I'll admit that part of why I went down a less-than-helpful rabbit trail not once but twice was because I am afraid of looking foolish (or dare I say outright wrong?) in my experimentation with this stuff.

Mike Caulfield reminds us that we should always remember what our aim is in our fact checking and overall information literacy efforts. In this case, I'm an average person who knows hardly anything about how nurses are paid (except for at the university where I work). I'm pretty much the perfect candidate to kick the tires on these tools and resources to see what it looks like when we check claims we see online (or, in this case, hear on a podcast).

My goal is to equip others to be better able to assess if what they're looking at is what they think it is and to determine the credibility of what's being shared. Given how quickly AI is changing the fact-checking landscape and the consequences of living in a society in which lies are so blatantly propagated, continuing to get better at this stuff and share with others seems an important and necessary thing to do.

 

Choosing Rhythms of Consistent, Predictable Joy

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Grid of various colorful drawings using the Procreate app on the ipad, including an orange, pear, fried egg, pizza, plants, and a moth
These are the drawings from the instructor. Look lower in the post for information about the course she teaches, plus to see my drawings, as they are emerging….

I don't want to throw any shade on people who enjoy setting goals for yourselves in a new year. Hooray to Taylor Kay Phillips, who took over Lyz Lenz's Dingus of the Week post this time, and said that she wants New Year's Resolution Wet Blankets to settle down and let other people have their things. This year, one reflective approach that is resonating with me immensely this time around comes from Robert Talbert, in the form of his My Start/Stop/Continue for 2026 post. CW: He's a bit down on resolutions in the beginning, but if you're a big fan of setting them, just skip to his Start section about Going Analog and enjoy seeing what he's up to…

Start: Creating with Regularity

Through an impulse purchase via Instagram advertising, I bought a year-long membership to the Art Makers Club at the tail end of the year. This all started with our son asking if he could participate in our revised advent plans for the holiday season (my goodness did our first attempt ever fail miserably) by doing digital art, instead of the watercolor the rest of us were doing. He likes using Procreate and mentioned offhand that it was one of those kinds of apps that you buy once (as in I/we already own it), which didn't become relevant until weeks later, when I considered this purchase.

My Art Makers Club purchase didn't start with an entire year, but rather a highly structured course. The Kickstart Your Creativity with Procreate got me excited from the premise. I'm a huge fan of being able to track my progress toward goals, so the included progress tracker was super appleaing to me. Wait a second? I get to take 15-20 minute tutorials from an encouraging, down-to-earth, clear communicator and learn to actually use an app I already own instead of continuing to gather virtual dust, like I had been? And I get to save my various drawings in the form of a tracker all along, so I can see how far I've come and where I'm going?

That was the hook, but it kept getting better from there. I also got a second Kickstart Your Creativity Course to go with it. But wait. There's more. A ton of other courses, such as:

  • Imaginative Map-Making in Procreate
  • Getting Started with Procreate Dreams: Animation for Everyone (ever since seeing Mike Wesch's very first animation video 10+ years ago: The Sleeper, I've dreamed of learning animation)
  • Easy, Eye-Catching Animations in Procreate
  • Realistic Paper Cut Illustrations in Procreate

There are ~5 other full length courses and then a bunch of previously-recorded live sessions, the opportunity to be a part of a community of people going through the courses, etc. I have now drawn from the orange through the poppy, as of January 3, 2026, not too shabby a result of a person who hasn't really taken art classes before.

An unfinished grid of drawings... Created drawings include an orange, pear, fried egg, and some plants... there are still about 17 drawings to go on the tracker
Here is my progress tracker so far for the course… I love how I can so easily see where I've been and where I'm headed. Those who know me well will know how excited I am to get to the bird!

Depending on how you define art, of course…

I also had bought one copy of Daily Drawing Prompts: A Year of Sketchbook Inspiration, by Jordan DeWilde for my Mom for Christmas and “accidentally” ordered a second copy for me. 😂😇 It has provided supplemental opportunities for reinforcing some of the skills I'm learning through the more structured courses.

Tracing of a woman's hand, with a silver wedding band on the ring finger
This was the first exercise in the book… to trace your hand and then add in details, like jewelry, etc. My hand does not look this young in real life, but if you look closely, you can tell that I at least tried to draw in the wrinkles.

As excited as I clearly am about these drawing resources, I want to keep my definition of regular creation broad. Alan Levine recently shared his reflections on having achieved an entire year of capturing daily photos throughout 2025. He has previously been such an inspiration for me in those years when we don't quite check every single box that we had hoped to… as in those years when he didn't quite get to 365 days/photos. Still, it was fun to see him share stories of what his daily photo habit looked like in 2025 and in years past.

I don't want to say up front that I'm shooting for a daily goal. My streaks habits seem to be multiplying and I don't want to put too much pressure on myself. As of today, I've used the Bend App to support 280 days of stretching. However, they let you “reset” your streak, once you've been consistent with it. So somewhere around 4-5 days, I missed stretching. But the following day was able to restore my streak without resetting the counter. I would love something like that for my daily create goal that is emerging, but I also am not inclined to figure out a whole system at this exact moment.

