[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 469 of the Teaching In Higher Ed podcast, designing courses in an age of AI with Maria Andersen.

[music]

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.

Dr. Maria Andersen has spent most of her career teaching, writing curriculum, and developing digital products for learning. Dr. Andersen has degrees in Chemistry, Environmental Biology, Mathematics, Business Administration, and Education Leadership. After 10 years as a college professor, she stepped out of academia to embrace online learning and the underlying technologies behind it.

Dr. Andersen worked in the EdTech industry for 10 years, including founding and bringing a company, Coursetune, to a successful exit. Recently she returned to the classroom having new teaching adventures in K-12 middle and high school. Maria Andersen, welcome back to Teaching In Higher Ed.

[00:01:35] Dr. Maria Andersen: So happy to be here, Bonni.

[00:01:37] Bonni: I had to look back to the last time that we spoke. The episode aired in July 2020, the topic was designing for an uncertain fall. How, Maria, do you think perhaps we should have changed that, I should have changed that episode title to better reflect where we find ourselves today?

[00:01:55] Maria: Just designing for an uncertain future, I guess.

[00:01:58] Bonni: Yes, absolutely. Much has changed since you were on the show, you’ve been on the show many times, in fact. Talk about your experience teaching in K-12, and maybe what parallels are there, what emerged from you and within you from that experience.

[00:02:18] Maria: Yes. As you may or may not know, we sold Coursetune in 2021 and I stayed on for a year to help it transition to its new owner. What I really just desperately wanted to do when I was done with all that was just go back to teaching. In August, I took a position teaching two classes at a local STEM charter school, it’s a mile from my house. I teach a business elective to the high school students and a class that I created called Technology in Society to the middle schoolers.

That’s really the one I was aiming at teaching. I wanted to spend a year thinking about all the different arcs of technology, the histories, how we got to where we are in the world, and how everything works together or not works together. That class has been super interesting to teach to middle schoolers too. I wasn’t actually planning to teach middle school, and then they asked if I would be willing to teach in middle school elective, and I thought, “Well,” I was up for a new adventure, so I’ll give it a try.

They are delightful, and their curiosity and their willingness to ask questions, which is something you don’t see so much anymore in college students. I’m really enjoying that, and I really enjoy the subject area of just spending– every day is a brand new prep. I have all the science background and math background, but it’s still taking a deep dive into a lot of technology, I don’t know how it works either when I start.

We’ve gone through water infrastructure, power infrastructure, transportation, logistics and infrastructure, agricultural infrastructure, household technologies and how they all work, communications technology. We’re in a material science unit right now and then we’ll get to computing technologies in our last month. With each one of those, we go back in history to see how we function without the technology arc and how things changed as different technologies developed, how roles in society changed, how the different sciences developed over time to bring us better technology. It’s been super interesting to learn about all of it with the middle schoolers and enjoy their enthusiasm and excitement about it.

[00:04:42] Bonni: I love that emphasis on history. I’m going to have to look at this person’s name. I get fascinated by this guy on Twitter who will– he does it to help us think more critically about history, and he’ll have, “Here’s all the tropes about parenting where we see the same exact things be echoed,” or, “Here’s the same things that we’ve heard about being distracted,” and that kind of stuff.

I’m going to have to find his name, so I can more easily bring him up both literally and in my own mind, but how wonderful to root all of that in history and to consider and be curious about what the world looked like without that. What’s been some of the biggest surprises for you, as some of this was new for you and also for the students, what life looked like without the technology that we have today that perhaps we take for granted?

[00:05:28] Maria: That’s a good question. I think the biggest surprise for the students was discovering that we have had some environmental issues that we solved, so the Montreal Protocol which ended the production of CFCs that produce the ozone hole. I think we finally, as of last year, the year before, have finally a reducing ozone hole, because it takes decades for the stuff to get out of the atmosphere.

Recently, when we did material sciences, seeing how much devastation of the forests we have created in the 1700s and 1800s, and then the turnaround of that in the last 100 years to where we now have more trees planted than are used in the United States, and we managed the use of wood and wood products so that we don’t deplete forest anymore. They were really heartened by hearing those stories. I don’t think that our youngest generations now hear a lot of stories of hope, renewal, or ones where humans have managed to solve problems. I think they’ve been most heartened and delighted by those kinds of stories.

