Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 518 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Teaching with AI with José BowenProduction Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

José Bowen [00:00:11]:

Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:20]:

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. I always enjoy conversations with José Bowen, and today’s interview is no different. José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, as a dean at Miami University and SMU, and as a president of Goucher College. Bowen has worked as a musician with Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, and many others, and his symphony was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1985. Bowen holds 4 degrees from Stanford and has written over a 100 scholarly articles and books, including the Cambridge companion to conducting, teaching naked, which was the winner of the NESS Award for the best book on higher education, Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection. And his new book that he’s here to talk to me about today, which he cowrote with C. Edward Watson, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:04]:

Bowen has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, has 3 TED Talks, and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 300 campuses and conferences in 46 states and 17 countries around the world. In 2010, Stanford honored him as a distinguished alumni scholar, and in 2018, he was awarded the Ernest l Boyer Award for significant contributions to American higher education. And José is now a senior fellow for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. He lives in Dallas and also does innovation and inclusion consulting for a wide variety of Fortune 500 Companies. José Bowen, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

José Bowen [00:02:54]:

Bonni, I’m so glad to be back with you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:56]:

You are a person who studies change. Specifically, when we talk about artificial intelligence, what are some things that are changing that you’re finding we’re the least prepared to address right now in higher education?

José Bowen [00:03:10]:

Well, the top of the list is everything related to AI, And I hear, oh, well, the MOOCs didn’t pan out or this didn’t. And it’s true. We’ve we’ve had that hype phase, but this is a lot more like the Internet or the printing press than it is like MOOCs. And so students have always cheated. They’re cheating differently. I’m not sure there’s been a huge increase in cheating, but cheating has gotten easier. Right? They were using Chegg or something before, and so now they’re they’re they’re using AI instead. But the ways that they’re cheating, the ways that they’re doing homework so a lot of our assignments are are now no longer really viable.

José Bowen [00:03:49]:

And at the same time, we could be spending a lot more time talking to students. So I think the AI revolution has come to the workplace. I saw this morning that 72% of professionals are using AI daily to help with all sorts of tedious tasks. And so I think faculty have not yet started to realize the power of this and certainly what’s happening to students and both the negative and the positive. So I think we’ve gotta start wrapping our head around all of this.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:16]:

And this is also changing what we think of in terms of quality. I mean, there’s been a lot of critiques, justified critiques about the arbitrariness with which we attempt to assess quality. What are some of the patterns that you’re seeing in terms of we really do need to start thinking differently about what quality means?

José Bowen [00:04:39]:

So like a lot of previous technologies that affected writing, especially, but really all sorts of output, AI is changing average. So on the one hand, if you think, you know, I’ve used free chat GPT and the AI was in, it was okay. Right. But if you Dave it a c, you have a problem. Because if a student produces work that’s the same quality as AI will do for free, whether you like it or not. That work has now been devalued in the workplace. Right? Why would why would an employer hire a student to do something for that they could get AI to do for free? And this has happened before. Right? So think about dictionaries.

José Bowen [00:05:18]:

Right? Dictionaries and thesaurus made all of our writing better. Right? Now it was the intellectual work of other people that put together the dictionaries and the thesauruses. Right? So I think that’s the plural of

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:31]:

the word.

José Bowen [00:05:31]:

I’m not sure.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:33]:

Thesaurite. So right.

José Bowen [00:05:36]:

So so we’re using we were we are leveraging other people’s work to make our writing better. And then we got spell checkers. Right? So you can say, oh, a spell checker is cheating. You have to look up words in a dictionary, which, of course, is just the older technology. But but a couple of things. 1, now everybody uses a spell checker, and hopefully, most of us are no longer grading spelling. Right? Many of us started our careers. We were still grading spelling or giving at least it was a line on the rubric.

José Bowen [00:06:05]:

And now I expect perfect spelling because if there’s a spelling mistake, I just say no. Submit use your spell checker. All those little red lines, fix them, and then resubmit. Right? I’m not gonna accept this because in the workplace, right, it’s not gonna no one’s gonna accept your spelling errors. So the technology changed the standard that we accepted. So if you say spell checkers are cheating, that student now has a problem. When they go to the work when they go to an interview and there’s 2 people for the interview, and one says, I can produce, you know, this many pages a day because I use a spell checker. And your student says, oh, well, I have to look up everything in a dictionary because spell checkers are cheating, and so I can’t produce as quickly as my colleague.

José Bowen [00:06:48]:

The output’s the Dave. But they’re not gonna get the job. So what we call cheating, business calls progress. And so it’s it’s not it’s not a it’s not a good thing to say to our students this is cheating because the students who are most the studies tell us, students who are most likely to use AI right now are wealthy. No surprise. It costs money for the best ones. Right? But also men. Right? And white men, white wealthy men especially, are the leading edge of using AI for a variety of reasons.

