[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 472 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, perspectives on artificial intelligence, a student-professor dialogue with Stead Fast and Lance Eaton.

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Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. 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.

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Stead Fast is a recent graduate of College Unbound, earning a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership and change with a focus on engagement in the arts. They’re looking to work within the humanities to expand the reach of traditional museums, galleries, and to make spaces of creativity and exploration more accessible and engaging. They were first introduced to AI with their special topics in civic engagement course that focused on technology and student policy. With the class, they took part in researching AI tools such as ChatGPT, and analyzed their implications within higher ed. They also helped to create their school’s policy for faculty and students around the use of AI.

My second guest today is Lance Eaton, the Director of Digital Pedagogy for College Unbound. He’s an award-winning educator, and he’s been working at the intersection of EdTech and higher ed for over a decade at different colleges and universities in the United States Northeast. Lance is currently completing his dissertation from UMass Boston, which focuses on how scholars engage in academic privacy. Lance has given many talks written about and presented at conferences on artificial intelligence, generative tools and education, academic piracy, open access, OER, open pedagogy, hybrid flexible learning, and digital service learning.

As you’ll hear about in the episode in spring of 2019, Lance ran a course, AI and Education, where he and students at College Unbound worked together to explore and critique generative AI, and to co-create a set of usage policies for students and faculty at College Unbound. From there, Lance and his students have been involved in various public forums to advocate for more dynamic approaches to generative AI in higher ed, and the importance of centering student voices. Stead Fast and Lance Eaton, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:13] Lance Eaton: Thank you.

[00:03:14] Stead Fast: Hello. Thank you for having us.

[00:03:16] Bonni: So glad to have you here, and we’d love to get to know a little bit about you. Stead Fast, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, especially your emerging interest in artificial intelligence, but we’d love to hear other things too.

[00:03:31] Stead: Sure. I am a recent graduate of College Unbound. I majored in organizational leadership and change with focus on engagement in the arts. Honestly, I signed up for Lance’s class with very little experience with AI. I just needed the credit to graduate. Having taken the class, AI definitely was a heavy interest for me. I’m really glad to have been able to explore it a little bit and be able to discuss it with my peers.

I think really the most important part of that class has been being able to, because of AI, been a part of my school’s policy and work with Lance and other administration, and again, through our experience there, really amplify student voices. That’s been really, really interesting. Exploring the teacher-student dichotomy and blurring the lines in the realm of technology has been pretty cool.

[00:04:29] Bonni: Thanks for sharing a little bit about yourself. I actually am a graduate of two different degrees in organizational leadership. That’s what I got my master’s in and also my doctorate, so it’s fun to think about what we might have in common in terms of this thought about technology and the ways in which it can impact, as you said, Stead, our sense of who we are and what does it mean to do what it is we do, and specifically around teaching and learning how that might impact us and this emerging artificial intelligence. Lance, we’d love to hear a little bit about you and your emerging interest in artificial intelligence.

[00:05:07] Lance: Sure. Thank you for having us. I’m Lance Eaton. I am Director of Digital Pedagogy at College Unbound. I’ve been involved in instructional design in that intersection of educational technology and teaching and learning for about 11 or 12 years now, and over that time continued to develop deeper and deeper thoughts, and critical insights, and just a richer community of folks that helped me think about how these tools impact our teaching and learning in sometimes really powerful ways and sometimes really problematic ways.

There’s a lot of things in the last five years that I’ve been doing that as generally AI emerged, it was this really interesting moment I felt emerging where it was just like, oh, these different critical thoughts and these different experiences are making me think we need to do something. We need to not react but respond to generative AI. As it emerged in late November and early December, myself, another person you’ve had on the show, I think a few times, Autumn Caines, were in conversation. Through that, I realized our faculty were going to need guidance.

Our students were going to need guidance, and all of this was going to have to happen in some way by the time that our semester started, which for us is really early. It’s January 9th. I had a lot going into it, but I feel like it doesn’t matter because it continually evolved both from deep dives and conversations with colleagues and people in my personal learning network, and then also obviously with students and the ways they really maybe think and look at this in lots of different ways.