For myself, I think it’s just this reflection on just how complex and fragile the society we live in is, and how easily it can all fall apart with one or two components of our technology chain failing. I don’t think that most adults realize just how fragile and complex it is. If you just look at– We did a unit on transportation infrastructure and we went all the way up through modern infrastructure, like how is it that an Amazon package gets to you, or overnight shipping works, or international cargo ships.

Just looking at all of those pieces individually and how they all work together to get the things to your house that you asked for, it’s just incredible, and it relies on a global infrastructure and transportation infrastructure and computational infrastructure, and just all these things that I think that we don’t learn about so much in school.

We learn pure sciences, we learn reading and writing, and we learn about now how businesses function and things like that, but we don’t spend a lot of time in school learning about how complex everything is. That is really the natural world to kids now. Their natural world is this technological world, and they should be taught about how everything is reliant on everything else.

It would make them more informed citizens, it would make them more careful voters, it would make them pay more attention to the kinds of government projects that are going on around them that keep them drinking clean water and having power in their houses and things like that. I think it’s the missing curriculum that should be taught everywhere.

Of course, I’m a little biased because I teach it, but I do see that their curiosity is peaked. They are eager to learn about the science behind everything, they have lots of questions about how society changed. We’ve had some really great and deep conversations about women’s rights, equal rights, and unions because they’ve been so shocked by things they saw in the past, like people walking across the– we were doing steel, so they were watching people walk across the steel beams and skyscrapers, and reenactment.

They were like, “Whoa. Pause. Where’s their safety equipment?” [laughs] There was no safety equipment back then, but there are laws about this. There are laws now about this. [laughs] It was just completely unsafe, why would people have done it? Just this disbelief and now they’re starting to understand that all of the things we have today came about because people did something in the past, right?

I know we teach history, we teach social studies, and we teach humanities, but we teach it in a purist way where we study the societies. Technology has been such a driving force in society for the last 200 years, such a driving force. We have made more technological progress in the last 200 years than in all of human history.

I’m afraid that what we teach mostly in schools is the human history that goes from the 1800s to the past, not necessarily– If we made 100 times the progress in the last 200 years than we made in all of human history, shouldn’t we at least place an equal emphasis on this last 200 years of progress as we do the rest of human history? Because it’s not equal. The amount of change is incredible.

Now what we’re seeing with Generative AI, we have another incredible acceleration of change happening already. Education has had a really hard time adjusting to the last 100 years. I’ve been looking back at curriculum and education as its own technology arc, and what’s incredible to me is that we treat modern education as this thing we’ve figured out, like it’s a done deal, we know how to do this, the US has the best higher education system in the world, blah, blah, blah, except that if you go back to 1900, only 51% of elementary-aged kids went to school and only 11% of high school-aged kids went to school. That was 120 years ago.

This whole phenomenon of putting 14 to 18-year-olds in school is a very recent phenomenon. For us to imagine we have it figured out, and that the schedule of going to eight classes a day is totally the way to do it, and that what we’re teaching them is the right stuff to be teaching them is ludicrous.

We’ve only been doing it for not even 100 years, and we don’t have it figured out, and the world has changed so much in the last 100 years that we really need to do some serious thinking about what is right for teenagers to be doing in the educational system and what is right for the society to provide to them as they mature, and these things are not easy to change.

[00:12:25] Bonni: When I think about my evoked set of people who are very skilled at building curriculum, you are certainly at the top of that list. How do you plan for a curriculum that, as you said, is not something that you are super well versed in, you’re exploring and being curious along with the students, how do you provide the needed structure while giving yourself enough margin to go down those fun rabbit trails, have those discoveries, and continue to foster the power of that creativity that you described earlier?

[00:13:02] Maria: Well, I’m very lucky to be living in the time I live in because the structure that I give to the curriculum comes from a very talented group of YouTubers who each have their own little niches of subject area. It’s funny because the students have recognized that in different units, we have different YouTube experts that help us learn about that subject area.