José Bowen [00:07:20]:

So your poorest students who, you know, they listen to what you say or they don’t have access to paid Chegg and to AI, So they’re now gonna be at a disadvantage when they go to the workplace. So there’s a huge equity issue here, but there’s also an opportunity to raise standards. Right? That in the same way that spell checkers meant, okay, you can use a spell checker and I’m gonna focus more on grammar. And then grammar checkers right? So I’m gonna focus more now on the on variety of sentence structure, on content, on other kinds of things. So all of those previous technologies, even even computers and typing, right, I you know, we used to have people type our papers, way back in the Dave. I’m old enough. And and then when the computer came in, there was no longer a job for the people who typed papers, but it was easier to edit. It was easier to make the paper better.

José Bowen [00:08:13]:

Oh, I don’t have to retype the whole page. I found a mistake. Right? I have to retype. So each of these technologies has allowed us to rethink how we write, but also to raise standards. And so I think that the opportunity that’s being missed here is to say, okay. Whether we like it or not, AI is going to be used to enhance people’s speed in the workplace. We need to teach students how to write and to do all of these tests by themselves, but we also need to teach them how to accelerate their work with AI. That’s a different and probably a harder teaching challenge, by the way.

José Bowen [00:08:47]:

But we can also raise quality standards. Right? And so we should be demanding higher quality work in the same way that we demand better spelling. And so I’ve actually changed my rubrics. So the old c, the it has a thesis. It’s not fully developed. The evidence is good, but it’s not fully right? There’s a mistake here or there. That used to be a c. And and so if you’re still giving those papers a c, my recommendation is those are now an f.

José Bowen [00:09:13]:

And and our right. This is a great thing. What a great thing to say. We now can raise standards. And, of course, the secret sauce of education has always been high standards plus high care. Right? It’s not either either one by itself doesn’t work. It’s both. But that opportunity to say, I need to get every student to a level because a level is what is going to be hirable.

José Bowen [00:09:37]:

And so as AI right? AI is mostly doing menial things, you know, mid level. Right? There’s the first draft of this. It’s doing it’s finding the legal problems and legal documents. Right? There’s lots and lots of evidence that senior lawyers are still better. A senior radiologist still needs to check your scan. But but the junior jobs, the intern jobs, the rough draft of the press release, all of those sorts of things are no longer gonna be jobs. So we have to get our students to do the part that we value with critical thinking, right, asking better questions, making sure the output is correct, and and making sure the output is excellent, not just okay or average. And so I think AI has changed what we can accept as average and mediocre quality.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:22]:

When I think about some of this, it’s and I’m I’m thinking about an article that James Lang wrote, and I’ll I’ll put a link to it. He was basically saying we we don’t have to move as fast as we we can be we can be more experimental and slowing down how we’re processing, I think, was his argument. I’m probably not doing a good job here, but he wrote about his wife who teaches kindergarten, and that there still are some things. I think like, I still think I’m glad that our kids know how to spell words. I’m glad that they do. I mean, I I think there are still some basics, and you talked about writing, and a lot of people that I really respect to who are helping people become better writers, they talk about the part of writing that is writing is thinking, thinking is writing, writing is thinking, thinking is writing. And I I’ve just never been trained as a writer in that way. So for me, I think about how much I’ve learned from this podcast.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:22]:

Writing is, or thinking is asking questions and getting curious, and asking questions and getting curious is thinking, and so for me, it’s not necessarily the same route to more critical thinking, but I am glad that, at least so far as of today’s conversation, I haven’t been entirely replaced by there’s this big, big debate going on right now in a listserv that I belong to of, shouldn’t we just have our video just basically turn our video of ourselves into that’s the interaction with students. We just basically become a large language model ourselves, but it’s video. And, you know, it’s been, know, an interesting debate. So I guess I guess I’m interested in hearing you talk about this this process by which we learn to spell, learn to think more critically. Some of people, really, their disciplines, that happens through the labor of writing, or in my case, it resonates with me, the labor of being curious and getting to speak to people. And and and yeah. So I’ll stop and let you let you reflect on what I’ve shared.

José Bowen [00:12:32]:

Oh, that’s such a rich question, though. There’s so much there. So so first, I absolutely agree with everything you said. I think that the change that’s about to happen in education is that we are going to have to rethink and convince people that they should do this labor when there’s an easier way.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:53]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

José Bowen [00:12:54]:

And the analogy is the calculator. Right? So the calculator was a big challenge to math teachers. Right? Because I don’t need to know addition or division or multiplication. And the idea is, well, in some ways, there are some kinds of multiplication you don’t need to know. You don’t need to know how to multiply multiply 5,372 times 4,625. We I I remember those problems, the long addition of here are 25 numbers to add up, long division. Well, the truth is we don’t teach that as much as we did anymore. We teach number sense.