[00:06:59] Bonni: Share more about the distinction in your mind between when we respond to something, perhaps a new technology, but it could be anything, versus when we react to something, again, perhaps a technology or perhaps something else.

[00:07:13] Lance: To me, response is there’s this acknowledgement that something has arrived that is going to challenge or augment, or impact the ways that we were doing things. Particularly I’m thinking about technology or the pandemic. To me, in that it’s a Buddhist idea of you need to spend more time when things feel really panicky. I am not getting the quote right, but it’s this idea of that’s when you need to slow down the most. I feel like what I saw, the conversation, and of course the conversation was started in part through certain media discourses.

The Atlantic came right out of the gate with the end of the college essay. That’s a lot of people’s first response to it back in December. To see that grow in lots of institutions, I think New York City schools banned it. Those felt reactive in the way of banning it felt, we’re going to shade out the sun. It’s not a really grounded way to think about this thing that you can’t really ban it. That, to me, is that difference, is a thoughtful approach that is also looking to and involving the community in which are impacted and involved.

Also trying to be mindful of what is realistic in this outcome versus aspirational. Not aspirational in that negative way, but aspirational in when you say we’re going to ban it, that feels aspirational in a controlling kind of way. I don’t have the word for that, but that’s where my mind went with this, or just a fear-based. Now, the fear is real, the concerns that it presents is real, but how we navigate that, I think is to me that difference between the reacting and the responding.

[00:09:16] Bonni: Stead Fast, if you were talking to an eight-year-old today, how would you explain artificial intelligence to them?

[00:09:25] Stead: Honestly, they might already know more than I do, but I think depending on whoever you’re talking to no matter what age, their background, you try to use things that are relative to preexisting experiences that they might have. You can say, AI might be a little helper to you, maybe like a babysitter or a nanny, someone who’s there to just make your life a little easier, explain things for you. Maybe more in line with a teacher, like a interdisciplinary like facilitator, to put it fancy. I would not say that to an eight-year-old. Just someone who’s there to help, to explain things, to break it down into smaller pieces for you.

[00:10:18] Bonni: I love that you started out saying that they might already know more than we do. We have a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old, and they regularly will find or hear about apps that they want to download and all of that. Recently there was a AI image generation app that they wanted to download, and of course we always tend to look those things up on a site called Common Sense Media to get a sense of the age appropriateness and do our due diligence around the privacy implications of such a thing.

We’re all cautious about that, but ultimately I decided that this was pretty harmless, but it is one of those things, Stead where you think, because so much of these things– I agree, and actually you said this earlier, Lance, to try to control this entirely, like banning any sort of AI, well, good luck with that, because it is showing up in so many different places. I’m expecting our dishwasher to come out with AI tomorrow or something.

Yes, the thinking through the fears to be able to name those and recognize those, and then be able to talk about them in age and developmentally appropriate ways, I think is a really helpful thing for us to consider. In some ways I see parenting as some aspect of that role is as an educator. It’s not the only role that a parent might play, but those are the lenses that I think through that with. Lance, anything to add on how we might explain it to an eight-year-old? Or would you like to start and tackle the 80-year-old question? Where do you want to start?

[00:11:48] Lance: Ah, I feel like the eight-year-old is easier because there’s an expansive imagination there. Not that the 80-year-old doesn’t have an imagination, but let me start with the eight-year-old. I would tell them that the way you can think about, at least right now, generative artificial intelligence is that, if you’re dealing with words, that it is basically this program that treats words like Legos and has this infinite set of Legos, and has this infinite set of ideas about how Legos fit together. You can ask it to assemble words in a particular way and it will do its best to do that and do that fairly well in many different contexts, but you’ve got to be really specific about what it is that you want it to generate.

Then I just try to apply that with if it was image or video, or things like that. If we’re getting into the more advanced general AI, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to explain that to an eight-year-old, because again, I’m not sure I fully always have my mind wrapped around it. The 80-year-old is an interesting– I guess it’s an interesting challenge in that I feel like a lot of their points of reference are going to be historically really negative versions of artificial intelligence.