I’m trying to remember who some of the channels are. Maybe I can grab them at the end and we can insert it here. For example, right now where you’re learning about material sciences and there is a channel called Real Engineering. They did a whole series on material sciences and learning about the various materials. It starts with a video on understanding the words we use for material science.

I took a class of material science as part of my engineering forays in college. We can use that as a base for understanding what we’re talking about, and then we look at videos on how things are made with those materials. There’s a series called How It’s Made. We’ve watched some of those videos. Actually, a lot of the curriculum is video-based as there’s no text. There’s no single text that I can find anywhere that would go over all of this.

Luckily, there are all these niches on the internet where people explain things. Those YouTube providers, those folks have been fantastic at helping to provide the base for this, and then I typically will go through the videos that I screen for the kids and create vocabulary activities on them, crosswords. Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of these active learning sets where I go through and I’m using ChatGPT to help me out in creating some of the materials.

I’ll go through and create what we call True and False for videos. I go through and create these cutouts that we use and they get a set of statements that are either true or false, and before we watch any videos, they have to try to figure out what they already know and they categorize into definitely true, definitely false, maybe true, or maybe false. Then we watch the videos, and as they watch with a partner, they keep sorting the information as they hear it in the videos and talking it over with their partners.

They can ask to pause the videos if they need time to chat or go back if they want to go back to hear something again to make sure they’ve got it right. They’re very actively listening and paying attention to what’s going on because they’re sorting the information both in their heads and in front of them in real-time.

When we’re done, we’ll go through the true statements and then why the false statements are false. It’s a way to engage with the material, and then they go through and create PowerPoints of the– We have this huge timeline on the wall of all the different technologies that have been developed and they each pick a topic, and make some slides for that topic that are– we call them slides, but we print them out as little cards to put on the timeline.

I think the question you asked was, how do you go about preparing for something like this? I think the really tricky thing is that no single educator is really prepared to teach this curriculum because we don’t teach it, but you can rely on a lot of people who are experts to provide the base curriculum, the digital curriculum, and so long as you yourself have a curiosity and a willingness to learn, you can figure it out.

I think you could come at this from a background in history, you could come at this from a background in science or engineering, and so long as you are willing to learn it, you could help the students to understand it. Depending on your perspective and background, you might just teach it with a slightly heavier flavor in some area.

I do have a science background and an engineering background, so I can figure out the stuff I don’t know and help the students to understand it. We do some experiments in class and whatnot, and if I had more of a history background, I would probably focus more on some of that as the thing I would really geek out about in class. I think we can rely on the fact that there’s a robust digital area of expertise here.

[00:17:35] Bonni: I’m fascinated and have been for such a long time by the juxtaposition of analog and digital. I would love to have you describe the process that you went through, or you would go through, of taking one of these videos, the content that it looks like, how does one put that into ChatGPT, and then what would that output look like? Then I am assuming you are physically then printing this out and cutting– would you talk us through on a practical level–

[00:18:02] Maria: Yes, I physically cut them out. I start with an extension. It’s called [inaudible 00:18:09] I believe. I can send you a link to it to put in the show notes. If you install this into Chrome, then when you pull up a YouTube video, it gives you a ChatGPT button. You can choose what your first prompt is for ChatGPT.

What it’ll do is grab the title and the transcript of the video you’re watching, open up a ChatGPT window with the model you’re using. I’ll usually use ChatGPT 4 because I have the pro access. Then I start out by saying, “Give me 20 bullet points about this video.” 20 bullet points that give me an overview of the video. That’s actually a nice way to– Sometimes I don’t want to watch 100 videos, that’s an exaggeration, but to find the best two, so by using the bullet point lists, I can quickly screen a video and say, “Ah, this doesn’t seem to be what I’m looking for,” and, “This is what I’m looking for.”

From there, I will typically say, “Based on this video transcript,” and I again quote the title of it because it’s already got it in there, “Give me 15 true statements and 15 false statements about it.” Sometimes I ask it for crossword clues or comprehension questions. It just depends on what I’m going for in this particular case. Then I take those and bring them over to a document.

If I’ve asked for true-and-false statements, I bring them over to a document, and then I screen through them to find the ones that I think are particularly good from those lists. I usually base an activity on about two to three short videos. Maybe one on history and one on more of the science or something like that. Since we’re doing material science right now, that’s what I’m going for right now.