José Bowen [00:13:28]:

Right? So roughly, what is 5000 times 4000 going to be? That’s important. But the actual number, everybody’s Bonni use a calculator. No accountant in the world. There is not a single accountant in the world who’s gonna take out a piece of paper and and add up a column of 6,000 numbers. Right? So we now teach number sense. Right? So we teach the process of long division and roughly how it works, but we don’t make students spend 8 weeks doing endless, as I did, you know, long division problems by hand. So we’ve changed the way that we teach math because calculators do change the way that we think. By the way, an abacus does this too.

José Bowen [00:14:10]:

The difference is that an abacus leaves you smarter and a calculator doesn’t. In the same way that a GPS system, right, a map can help you navigate. When they when I take the map away, you can you still have a visual picture. But when I take the GPS away, you’re lost. Right? It’s not clear which of these AI is going to be. It’s not clear what kind of cognitive aid it’s going to be yet. But the calculator is here, and so we had to change. I I had a I was working with a group of nurses who were saying, we teach students how to do nurses’ notes, and this is an essential skill.

José Bowen [00:14:46]:

It’s what your doctor does. You know, they take insurance codes. What are the what is what is the diagnosis, etcetera, etcetera. This is really important. Well, it turns out AI can do this. And they said, we just we’ve just tried in your workshop, and we’ve discovered that the AI makes better nurses’ notes than our students, but the notes aren’t as good as our notes. And and that I think is what most faculty are discovering. Right? That the the AI can do this thing better than some students, but not as well as I could.

José Bowen [00:15:14]:

And so therefore right. Well so students need to know how to make the output better. So from an assignment point, we said, well, okay. Could you could you have the AI produce bad nurses’ notes and have students improve them? Yes. Oh, that’s the greatest. Okay. How about if the AI produces good, bad, and medium nurses’ notes, and the students have to tell which are which and explain so we we we try to what are the assignments we can now do? But to me, that’s the process. That’s the I totally agree that writing we we assign writing to monitor thinking.

José Bowen [00:15:51]:

We assign writing to help you think. We assign writing to get you involved in process. We assign writing so that you learn how to write. The outright there are a whole series of reasons we assign writing, and that’s going to change. So we now have to think, well, okay. If the writing itself is going to be hard to convince you to do, how do I get you to do the thinking part? How do I get you how do I get you to be a great editor? Right? So great editors didn’t start as editors. They started as writers and making their own writing better. So my policy advice is that your policy start with why.

José Bowen [00:16:29]:

Right? So I I literally have a a policy that I use for for for students that that’s that starts with the with the statement. One of the course goals is to help you learn to write and communicate effectively. That will require practice. While you will be expected to use AI at work to increase the speed at which you can produce, you still need to be able to create, edit, and recognize high quality writing yourself. If AI can do the work without you, you will not have employable skills. Now notice, that’s not the that’s the why. That’s the motivator. Right? I’m explaining to the students the context because now the policy is to that end, the assistance of AI in your writing is prohibited in the first half of the course.

José Bowen [00:17:13]:

But in the second half of the course, you may be allowed to use AI under specific circumstances. And the reason you do that I mean, this is I did the same thing with cell phones and computers is because if I say, oh, computer, bad. Typing, writing. But right? The students just think you have 3 heads, and they think you’re gonna want them to use a landline forever. And so you have to be open to students. There’s new technology. This is gonna change things. The calculator is going to help you.

José Bowen [00:17:36]:

But the reason I need you to learn how to do multiplication tables is because sometimes your fingers will make a mistake. And you’ll get an answer on the calculator that you need to intuitively know it’s wrong. And that intuition doesn’t come by itself. It comes because you’ve played with numbers. You understand how numbers work. So even though you’re gonna use a calculator for the rest of your life, you’ve gotta know that a 100 times 10 is not a 1000000. Right? That you made a mistake. You have to have some sense.

José Bowen [00:18:04]:

And so we have to explain to students how this is gonna work. That’s the policy side. But I think the much, much, much, much harder side is how do I teach students to produce a final draft press release, to produce a final draft legal document, to produce really good nurses’ notes when it looks like AI can do that work for me, even though AI is producing only average work. And, of course, sometimes average is good enough. Right? I don’t always need the best. I just need to be very good and accurate. So so I think that’s the place where we need to engage is how and how, not not not what are we gonna do. Students are all gonna need to know how to work with AI.

José Bowen [00:18:46]:

They’re all gonna need to know how to write. The big question for for education is how the heck are we gonna teach the multiplication tables now that there’s a calculator? How are we gonna convince them to memorize it? And so I think that’s right. The math people did it. They figured out how to do this with calculators. We still right? We we’ve changed how we teach math. And so now we’re gonna have to change how we teach writing because we have this new tool. So let me let me switch because you said something about roles, right, and and then your role. And so so, for example, one of the things that AI can do really well is it can help us practice.