I think there’s a lot of things to be concerned about artificial intelligence, but the the sentient AI is not the thing that I’m concerned about, and so I would try to just frame it as something that’s more like Data from Star Trek, or some other robotic character and use that as a means of like start explaining it and the differences between that. I try to find a common cultural reference they may more likely be familiar with and try to split the hairs after that.

[00:13:44] Bonni: Stead, how about you? What comes to mind as to how we might explain artificial intelligence to an 80-year-old?

[00:13:51] Stead: I agree with Lance. I feel like there’s so many negative representations, think of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was like where my mind first went to, but I think of it more, again, it’s like a facilitation piece. Think about Mr. Coffee or microwave, if used incorrectly, there might be some negative side effects, but at the end of the day it can definitely make your life a lot easier.

[00:14:21] Bonni: This brings us to such an important part of the conversation, and I want to be careful just in even how I ask this question not to sound demeaning, because I think so many of us could very naturally have and it would be very both authentic as well as important to recognize the fears that we have when we start thinking about artificial intelligence.

Perhaps it might be helpful to limit this a little bit, Lance, and talk specifically about our fears around the language types of artificial intelligence, the generative ones. You’re nodding your head. We’ll start with that when we’re talking about AI, in this case specifically the generative types of artificial intelligence. What kinds of fears are you hearing? Let’s start, Stead, with you. What are you hearing come up from professors in terms of this being a frightening thing in some ways?

[00:15:14] Stead: The first thing I always hear is that students are going to use it to cheat and to have them write their papers for them. My response is I could always just have my friend who’s an English major write my papers for me, and you would have no way of detecting that. There will always be a way to cheat out of doing a paper. It really comes down to what kind of values you’re trying to instill amongst your students. Actually creating assignments that are engaging and are interesting for them to make them want to do it, or to just work around the more busy work-end of what academia can be, and getting to the more personalized work experiences.

Again, I always bring up the work we do at College Unbound, which is so unique and it really heavily evolves around community engagement and also personal reflection. Things like interviews, discussions with the classmates. Again, just like personal reflections where you talk about experiences that you’ve had, or your goals and values as an individual and how you see that represented in your community.

Things like that that really would be a lot harder to work around within AI or even, again, face-to-face interactions with the student as well, trying to get more engagement in the classroom where you can actually talk to them and see and hear them respond to you. Of course, obviously that’s tricky with all virtual classes, but trying to find workarounds with the assignments to make it harder for students to cheat, and to get them interested and engaged to actually want to do the work, which will require some intimate discussions with your students on the individual level and on the larger level to see how to make that happen.

[00:17:09] Bonni: You talked about assignments that involved interviews and discussions, and personal reflections. Can you think of a assignment that was a little bit on the more difficult side for you to do but it really felt meaningful specifically because it was authentic to a context or learning something that was both hard but also felt important to you?

[00:17:30] Stead: Out of the few core classes that we had at CU, reframing failure was really, really a struggle for me at first, but also was a big interest because we were looking at our experiences that were previously viewed as failures, and dismissed as non-learning opportunities, and now we’re actually looking at them as, no, how can we reevaluate them and use them to better our experiences as learners.

We had to create a resume of our failures and reflect on why we believed they were failures, and try to re-envision them as educational opportunities. Just going through that process, obviously there was specific examples with each one, but getting used to that process of reevaluation of failures was very, very pivotal learning moment for me. It was also really hard because it forced you to confront things that you were not proud of and not really happy with, and do that work of just personal reflection. It was really, really great.

[00:18:32] Bonni: Since this is an audio podcast, people can’t see how big I’m smiling right now. I’m both smiling at how wonderful that is that you got to experience that, but I’m also laughing at our daughter because– [laughs] I shouldn’t have said her, I should not have identified which of our two children I’m speaking of. Forget I said that. She has used our embracing of failure.