Stop: Checking Work Email on My Mobile Devices

This is one of those “I should 100% know better” things. I've gotta stop checking my work email on my mobile devices. One reason has to do with overall productivity. In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Annie Murphy Paul describes the benefits researchers found of working on a large display (versus on a laptop or mobile device):

When using a large display, they engaged in higher-order thinking, arrived at a greater number of discoveries and achieved broader, more integrative insights. Such gains are not a matter of individual differences or preferences, Ball emphasizes; everyone who engages with the larger display finds that their thinking is enhanced.

Before reading The Extended Mind, I always felt like I worked more effectively at either of my two big-screen set ups (home and work offices), but Murphy Paul uncovered a number of researchers exploring this hypothesis much more soundly than my anecdotal evidence. I just feel better and more able to focus in constructive ways when I'm engaging with my work via a large monitor.

Another reason I don't want to keep doing this in 2026 is just that it tends to get me feeling all the negative feels during a time when I'm not going to proactively going to be able to dig in with problem solving or attempts to communicate about issues. If an email is going to evoke a sense that things aren't right in a particular context, why not wait until I'm “in the saddle” and ready to “ride” toward a resolution vs stewing in the frustration needlessly. I don't get that many emails that make me angry, by the way. I've got it pretty darn good in that department. But even if it is just an email that is going to require some kind of follow up, I tend to delay taking any steps toward moving forward until such time that I'm back at my computer. Why not just enjoy the time more in whatever context I may have been in when I succumbed to the temptation to just “dip my toe” into my work email to “check in”.

As I prepare to live into this commitment (once again, as I have failed at this in the past), I will revisit Robert Talbert's Grand Unified Theory of Academic Email: Fixing the Missing Piece of the Clarify Process, as he helps those of us who may have a tendency to over-function to ask ourselves if whatever may have bubbled up in our email is actually ours to do something with… I would probably do well to re-listen to Brené Brown's Unlocking Us Podcast Episode: On Anxiety, Calm, and Over-/Under-Functioning. And Karen Costa's conversation with me on Episode 505: How Role Clarity and Boundaries Can Help Us Thrive.

Rinse and repeat. I feel a playlist coming on…

Continue: Finding Times to Go to Jazzercise with My Mom

Speaking of playlists, I've been having a bunch of opportunities to find great workout music, since I've been driving to Oceanside a number of times each week during this holiday break. If you've been listening to Teaching in Higher Ed for more than a couple of years, you may have “met” my Mom back on Episode 462: Teaching Lessons I Learned From Mom. During the episode, I read her a column I wrote for EdSurge about her: Teaching Lessons I Learned from Mom and then reflected with my mom on the death of her sister, Judy.

It takes ~45 minutes to make the drive from where I live to the Oceanside Jazzercise location where my Mom takes classes. The class, itself, is an hour, and then it's another hour to say my goodbyes and get back home. Yes, that's three hours anytime I go take a class with her. However, I've been telling myself that if I set a goal to take a class with her once or twice a month, during regular work weeks, and then a few times a week when we are on Spring break, that it would quickly add up to a whole lot more joy in my life. I rarely take lunch breaks at work, though I do often go for walks during the day with work friends (and sometimes former students, etc.). I'm having this inner dialog with myself about how much time I would actually “lose” from work if I were to keep this commitment vs what I would “gain” from the experiences.

Lest anyone reading this feel like you want to “fix” my stinkin' thinking on this front and tell me stories about how much time you wish you still had with someone you've lost… you may be somewhat relieved of your duties to know that I've already put some things in motion toward this idea. Kerry Mandulak (who has been on Teaching in Higher Ed a couple times before) was down in Oceanside with her family this past week and we hung out together after I went to Jazzercise with my Mom. She raved about the Airbnb where her family was staying. I've already booked one in the same complex for Spring Break and blocked out four opportunities to join my Mom for Jazzercise that week.

Two women smile together with an Airbnb in the background
What a joy is was getting to spend some time with Kerry during her family's trip to Oceanside.

I'm headed down to the Lilly Conference on Tuesday and will stop and do a class with her on the way down. At this point, I just need to block a few more times in my calendar for Spring 2026 and I'll have just the structure I need to turn this all into a reality and a bunch of memories with my Mom… That, plus an ever-growing playlist of energizing workout songs…

Related Goals

Robert Talbert mentions how poorly people, in general, tend to do with our resolutions. However, on my goal-setting, I tend to do ok, much of the time. To that end, I plan on continuing a few other things throughout 2026. I commit to:

  • Read at least 24 books (connect with me on StoryGraph, if you want to see how that's going and what I'm reading)
  • Keep stretching daily using the Bend App
  • Continue closing my Apple Watch rings (currently at an 845 days streak, which kinda scares me a bit, just because I think occasional breaks are ok and even healthy to take)
  • Apply to present at a conference at another country with a couple of collaborators and see if we're successful at getting to share our work in an entirely difference context than I will have ever experienced in my life (and I used to travel a ton for work in my younger days, so that's saying something)
  • Air an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed each week for the entire year, keeping yet-another streak alive… making it 12+ years of consistent conversations about teaching and learning

What are you up to in the new year? Anything you're committing to stoping, starting, or continuing?

Return to Me: Teaching, AI, and the Longing to Connect

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Dean Martin sings into a microphone

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.