José Bowen [00:19:20]:

Right? It can be a tutor. It can be a mentor. So role playing is a really interesting new kind of assignment. Right? So that could be anything from, you have a job interview coming up as if you’re you have a job interview at Microsoft next week. Here’s the job Here are the members of the search committee. What are their interests? Here is the job description. Here is my resume. First of all, read my cover letter and tell me how they might respond to my materials.

José Bowen [00:19:56]:

And then let’s practice the interview. And I I did give this advice to somebody who was interviewing for a deanship a few weeks ago, and he called me back this week and said, you’re not gonna believe it. I said, I believe it. He said, my interview with AI was almost exactly the interview I had with the real people that because I gave it the roles, I told it who the people were, and they acted like those people, and they asked the questions. Right? And so I had a really good chance to practice. So right? Or or feedback to students or for well, let me, first role playing. So I I could I could talk to Martin Luther King. I could talk to Socrates.

José Bowen [00:20:33]:

Right? So respond as rabbi Hillel. It does help if you tell it to only use real sources and you give it a real source. But you can have now conversations with the with the author that you’re reading who has been long dead. What would they say about this? I think this is what you meant in the text, etcetera. I give students the the choice of feedback. So I could either grade these myself, and I will give you written feedback in 3 weeks because there are a 150 of you, or I can use an AI which I have trained to write like me and give feedback like me and has read all of the previous, literally, a 1000, 2000, 10000 essays. Right? I mean, it’s a lot of essays. And my previous feedback over the years, and it knows how I grade.

José Bowen [00:21:19]:

And it’s actually more consistent than I am because if I have a bad lunch or I’m, you know, then I don’t right? Everybody grades harder when their sports team loses, it turns out. Right? Not a surprise. So the AI is more consistent. So you could have AI feedback now, and I will read it, and you can read it, and you we can talk about it, make adjustments, but you’ll get immediate feedback. So so there are there are different thing our our jobs are gonna change because there are different things that AI can do to help us with student learning. That doesn’t change that they still have to learn how to write, but they can certainly get more feedback about their writing if I control the environment and have the right kind of assignments.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:57]:

It’s interesting. When I had a chance to speak with Eddie, he had recommended I we’ve gotten to this conversation about, oh, no. You know, when he when he first started to see what it was capable of doing, and then we spent some time on, okay. Now that we’ve done the oh, no, now let’s do the oh, wow. And so on his oh, wow, he was talking about some of some of those tools that are more narrow in focus. So and I went and had a conversation about something that that the students I’m I’m teaching right now said they were really interested in, and that’s cognitive dissonance. And in this particular case, cognitive dissonance in a business ethics course, although, of course, this this idea crosses across many, many disciplines. But it was really fascinating to go.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:44]:

And I said it to this is a college level person, and and this is this is the context, and it was really, really fascinating to have that. The thing that saddens me about what you said is I find such meaning and significance in relationship in terms of my students, and I do not consider a relationship with an AI to be the same thing as a relationship with students. When I say things like that, though, I hear from many people who are working in situations of precarity coupled with very large class sizes. So I recognize the ways in which our systems and structures are necessitating things like that, but I won’t pretend that I don’t think higher education suffers a significant loss when we set aside the need for human to human relationships. But the I mean, that so that’s that’s different though if the AI is helping us practice. And if it is indeed as effective, if not more effective, in something I would be able to do with practice, I just hope that we can squeeze out of this very, very devaluing of human relationships or even just humans in general, you know, and this process is is a frightening thing and a sad thing and and, on some days, an angering things as well. So I think we have to really wrestle through this together.

José Bowen [00:24:14]:

No. We we do. And so that’s exactly right. You know, you you know that my my last book was all about relationships. Mhmm. Right? Relationships, resilience, and reflection are my 3 r’s. So think about so when I go to the doctor, right, in the old days, my doc well, the old Dave, a year ago, my doctor was behind a computer screen typing, you know, insurance codes and nurses’ notes. And now I get eye contact.

José Bowen [00:24:37]:

It’s like, woah. What happened? He said, well, the AI is making the nurses’ notes. And so I actually get eye contact with my physician. And he says what the various, you know, Augmedix and NABLA, the various programs that do this that are AI enabled that that help doctors. They say doctors will save 2 to 3 hours a Dave. And my doctor says that’s about right. He says he gets about 2 hours a day. Now your question is, what happens with those 2 hours? So option 1 is he gets to play more golf.

José Bowen [00:25:05]:

Option 2 is he gets to spend more time with every patient, and he gets to look or he gets to spend more actual he he is much more focused on me because he’s not worried about writing everything down, I find. But the 3rd option that he’s worried about, and I mean, you and I are worried about, is that he’s gonna see more patients. Right? They’re just gonna make sure he has this right. So that’s a that’s a decision in higher ed that, well, hopefully, we’ll get some say into, and and he may or may not. But we should be clear that AI can it has the capability to increase our ability to have relationships with students, right, by taking away some of the other kinds of tedious things. So you mentioned practice. So first of all, one of the things we should all be doing is here are the instructions for my assignment, upload my syllabus. Are there ways I could make my syllabus more inclusive? Are there ways I could make my reading list or my assignment more inclusive? Right? Another thing you you can do to to to help relationships is here so a lot of us do a a a pre class poll, right, survey.