We talk about how important it is, what a vital part of learning that it is, and so if something doesn’t go quite the way I wish it would have, she has on more than one occasion come back with, “Remember, you always tell me how important failure is, I think.” There really is absolutely no comeback that I have for that. I have completely failed, speaking of failure, at being able to not just go, “Oh yes, I guess you’re right,” so we move right along in our days. [laughs] Oh, I love that.

[00:19:19] Stead: That’s awesome.

[00:19:20] Bonni: [laughs] Lance, what’s coming to mind for you in terms of what fears you’re hearing professors’ experience?

[00:19:30] Lance: I hear a lot, as Stead Fast identified, of the concerns about cheating and plagiarism. There’s real pieces of that that I can recognize of just trying to understand or learn through what is authentically the students’ ideas in work. There’s been plenty of times in my own experience in my history where I’ve had a lot of strong feelings around that. They’ve evolved. For me that that’s a concern, but in a lot of the circles I’ve been discussing, that feels like less of a concern and more of like, so how then do we change some of our practices?

It’s how do we change our practices without burnout? I think to me, this is one of the things I’m cluing into a lot in talking more about, is one of my earlier talks that I did around generative AI is like, I mapped out the educational technology that has been moving us along over the last 15 years. Every time we feel like we’re settled as educators, it’s, nope, just kidding. We had the pandemic, and that upended things. Then we had the weird hybrid flexible comeback where we’re doing five things at once while also tap dancing. I think there’s a true sense of people just feeling like, ugh, and now I have to rethink everything.

Because for many educators who are deeply thinking about their teaching and their learning, it’s not just that the assignments now have to change. The assignments are connected to the objectives, which are connected to the materials. It’s like they’re pulling out the large threads of this tapestry, and it can feel like they’re at page one. I hear some folks that are just focused on the plagiarism, but I hear other folks that are more worried about, oh, now I have got to start at page one. If you’re somebody who’s had to start at page one every two to three years for the last decade, there’s a toll there.

I think the thing that in other circles I am both engaged with and thinking about, is this tool, it is a double-edged sword in that there’s really cool things that this can do. Also, the way that we increasingly use this and this data set is that was built around a particular set of English language speakers that were typically from North America, more white, more male, the cultural pull to normalize that as language. The best example I give is the cover letter and all the rhetorical expectations of the cover letter.

Now, people are going to continue to use this so that it’s easier to write the cover letter, and that’s great, but it more formalizes in grains. There’s certain ways of accepted standardized long-term imprinted English rather than recognizing language as fluid. I just worry about the ways this reinforces and privileges certain biases and groups from which the data that the large language dataset was pulled from. Then the secondary effects on what that means for what normal language looks like and whatever we mean by normal English language.

[00:23:05] Bonni: I think so much about just one tiny, tiny, little fragment that people have talked about is the ways in which, for some people having just a blank page in front of them, they find it very difficult to write. I certainly have been there myself, my gosh. Just being able to have artificial intelligence to be able to provide a starting point can be very helpful.

Yet when you talked about that, Lance, if that’s all we know and we think that’s how we’re supposed to talk, that’s how our ideas are supposed to be expressed, and losing a sense of what might make the way that you had wanted to express a particular idea, to downplay that, to have there be any sense of shame or a lack of, I don’t know, an authentic self that’s welcome onto that blank page, I think it’s just really that tension, right? Because it’s exactly like you said, it can be helpful and it also can hurt. I remember I’ve been reading, I haven’t finished it yet as of today, but a book called The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian.

It’s about artificial intelligence and it talks a lot about the issues you started to pull on there a moment ago, and the ways in which these tools– he talks about the way that Kodak Camera lenses were designed to take a photograph of, in this case, a white woman, and how those things are still deeply embedded in the photography hardware and software today. Anyway, at the same time reading some of those chapters, I was also reading Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy. I read mostly via audiobook, although I also bought the ebook as well. I thought, the whole time every single page turn, I thought if someone like him were so tied to this is how these things are supposed to sign–

Part of why he’s such a brilliant essayist and a brilliant poet is because he doesn’t say things in the way than a, I was going to say “normal”, that’s not even the right word to use. That’s part of it. It really is this tension. You want people to be able to get past that blank page, and sometimes it can be so helpful. Then you don’t want people to lose themselves. It really is disheartening sometimes to think about that. Should we switch to the happier note of maybe what we’re hearing professors being excited about when it comes to AI? What are some of the cool things that it’s doing for people out there? What are you hearing? Stead, should we start with you?