I create a document with true statements and false statements. I can actually send your readers to my Teachers Pay Teachers store, which has a free copy of one of these on iron and steel. They could go look at– I think maybe it’s just iron. They could go look at one that’s based on the history of iron and iron properties. Then I print them out on cardstock, I use a paper cutter to cut them out and put them in little baggies. Then in class, the students partner together, and they sort them all out on their desks and to their true-and-falses as we watch the videos, and we talk about anything, any questions they have.

One crucial step I missed is when I think I have all the true-and-false statements that I’m going to use in the activity and I modify them slightly, I usually listen to all the videos once with the statements in front of me to make sure that I’m hearing whether they are true or false in the videos, and it wasn’t just a ChatGPT artifact of something that didn’t happen in the videos.

Before I run it with the class, I take all the true statements, and I asked ChatGPT, are all of these statements definitely true? I take all the false statements, and I run them through ChatGPT and I say, are all of these statements definitely false? Because what I find is that, even if something has been said in a video, and it’s built true-and-false statements, they aren’t always 100% false.

There’s some loophole that wasn’t covered in the video that hasn’t– it’s actually a really good way, if you write true-and-false statements for tests or anything like that, asking ChatGPT to tell you whether it thinks the statements are definitely true or definitely false is a good way to find the little fine print that you might have missed in your own head when you wrote those statements like, “Oh, I didn’t think about that particular aspect, I need to shift the wording.” I’ll shift the wording on anything that doesn’t come out as definitely true, definitely false so that I’m sure it is. I’ll run it through one more time to make sure I’ve got it right.

It does take a little bit of work to develop these high-quality activities you can do with the students, but I find that these students, they all have one-to-one devices. They don’t take any notes, either my high schoolers or middle schoolers, they take no notes. Even just having pencils is like– if you do an activity that involves a pencil, you have to really think twice. You have to provide pencils, basically, because they don’t have them.

Some people would say, “Well, we need to teach them how to take notes if they’re not know how to take notes.” Also, we could just adjust to the way we teach that’s more interesting to them, right? They live in a different world.

They don’t need to have as much information memorized, but being able to sort and think and problem solve, it’s interesting to hear the conversations they have about true-and-false statements with each other. “This one’s true, then this one must be false,” like they’re thinking logically about things, and going through the materials. Actually, the materials I build you could easily use in any class above sixth grade. Anyways, I can send you guys to an example if you want to give it a try.

[00:23:02] Bonni: We have been using the name ChatGPT a number of times already in our conversation. Would you introduce us to this entity called AI or ChatGPT as you would like to have us know them or think about it?

[00:23:18] Maria: Yes, I always tell people that you’ve just been given an assistant and they’re college-age, book-smart, go-getter, who has no ego, and will always carry out what you’ve asked them to do to the best of their ability, but they don’t have a lot of real-world experience. They’re book-smart, and they get it wrong sometimes, and when they get it wrong, you just have to gently say, “Okay, well, I liked that part of it, but you didn’t do this part right. Could you give that another try?”

The nice thing about ChatGPT is unlike a real college student who would have feelings and be upset by your not liking 100% what they did, ChatGPT isn’t like that at all. I tend to say, “I liked this part, but I didn’t like this part. Can you redo it,” and bam, just like that, you’ll get a fresh start at it, and if they don’t get it right that time, you tell them what they did right, tell them what they did wrong, and ask again.

The way that generative AI is constructed by– especially ChatGPT, by its very construction, it does not pick the highest probability words for the token strings it builds. Because of that, it often will get something wrong in your directions or get something a little bit off in what it does because it’s not picking the most high probability words. If it picks the most high probability words, it would sound like a robot, not a human, and we want it to sound like a human.

We have to use mathematics to tweak it, and when we tweak it, it loses some of its fidelity to follow directions. You just kind of have to understand that and work with it as an assistant or an ally to help you get your work done. With any technology, you have a choice, your choice is either to be like, “I got something wrong, I quit,” or, “Got something wrong, let’s try it again,” and if you fire your new assistant, well, then you don’t have an assistant. [laughs] If you work with your assistant, and this would be true for a human assistant as well, if you work with your assistant and learn how to coach it better and learn how to get it to give you what you want, then you have an assistant.