José Bowen [00:26:11]:

So export that, and that was a spreadsheet. And so now I give it to AI. So here is my class survey. Here are the names of my students. Here are their interests, where they’re from, their religion, what sports team they like. Now here’s my assignment. What I want you to do is to create a customized assignment, put the student’s name at the top, and then customize the problem set of the assignment so that it’s more engaging and interesting to individual students. Right? I I, for example, in my many years of education, never once encountered a math problem where there was a José dividing up the apples and oranges.

José Bowen [00:26:47]:

Right? It was always Steve and Bonni, you know, Occasionally, Susan, but right. It was mostly right? So we know that people are more motivated when they see their own names or names in their own ethnicity or or etcetera. So and I’ve said for years, when you do your midterm assignment when you do your midterm, use the names of the actual students. Right? Oh, I see my name. Tanisha, there I am. Right? I’m I’m more likely to pay attention because I’ve I’ve I’ve I see my name. So that that’s a way to increase, right, and to improve our relationships, improve, student attention. But I think the real sort of troubling and amazing thing so there’s a lot of work with call centers, and the studies are that that when the AI listens, turns out customers are happier.

José Bowen [00:27:34]:

Right? Because I’m more likely to get the help I need more quickly. The person gets on their screen. Oh, this caller is in distress. Right? This is true for the suicide prevention hotline, peer being told your pet has died. Right? That AI assisted communication turns out to make people feel better. There’s a twist. It also turns out that the people who were least experienced are helped the most. Right? You’re not surprised.

José Bowen [00:28:01]:

Right? But the person who’s new to the call center gets a lot of help from an AI who’s listening and flashing across the screen, slow down, reexplain that. They didn’t understand that. You stopped talking. Right? Whatever. But we can imagine the same thing for faculty. Right? We were mostly not trained in counseling or relationships. Right? And we’re turning it back to our research. So if a student walks into our office, a student you have, you know, a hon I used to have a 150 advisees.

José Bowen [00:28:28]:

Right? It’s like, I saw you last semester. I wanna remember your name. I certainly don’t remember the name of your dog or what major you are. But if the AI does, it’s like, oh, how is Skippy? Have you taken statistics yet? Right? I mean, I’m still looking for my password to try to figure out where are the student records. And AI is like, no. No. No. This is this is Sandra, and she she she took these courses that you should you know, ask her about history, ask her about right.

José Bowen [00:28:54]:

Right. I can now have a better conversation. And the data tells us this is interesting. The research says that even when when students know this is happening, even when customers know that the person on the other end of the phone is AI assisted, they don’t care because they get better, more empathetic, caring help. In fact, the researcher of one of these studies said it’s like Grammarly for empathy. Can you imagine if AI made it all of us more empathetic because it it meant that we could stop making all those notes and writing stuff to now, again, that might not happen. We could just use AI to do the class schedule and go back into research. But AI has the potential to allow us to focus more on students, to allow it to focus more on people during a meeting because we don’t longer have to take minutes.

José Bowen [00:29:40]:

Right? The AI can take the minutes for us. So this is a big challenge. It could go horribly wrong. It went horribly wrong with the Internet. Right? We ended up with you know, we thought the Internet was gonna be this great tool, and we ended up with social media instead. And and so we have to I I don’t know I don’t know if government needs to regulate this or not, but I think as faculty, we need to be at the forefront of this discussion. We need to be modeling for people. Here is a good way to use AI.

José Bowen [00:30:07]:

Here’s what we can do. We have a committee on our campus. We are trying things. We are experimenting. We are trying to foreground relationships, because if not, some administrator is gonna say, hey. We could save money by doing this, and we end up saving Bonni, but not improving student outcomes or or relationships or etcetera. And so but I but I agree with you. I do think that for people in large classes, for people at community colleges where they have too many students or institutions where they just, you know, they just have more students than they can write good personalized feedback.