[00:25:36] Stead: There’s a whole mix of things and I think the main point is, like we’ve already discussed, the brainstorming aspect, so helping students and professors start their work, whether it’s a paper or curriculum ideas. Also context building, it’s very helpful for that because the way, at least like we use ChatGPT a lot, so the way the language model is set up is that you’re required to give some context to your questions, but it also always responds with context in the answer.

For those who might not be experienced really with a certain topic, it can help you not only just give you the straight-up answer but also give you the context around it why it’s saying where maybe it pulled some of the information from, which I think is really interesting. It gives you more than just that one bit of information. It also gives you a little jumping point to look out onto. Besides that, I think really just bridging the gap between teachers and students.

Not only facilitating both of their work, but also bringing them together in a more engaging way and starting dialogue between the two historically more separate groups, or I don’t even want to say separate, but there’s the existing relationship where the teacher talks down to the student and then the student doesn’t really talk back. Now, it’s forcing more dialogue to happen between the two, which I think is really, really interesting in and of itself just as that relationship. Then of course within exploring this as an educational tool as well for both of them, I think it’s going to be tricky but interesting for sure.

[00:27:33] Lance: Stead Fast, I really love that, what you honed in on there about power and the power differential. What I’m excited about, or I feel positive about, is how in many ways ChatGPT for lots of people, neurodivergent people, people from marginalized backgrounds, and experiences, ChatGPT becomes a really phenomenal code switcher in accessing a lot of the embedded assumptions. I’ll go back to that cover letter again of when people apply for jobs, by and large everybody has to use a cover letter. The cover letter is this very archaic, rhetorical set of expectations that have 90%, 95% of the job, nothing to do with your job.

This gives access to that. Back to that blank screen dynamic of getting out or using it as a brainstorming, using it as an organizer, one of our students in using it mentioned, she was like, this is great. I took all of my notes and I put it in and I asked it to organize them in a clearer manner, and boom, it came back. That helped her figure out where she wanted to go with a particular project and stuff. That idea of brainstormer, that idea of person on hand to ask questions and ask questions with– ChatGPT isn’t going to judge you. Everybody can say they’re not going to judge anybody on questions, but asking a question of another person is giving up social power.

It shouldn’t be, but for many of us, we’re trained that that’s– I am going to ask you for help and that’s indicating I lack. It becomes the space for people to better learn things, clarify things, ask those questions that they’re going to feel uncomfortable, or challenged by. I feel like it creates a lot of opportunities to unlock that hidden curriculum of the world. This is the other double-edged sword I worry about, is it allows us to do things or get moving with things more quickly. I’ve started to find myself leaning on it to do that and get started with certain things.

This is more on the positive, but the other piece of this is my concern of how much this pulls into or makes us have to be even more productive. Because much of our technology is capitalist-oriented in this idea of it’s there to make us more productive, more effective. Right now, lots of people are using it and finding it as a way of creating an edge or a lead. Yet in five years from now, it’s now we have to do– even this output is expected to be even more. While the technology helps, the burnout is still going to feel even more so because it might be higher-level work, but higher-level work does a lot on the brain as well.

That’s the concern, but I think there’s some really great opportunities here. In terms of the classroom I think there is ways in which to leverage this as an infinite example generator. That’s something I’ve been thinking about is, gosh, I want examples for everything that– good and bad example. You never, ever want to leverage what you might think is not a great example from a student as a bad example. If you can have something that creates a bad example of a work, so to help students understand where their work should fall along continuums, things like that. There’s ways like that I continue to look at it that feel helpful.