It’s your choice. Will it get some things wrong? Yes, but so does the internet. One of the things I think that very few people have noticed is that Google Search is becoming incredibly biased in the last five years. Everything you see in a Google search is there because somebody paid Google to show it to you, and that is already an incredibly biased set of information.

Rarely does anybody go to the second page of Google where more information that was not paid to show you would be, and to imagine that our problems in the world are all created by ChatGPT and misinformation is not the case at all. They were already there from marketing, misinformation. I teach marketing right now, so I’ve been paying particular attention to it, and it’s quite pervasive.

[00:26:33] Bonni: Talk more about this personal assistant, how you go back, what kinds of things do you go back and ask it to redo? How do you modify those? I realize I’m asking a complicated question, but what are some of the basic ways that we might go back and say, “That wasn’t quite what I was looking for, try again”?

[00:26:51] Maria: Well, even if you save your prompts somewhere, and you think, “Oh, I’ve got the perfect prompt, this will get me the multiple–” I do some like Kahoot quizzes for a class. Kahoot quizzes have a very specific structure. You could only have so many characters in the stem of the question, you could only have so many characters in the responses, you want the answers to not always be choice A. You want them to be random.

I have spent probably 10 hours trying to construct the perfect Kahoot prompt down to trying to set the temperature settings using Chat, which you can’t do, you have to go to the sandbox in OpenAI to do that. Trying to get it into a format that you can upload to a CSV file because Kahoot can take a CSV file, but it’s a very specific format for the file.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the perfect prompt and then ultimately, what I realized is because of that temperature setting, it won’t matter if you write the perfect prompt because it’ll never do the same thing twice. You have to live with the fact that right now there is no way to tell ChatGPT, “I want you to pay 100% attention to these rules, but then use your lower temperature setting for writing conversational English for this particular aspect.”

I’m sure that’s coming, I’m sure we will have a version of these products where we can pick and choose which rules we want 100% followed and which rules we don’t. Right now, you can just do something simple like, say, “ChatGPT, write me 15 multiple choice questions based on these transcripts for a game,” and you’ll get something to start with and it might be super close to what you want, in which case, yay, you won the ChatGPT roulette for the day, but sometimes what you get is you get three responses instead of the four you might expect because you didn’t say you wanted four. Of course, sometimes you say you want four, you still don’t get four, so go figure that one.

That’s just it not doing 100% of what you tell it to do. In those cases, you just have to say, “Oh, you gave me three responses. I was really hoping for four. Well, you just redo it,” or sometimes it gives you all the questions and none of the answers, in which case you have to say, “Oh, I was hoping for an answer key too, can you give me that,” and it’ll give you the answer key. Then you’ll discover that all the answers are A. [laughs]

That is the one I have had the hardest time with. I have tried everything in my brain to try to get it to randomize where it puts the answers, and it just won’t do it past one or two questions. It’ll do it for the first question, the second question, and then never again for 15 questions. In the end, I’ve had to learn to just make sure that when I load things into Kahoot, I always choose the option to randomize where the answers are in the questions, which is an option in there, but some things it just cannot get the hang of doing.

I think it has to do with that temperature setting it’s got right now. The more you specifically tell it to do upfront, the less likely it is that it pays attention to 100% of what you said. Sometimes less is more. You might as well just start out with a first pass, a first draft of what you want with a very short prompt, and then ask it to get to improve a couple of times on that and then you get to where you want. You’re going to be doing that anyways, so you might as well start with something short.

[00:30:38] Bonni: The final question I’d like to ask you before we get to the recommendation segment is an analogy that I’ve seen it be used in both directions, so I’ll just set it out to you and see what you think. You do have a math background. How does the analogy of ChatGPT being a calculator sit with you?

[00:30:58] Maria: I think that’s a good analogy actually. In the math community, we first had to grapple with calculator use and then graphing calculator use. Then WolframAlpha came along in the early 2000s and really rocked the math world again with what it could do so easily and freely available on the internet. We’ve been through this a few times, so maybe mathematicians are just more able to adjust at this point, although some of the newer faculty who are just hitting this for the first time and our math people are having the same reaction we all did to all of those things.