José Bowen [00:30:42]:

At a private institution, I got 20 students. I can write really good feedback on 20 papers. I got 200 students. I’m gonna write less. I just have. It’s a survival strategy. So that’s if AI could give could write longer, more personalized feedback to students, that might be better. But, right, the the context is gonna highly matter, but I love, love, love your question.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:08]:

When Mike Caulfield was here most recently, he had suggested in the recommendation segment, he had suggested that we study more about argumentation theory, And I just found myself continuing to think, gosh, I really wanna learn more about that, so I signed up for one of the Harvard classes that’s offered through the edX platform. And using the recommendations from Eddie last week, when I would struggle with something, think, I I need some more practice on this, I would go over to one of the the tools that you can say a specific term. In this case, I was having difficulty, distinguishing between 2 different sets of vocabulary words and identifying them. And it was really funny to watch my thing. I got it wrong. I got it wrong. I got it wrong. I got it wrong.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:54]:

And then about halfway through, I suddenly something lit up. I mean, it took me longer. This was something that I struggled with. It took me longer than I think probably many people who might set foot on Hartford’s campus, for example, to sit in one of those classrooms potentially could take them. And that but you could see it if you watch this transcript of of this chat that I had trying to distinguish these things that was fascinating. And the thing that I like about it too is that if I were assigning this, it comes back to assigning practice. In this particular case, I self identified. This is something I really wanna I really believe Mike when he tells me I would be better off and so would you if I learned more about this thing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:35]:

There’s no one assigned this to me, but I’m seeing I’m struggling with this particular set of concepts. I’m gonna go get some extra practice, but if this were assigned to me, then I could copy and paste that in. But at that point, it’s just that I did the labor. I don’t think I should get a c because I struggled with this concept because I put the labor in to come back into the course and have been able to show you. I put the work in, and now I understand it, and you can see the last 50% of my answers. I have been able to catch up with the rest of this theoretical class and my imagination that doesn’t struggle with these things, then I’ve been able to demonstrate that to you. So I think that’s also interesting where and you talked about the interview when Autumn Canes was on. She had built a custom chat GPT.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:24]:

Actually, no. I think it’s the University of Michigan. They’re they’re

José Bowen [00:33:28]:

Amazing. Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:28]:

Custom. Yeah. So so the ability for them to get an interview, but rather than having it write the whole interview, it does require it. There’s a stop and a start and a stop, so the students are required to ask the questions as opposed to produce an entire interview for me. In this case, it requires you to sequentially go through that and get the kinds of practice that she intends in that assignment. So it’s just fascinating, though. But but the idea that we can document in some ways the practice that we’re, that we’re saying is so good and so healthy, whether it’s writing, thinking, asking questions, that kind of thing, I think is a good thing. I do think it’s taken too far sometimes when we’re just gonna police the heck out of everything.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:12]:

I mean, if the the entire class comes down to that, this is all about you transacting, you know, keystrokes or something like that, then I think we’re definitely in a hellscape. I don’t wanna I don’t wanna be a part of. So

José Bowen [00:34:26]:

I I am I am I am I am not a fan of surveillance. I do not want I did not wanna be a police officer then. I don’t wanna be a police officer now. So here’s an easy way to do that assignment. I mean, because you’re right. If AI will will will volunteer more, especially Gemini. Right? You know, it wants to be your friend, and so it’ll give all the answers. So you have to tell it go step by step.

José Bowen [00:34:47]:

Don’t give me the answer. Right? Ask me questions that help my improve my you Dave to you have to slow it down. But there are a lot of, again, bots that are now doing this for you. But here’s an easy assignment. Right? So students here go Bonni go to Py or one of these AI that does, you know, this interactive dialogue and have a conversation with historical figure x. Right? Ask at least 10 questions, and then save the transcript as a PDF. And what you’re gonna submit is the is the PDF. Right? So it’s easy.

José Bowen [00:35:20]:

But what I’m grading is not AI’s answers. Right? Obviously, because you didn’t do that. What I’m grading is your thinking and your questions. Because the important part about the liberal arts is that you learn to ask better questions. So consider the answers carefully, ask better questions, and what is it let’s talk about what’s a better question right now. Here’s right. So so the assignment I mean, that’s not a hard assignment. It doesn’t involve lots of policing, but the but the the the what you turn it is now the transcript.

José Bowen [00:35:47]:

What I grade are the the questions you ask, not the writing that you did. Right? It is a way to actually to to assign thinking and process. And, of course, when we had students read the book, it’s oh, here’s the way around that. I would have I would have the I would have another AI set up. And it’s like, okay. Right. There are gonna be I I could think of a way to subvert that. But what I’d rather do is simply give you an assignment that’s so interesting and motivating that you get to talk to Martin Luther King, or you can spend 3 hours trying to subvert the assignment.

José Bowen [00:36:20]:

In the same way that students have spent for years, spent 3 hours searching for a 3 minute video rather than doing the 10 minute reading I assigned. Right? So the way around it is to say, so look. I say, has anybody seen Harry Potter the movie? Yes. Has anybody read Harry Potter the book? Yes. How are they different? Let’s talk about how they’re different. Would you would you would you would you say to your younger sister, forget about the book. Just watch the movie, or would you tell them they should read the book and why? And then we right? I let them talk about because everybody’s gonna come up with some reason to right? So reading and watching a movie are different. Right? There’s different experiences.