[00:31:30] Bonni: This is actually the perfect time for us to move to the recommendations segment. As a heads up to Stead Fast and Lance, the recommendations do not always, and may not even today relate to the topic of the episode. I want to make sure to free you up from that if you had something you wanted to share not related to AI, but I’m going to actually share two things that’s unknown or unusual for me because usually I will recommend things that do not relate. Today I’m going old school and I’m doing things that relate to AI.

One, the recommendation is don’t be that person. This is another, this is a recurring segment here, and this is a article from Rolling Stone. Lance, I know you knew about it because it came out recently as of our recording, professor flunks all his students after ChatGPT falsely claims it wrote their papers. I won’t even say the name of the university because I know it’s happening at more than just this one place. The seniors at this university who already graduated were denied their diplomas because a professor incorrectly used AI software to detect cheating.

It was like you were talking earlier, Lance, the distinction that you made for us between reacting versus responding. I think it’s a good read. I think it’s really important to even broaden our thinking of just beyond even artificial intelligence, the importance of trusting students and the importance of being good stewards for their learning. That our jobs as sparking curiosity and helping people build skills, knowledge, and ultimately ways of being to make their lives better and to make the common good better. Just constantly wanting us to be wrestling with what is our role.

That’s another don’t be that person kind of a story. Then the second one I wanted to recommend, I guess it’s not quite artificial intelligence. It is and it isn’t. I’ve recommended and actually had him as a guest before. Jeremy Caplan has a wonderful substack that’s called Wonder Tools. I always get such a kick out of his post. Now Because I’ve already recommended Wonder Tools in general and had them on the show, now I’m going to recommend a specific post because I try not to recommend the same thing twice. This is his best data visualization tool ever post, and it’s called Flourish.

Again, I’m recommending his post because I also don’t recommend things I haven’t tried yet, but you know I can’t wait to try this one. It’s got bar chart races and photo sliders where you can have before and after look at a photo where you just slide it over almost an animation, if you will. It’s got different kinds of cards. It’s got storytelling, interactive calculators, gauge graphics, templates, stories, searchable charts, animations.

You could only imagine how good this is going to be when I finish a few things and then have a chance just to let myself go play. My suggestion is to head over to that post, have a look, and try it out. I’d love to hear from anybody who does try it or already has tried it so you can motivate me even more to get in there and start playing. I’m going to pass it over, Stead Fast, to you to recommend whatever you’d like to recommend. Then we’ll close off with Lance.

[00:34:53] Stead: Awesome. As a recent college graduate, I’ve been looking for a really good study spot, somewhere to do my work. I decided to head to my local library. My recommendation is to go out and see what the library has got. Mine has a library of things that includes Blu-ray players, sports equipment. It has access to 3D printers, scanners, a bunch of obviously great books and movies, and music.

It’s also a great place to meet up and have some discussions with people, especially with the library staff. If you want to talk about AI, you can hit up their tech coordinator. There’s also a lot of great community events that happen there. Maybe some chess clubs, knitting groups, some public speakers, all sorts of stuff. Just check out your local library, see what they have to offer. You might be surprised,

[00:35:51] Bonni: Libraries and librarians are the absolute best things in the world. Thank you so much. What a perfect recommendation. Lance, what would you like to recommend today?

[00:36:01] Lance: First, I just want to say I am clearly in the right room. I also subscribe to Wonder Tools. My running joke is whenever I end up on a new campus, I find the librarians and start making sense of use of the library. I love being in this room right now. The two things I have are connected in many ways to AI, but not about AI. The first is as this all started happening, one thing I kept thinking about is what this means, what generative AI means for education, is we go in two pathways.

One pathway is you increasingly inject generative AI into teaching and into the learning aspects to which you get to a point where there’s a student interacting with a bot, but probably not a person. I think we’ll see that happen in many ways at the large-scale institutions, schools that are mainly online and teaching 100,000 students a year. That is how they look to scale, is through really decoupling lots of different aspects. What I kept thinking about is a lot of schools are going to have to double down on their relationships. I don’t know if I had heard it or not, but this idea of relationship-rich pedagogy.