I do think it’s just a tool that we’re going to be using and we’re going to have to adjust. There’s no question that we’re going to have to adjust, that education is going to have to adjust that what we teach is going to have to adjust. I know you’ve had some other folks on the podcast who’ve talked about equity issues in terms of special needs.

20% of the kids in K-12 have reading issues. 20%. We have a whole higher education system based on, if you can’t read, you can’t get a higher education degree. Yet, I’m teaching this entire curriculum right now off of videos and you have to ask yourself if, in the 1800s– and I have a whole talk about this. There’s a whole arc we could go through here, but we don’t have time.

In the 1800s, instead of books becoming more widespread, which actually wasn’t even until the 1900s to be fair, 1950s even, if instead of that somebody had come to people of the 1800s with YouTube as an option and all the videos available on YouTube, would reading and writing have become the foundational basis for our education system? Because humans were not made to read and write. Humans were made to talk to each other, to learn from each other, to ask each other questions, to observe.

We were not actually built to read and write text. That’s a recent development. Our genes have not adjusted to this. I think we have a ton of rethinking to do about how we go about education and we are not good at making those kinds of sweeping changes in education. I think in this case, all of this generative AI is going to force us to think really hard about what it is to be a good educator and how we adjust to all of this.

One of the things I’ve had to say several times to educators lately, I had an English teacher on a workshop the other day who was quite panicked about like, “I feel like my job is in danger because this can do all the reading and writing.” I just have to say back over and over, “If you think the only thing you did was teach students how to read and write, you need to rethink what it is you’re doing as a leader in the classroom because that’s not the only thing you’re teaching to students.”

You’re teaching them empathy through reading. You’re teaching them how society works through the materials you use. You’re teaching them how to get along with classmates. So much of what teachers do, especially in K-12, is about learning to interact and learning to fit into society, learning when to be outside the box. Those are the things that are actually still vital.

Plus, nobody’s going to let children sit– we all learned something from the pandemic. It is that you cannot just sit children in front of computers and hope that experience will go well for everybody. They are not going to self-supervise themselves all day long with no adult present. There is still plenty of space for educators to exist and thrive and do good with students in the world, but we do have to rethink what we’re doing.

I think we can’t panic because we have this new tool. There are plenty of tools we have that nobody knows how to use. Everybody listening to this, I want you to sit down and see if you can write down how it is that cellphone signals work or how it is that apps get displayed on your phones, or how your car functions. There’s plenty of technology around us that we use without fully understanding it.

Text is a technology, writing is a technology, it just got a lot easier. It’s the technology that has held on for a long time in the manner that it did and has now changed. Our educational system should change to adapt to it. It’s not going away. One of the things we do know about technology is that once it’s out of the bottle, it’s out of the bottle, you’re not putting it back. There’s no point in trying to do so.

What we need to do is figure out how we shift now, what could we now teach? Now that we have this, what’s the more important thing to teach: writing or explaining? I would argue that the most important thing we could teach is how to negotiate, mediate with each other, work together to solve problems. Lord, do we need that right now? Working together to solve problems.

We have all these huge problems in the world and we have instances of the past where we have worked together to solve problems. We need to teach students how to do that now because they’re the ones who really are going to need to come together to do that. Explaining to each other, learning how to listen to each other, all of that becomes incredibly more important.

Learning how to sift through information, making sure you check the validity of things. We just have different priorities now. To survive, as a species, we’ve got to start shifting our priorities from the all-importance of reading and writing as the basis of everything to maybe we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

[00:37:28] Bonni: Thank you so much. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. If someone wants to begin on a journey of your own of experimenting with ChatGPT, Maria, I really enjoyed your video called Treat ChatGPT as Your Assistant, Not Your Enemy. You talk about in that short, easy-to-digest video, you actually walk us through– I enjoy seeing the prompts and as you evolve them. For people that want to learn a little bit more, but on a good getting-started point, that’s an excellent video, about five minutes, that I would highly recommend.

Another related to technology, but a different aspect of it is I came across a website called Your Data Mirror recently, and I try when I bookmark things to always do a little H/T which is hat tip as in where did I get this from? I didn’t do it in this case because I’d love to be able to credit the person who introduced me to it. What this website does is it’s really all built around having a call for transparency about the kinds of surveillance and manipulation that goes on.