José Bowen [00:36:52]:

So there’s a reason why you do this. Right? So you could spend 3 hours doing or you could just spend 10 minutes having a conversation with Martin Luther King Junior, and then you’d have done the assignment. So I think, back to relationships, that we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about motivation. Right? Human motivation or or the way, you know, what I the way I summarize psych 101, which is where we have to have engagement, optimism, and agency. I care. I can. I matter. That the secret sauce of human motivation is those those three things.

José Bowen [00:37:22]:

I care. I can. I matter. I have to care and think this isn’t this is important. I I am what I’m doing here has purpose. I have to believe I am able to. Right? If it’s too hard, I quit. If it’s too easy.

José Bowen [00:37:33]:

I quit. I have to believe I can. But even if both of those things are true, I’m sitting in your class. I care about this topic. I can raise my hand and ask a question, but you don’t care. You’re gonna ignore me. Nobody’s gonna listen to me. I don’t matter.

José Bowen [00:37:45]:

Right? Then I don’t raise my hand. So you have to have all 3. That’s very simple. I care, I can, I matter? When so every so I think we should be thinking about explaining to students the policy we talked about earlier was all about motivation. Right? Why is this important for you to do? How is this Bonni help you get a job? How is this gonna help you be a better parent? It’s the same reason I don’t like talking about academic integrity. We should talk about integrity. Because if I talk about academic integrity, it sounds like, oh, in 4 years, you can forget all about this. No.

José Bowen [00:38:16]:

I say, so in the so what what are your most important values? Just ask students, what are their values? Right? Integrity will come up. Trust will come up. Right? So if trust and integrity matter, does it matter if your friend, if they if they if they didn’t write the poem on your birthday card, an AI did. Right? Are you you’re not happy, are you? Right? But if they tell you I needed I got stuck and may I help me? Right? Or if they lie to you about right? So integrity is a universal value. We all care about integrity. Your employer is gonna care about integrity. You care about integrity. So now, what are we gonna do in our class to make sure that we all act with integrity or respect or trust? And the students will come so how does this relate to AI? Well, ask the students, would is using a spell checker cheating? Is using a dictionary cheating? Is asking your parents who have PhDs cheating? Right? And those are those are not clear right? That’s this is good.

José Bowen [00:39:13]:

But believe me, if you don’t have the discussion about ethics and about cheating and about AI with your students, their employers are not. The country and the world are gonna be worse off. So we need to be at the forefront of having important, meaningful discussions with students about why labor matters, why this work is important, what is cheating, what is not, why we’re Bonni allow it, but not now, but maybe later. Those are the sorts of things that we’re the last stop before we release them into a world where they’re Bonni be confronted not just with fake news, but with fake motivation at work. Right? And and and and other cognitive calls for integrity. So I’m I I really think that this is where where faculty can make a meaningful difference in the world. And it yes. It involves content.

José Bowen [00:40:01]:

Yes. It involves thinking. Yes. It involves process, but it also involves those critical relationships with our students to to form them into the kinds of ethical people of integrity that we want to graduate.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:12]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I have just one today, and that is a video. The video is entitled error 404, human face not found, and it is presented by Robin Aisha Pocornie. And she tells the story about going to take a proctored online exam and receiving the error 404 human face not found. And she talks all about how she escalated her complaints and wanted the entities. This is a in this case, the Dutch Human Rights Institute. She eventually escalated to and was asking for this institution to stop using the technology, to apologize for what happened, and to vet all technology for bias. And I won’t tell you what the outcome was of the case because I really do want you to watch it and hear her story from her and not my clumsy telling of it, But I will say this is such a important continued conversation for us to be having about the ways in which bias is baked in. I will quote her here as she shared, algorithms are not intelligent.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:27]:

They are human made, and they include human biases and faults, which can have detrimental effects on people of color, black people, trans people, queer people, and anyone else who doesn’t look white. And she shares just because we can doesn’t mean we have to. And, you know, it’s just a really, really important look. You mentioned talking about what our most important values are, and I think that we might share the value of not wanting people to be left out of an educational process because of how they appear, and it was just a really, really good good firsthand, but then also she shares some research about some of these dangerous biases that are baked into these systems, and, specifically, this was a critique of online proctoring systems. So what what do you have to recommend for us today? I know you’ve got a few.

José Bowen [00:42:20]:

So a couple of things. So the first is that, right, the I think the person who is who has spent the most time on AI as a as a as a professor is Ethan Mollick. He has a new book coming out. But he also has a substack called one useful thing, which I I think is the best because he’s he’s not just writing about AI, which is useful, but he’s also writing about how faculty can use it. Another faculty member who is really deep into this is Anna Mills. And so her annamills.com is a website that has lots of resources. I will I have on teachingnaked.com forward slash prompts. So I have a list of the current AI.