That led me to the book that I just finished listening to today, which is Relationship Rich Education by Leo Lambert and Peter Felton. I think the book provides lots of great different examples of how institutions can build relationships and make sure that learning in many ways is this process of iterative failure if people can only do that when they are in places that they can trust or feel they’re going to be caught, as in trust fall. I think that’s the important piece here is that this might push institutions to really think about what it means to be relationship rich.

Then that just leads me to the second thing, which is following, I would say Jesse Stommel and Maha Bali on Twitter whenever you can. I always go to Jesse Stommel’s tweet for word pedagogy of start by trusting students. Then Maha Bali, she is always, always sharing– she does her work in the open. That continually makes me think about how we do this work of teaching and caring, and connecting with our students more thoughtfully and more meaningfully.

[00:38:27] Bonni: Such amazing recommendations from both of you. I was smiling a bit when you talked about the book, Relationship Rich Education with Leo and Peter. I was fortunate enough to get to talk with them about the book and read it before it came out. I wish I had a visualization of my brain and all of the nodes that are connected around past guests. Peter’s been on, I think two or three times now, and I only spoke with Leo that one time. In my brain, literally I will get to Relationship Rich Education, Peter Felton and Leo Tolstoy. [laughs]

No, I don’t think that’s it. I’ll just always have trouble with the Lambert part. I need to nail that down. More retrieval practice is necessary for me to slam that plane. [laughs] Oh, I once met someone when I was at the University of Georgia doing some speaking, this is way long ago, who his PhD research was on the tip of the tongue. As in the cognitive stuff that is related to when things are just on the tip of our tongue.

I got his business card and I’ll be darned if I can’t find it. I lost track of it and the number of times I’ve been like, I want to talk to you again. We have to talk. It’s just fascinating to think about, oh, he’s so close to beat on the tip of my tongue, but I just, most of the time I come down with Leo Tolstoy. This is actually very.[00:40:00] related to hallucinations of Al, we have hallucinations of our own sometimes. [laughs]

[00:40:05] Lance: That’s right. Plenty of times. Oh, my gosh, yes.

[00:40:08] Bonni: Predictive text. You say Leo, I say Tolstoy. [laughs]

[00:40:14] Lance: Right, we have that automaticity already programmed into us.

[laughter]

[00:40:20] Bonni: Oh, too funny. What an absolute joy it was getting to speak with both of you. Lance, I didn’t even tell you this when we first got on, but I got to attend, I don’t know if we would call it a workshop or, I don’t know, a collective knowledge sharing around artificial intelligence, probably, I don’t know, four or five months, years, decades ago, I lose all track of time. Stead Fast, I’m so glad I got to be introduced to you through Lance, and so, appreciate getting to have this conversation with you today as a fellow organizational leadership lifelong learner.

[00:40:52] Stead: Thank you. Same to you. I didn’t even know there are other organizational leadership learners out there, so this is really great for me.

[00:40:59] Bonni: I married one. We met each other in our masters in organizational leadership. We took a teams class together, that was when we first met each other. Graduate class in teams, and so we always try to say that we’re trying to live up to building good teams here in the Stachowiak home. Yes, we’re trying.

[00:41:19] Lance: It’s so cute. [chuckles]

[00:41:20] Bonni: We even have a mission statement that hangs on our wall.

[00:41:26] Lance: [laughs] That is awesome.

[00:41:27] Bonni: With our values, of course. Of course, yes. All right. Thanks to both of you. I really appreciate the conversation today and being connected.

[00:41:34] Lance: Thank you so much.

[00:41:35] Stead: Thank you so much.

[00:41:36] Lance: Take care.

[music]

[00:41:39] Bonni: Thanks, once again, to Stead Fast and Lance Eaton for coming on episode 472 to share about perspectives on artificial intelligence, a student-professor dialogue. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger, and podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. If you have yet to sign up for the weekly update from Teaching in Higher Ed, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the show notes from the most recent episode, as well as other resources that don’t show up on the show. Thanks so much for listening, and 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.