Maria, you were talking earlier about studying marketing and I suspect that you probably help students see today that we are not free. It comes at a cost when we’re using these websites. What Your Data Mirror does is it helps you make really informed decisions about when you decide to give your information. I especially like the part that anytime we dislodge things in our minds, I think it’s so helpful to go, “Now here’s what you could do about that.”

As citizens, it talks about what we could do to take action. Some of the things they recommend early on are things like updating your advertising settings on Instagram or un-tagging your friends or thinking about before you give data to a website. This is something I was a little bit pleased with. I’m sure I’m not as careful as I could be sometimes, but recently I was asked– anytime if it’s asking me what my birthday is, why do they need to know what my birthday is?

For this particular thing, it is information that would be nuanced based on my age. Well, they don’t need to know exactly the day I was born. Instead, it could be the year I was born and just make up the day and still provide me with the nuanced recommendations or tweak my settings or reports that I get, that kind of thing.

The website is designed to sensitize young adults to this very important topic. One thing I noticed, it’s also available in the German language. You can just toggle between English and German, and it’s a really nice look, I would say, not just for young people, but for older people like me too.

Just good reminders for the ways in which our data is being used to surveil and manipulate us and how do we combat that. Well, we can take these really simple actions and it actually does walk you through. You can specifically look at your data and what’s being done and how it’s being collected across the internet. It’s really fascinating, fascinating to look at all these things. Those are my two recommendations, and Maria, I’ll pass it over to you for yours.

[00:40:46] Maria: My first recommendation is the Ezra Klein podcast. If you’re not listening to it, it’s fabulous. He does a lot of interviews with book authors and folks who are really well-versed in AI right now. Some of his podcast episodes can run like two hours as he talks to authors, but he asks all the questions I would ask if I was talking to the author, and I really appreciate that. They just go as long as they need to go to get through all the questions. I’ve found several of his last six months of podcasts to just be incredibly enlightening, so much so that I listened to them twice.

My other recommendation is a little bit of a unusual one, it’s to buy less stuff to look at what you can do to repair or purchase things that have already been used once from thrift stores or get books from libraries. As we’re going through all of this technology stuff in my classes, it’s just becoming painfully obvious that we are causing resources to be used up in the world by our just kind of throwaway lifestyles. I’ve become more cognizant lately that when something breaks, if I can mend it, I should, or if I can find a way to use it in a new way, I should.

If I need a new set of– the other day, I was like, “Oh, I really want to have a set of sundae glasses to make yogurt parfaits or whatever,” but I can get those from the thrift store. I don’t have to buy them new. Anytime we reuse something, we’re saving energy. We’re not putting more carbon into the atmosphere. We are being more mindful of our environment. My second recommendation is to try reusing a little bit more than you have been in the past because every little bit helps.

[00:42:38] Bonni: Thank you for these wonderful recommendations. I echo what you said about Ezra Klein and particularly on the topic of AI, but I find him to be the best person for a view that is contrary to ones that I hold without the both-sides-ism that I find so distasteful. He really does a nice job with that.

Thank you for this recommendation to buy less stuff. I was picturing you going to a thrift store or to the Goodwill to look for used sundae glasses, and I imagine that sort of sparked some imagination and curiosity in your family and also in your classrooms as well. Thank you so much for this.

Maria, it’s so glad to be having this ongoing conversation with you. I went from– I still always feel nervous for every episode, but I went from being terrified to now it just feels like an old friend to kind of catch up with where you’ve been, what’s been going on in your life, and the ways that you just continue to be so generous in sharing with other educators and helping us be equipped to be better at what we do. so thank you for that.

[00:43:38] Maria: You’re welcome. Glad to be here.

[music]

[00:43:42] Bonni: Thanks once again to Dr. Maria Andersen for joining me for this conversation for Teaching In Higher Ed. This 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 Smith.

If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly emails, that will arrive with the most recent episodes, show notes, as well as some other things that don’t show up in the main podcast, head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and you can begin receiving those. Thanks so much for listening to Teaching In Higher Ed and being a part of the community. I’ll see you next time.

[music]

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.