José Bowen [00:42:59]:

So if you wanna try different AI, you don’t even know what kinds there are. Because if you’re using free chat gpt, you’re basically using a dial up modem, and you have no idea what this new thing can do. So there are links there to better AIs. Yes. Some of them are paid, but there are some like like Copilot and Claude 3 at the moment that Bonni is still free, and it’s it’s better than free chat GPT for sure. And it will give you a better sense of what AI can do. But then the rest of that page has lists of prompts. So you can copy and paste, which is useful because you wanna see, oh, well, what happens if I actually create and and, again, Ethan Mollick has really been good at this.

José Bowen [00:43:36]:

Here is a 3 page prompt. Here here are 500 words that will tell you your AI how to how to be a mentor or give you feedback. And it’s like, really? I have to write that much? And it’s like, yes. It is a form of writing, but it’s also it you have to tell it stop. Don’t do this. Do it step by step. No. No.

José Bowen [00:43:53]:

No. And I’ll give you Taylor Swift tickets if you do it well. Right? All of those all of those dumb little things actually seem to work. And so on at my website there, I I list a whole bunch of prompts. In fact, all the prompts from the new book, the Teaching with AI book are there so you can copy and paste. And there are also links to other websites like Anthropic, which has a whole list of of prompts. And, again, Ethan Mollick has a list. So that’s the practical.

José Bowen [00:44:17]:

I have one more, which is I’m a big fan of the of the of the the Scottish writer, E. M. Banks, who wrote a series of books about AI long ago back starting in the eighties about something he called the culture. And the culture is this society that uses AI and other people aren’t really happy about it. It’s way in the future. Start with consider blebbas. I think that’s how you say it. P h l e b d a s.

José Bowen [00:44:45]:

But it’s a it’s an interesting because he’s not just AI is good, AI is good, but it’s an interesting imagination of what the future, right, of of why people might object and why people might like it and what might happen to society once AI is doing all of the labor that we no longer want to do, and people can write books or climb mountains if they want to or not. And, anyway, he’s a great writer, and he wrote a bunch of those books, and I I really like them. So

Bonni Stachowiak [00:45:14]:

This is an embarrassing confession, but I was saving it up for today and then forgot. But I I only recommend I attempt to only recommend things once, and I wanna make sure and recommend Teaching with AI, which is the book you coauthored with Eddie and why the 2 of you have come on in recent weeks. So, let me not forget to add that to the list of recommendations. I was saving it for you and then completely, failed in my in my desire to save the best thing for last. So it’s a very good book. What I like about it is its blend of it’s grounded in research, and it is also practical. So it is practical in terms of, I found, as I was reading it, that I felt I could trust these authors for having done the research and and understanding these spaces and challenges and opportunities, and then very practically could find what it is I can do with this information that I am I’m taking in, and that tends to be the kind of book that I most enjoy reading initially and then also having on my bookshelf to be able to return back to it. And I’m, by the way, not being entirely truthful here because while I do have books on the bookshelf, it’s mostly for decoration, because I love being able to go back to the highlights, and this is one of those books where the entire book is practically highlighted.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:46:30]:

So it’s great that table of contents really lays it out for the promise of the book and just exactly what those of us are in higher education are both challenged by in, good and bad ways, because we should be challenged by some of these opportunities that are in front of us right now, and you’ve shared so much of that today, and Eddie did as well. So that is my recommendation slightly out of order here, but I didn’t wanna forget to officially recommend it.

José Bowen [00:46:54]:

Well, thanks. I I appreciate that. We we spent a lot of time trying to make the book practical. And also, in fact, the the designer at at Johns Hopkins, who we said, well, we here are the prompts. They have a little box on the left, and here Dave the here are the responses from AI we wanna show. And they have a box on the right. You know, here are the here are things that you could try. Here are templates.

José Bowen [00:47:12]:

You know, so there’s they they they spend a lot of attention thinking about the graphic design so people could easily find, okay, where are some where are some assignments I could actually give? Where is the templates? Where are the where are some examples? And so we we did we did want that because I think the easiest way for people is to to to get over the fear of AI is is to, 1, use a better AI. Don’t use just a free chat gpt. It’s not the same jet gpt that we that they released in March a year ago. It’s now the back to the November 22, and they made it dumber. So you’re really not using an AI. All you use is free chat g p t. But so so use a better AI or try a different one, and then try a more complicated prompt. Right? Try try get it get it to do your department schedule.

José Bowen [00:47:59]:

Get it to do your assessment report. Get it to to ask you. So find all of the research that contradicts what I’ve written in this paper. Right? Ask it to do something that you can’t just Google, and you’ll start to see, oh, here’s what it might do.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:16]:

Thank you so much, José Bowen, for coming back on Teaching in Higher Ed. And I shall say until we meet again because I always look forward to these conversations.

José Bowen [00:48:25]:

Thanks, Bonni. It’s always great to talk to you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:29]:

Thanks once again to José Bowen for being a guest on the podcast. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks to each of you for listening and being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I invite you to head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and you’ll receive the weekly Teaching in higher ed update with the most recent episodes, show notes, as well as other resources in addition to what you would find on that page. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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