Teaching in Higher Ed

Karen Costa describes learning to teach, design, and rest on episode 578 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Gardening is something I’ve tried and failed at many times. I don’t know if it’s something you can win or fail at.

There’s a ton of research on our mental health and well being and what green spaces can do for us.

The mindset is learning from nature rather than learning about nature.

Nature is really, really good at resting.

Resilience is born of rest, of hibernating, of knowing that we’ve got to kind of go down into the ground, into the earth, in those seasons of quiet and peace in order to begin again and rejuvenate.

Diversity is the foundation of life. Diversity is strength.

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Jessamyn Neuhaus shares about her book, SNAFU Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom, on episode 577 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Human beings make mistakes. We make mistakes as part of learning. We make mistakes just being in the world.

Academia generally attracts people with perfectionist tendencies.

Sometimes there is no positive outcome when something goes wrong. Sometimes things just get messed up because people are human.

Inadvertently we have a subtext that teaching is somehow perfectible. Teaching and learning will never ever be perfectible.

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Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna share about their book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want on episode 576 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

What’s going on with the phrase artificial intelligence is not that it means something else than what we’re using it to mean, it’s that it doesn’t have a proper referent in the world.

There’s a much broader range of people who can have opinions on AI.

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

Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

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Rolin Moe shares about rebuilding trust in the value of education (among other things) on episode 575 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

I never again had a static lesson plan. I was always very fluid in whatever I was going to be doing. I knew where I wanted to get, but the road could go in all sorts of different directions.

Learning is a continuous activity in all sorts of areas and all sorts of places.

Education is the process of helping people find things that they don’t yet know they love.

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Alex Edmans shares about his book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases and What We Can Do About It on episode 574 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We think a lie is basically the opposite of truth. So something is a lie if you can disprove it factually.

What I focus on in my book is a more subtle form of a lie where something could be 100% accurate, but the inferences that we draw from them might be misleading.

It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s that they’re people, they’re humans. And if we’re a person, we have biases.

What I’m trying to highlight is the importance of being discerning. We want to have healthy skepticism, but we want to have the same healthy skepticism to something that we do like as something that we don’t.

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Tolu Noah shares about her new book, Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality, on episode 573 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Whenever I’m planning a learning experience, I start by identifying a clear goal for the experience.

I don’t think there’s necessarily one right way to approach planning.

A really important aspect of facilitation is that yes, you have a plan, but you also need to be flexible with that plan and be willing to take a rest stop or a detour if needed.

Timing is probably one of the most important aspects of facilitation.

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Leon Furze shares about myths and metaphors in the age of generative AI on episode 572 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

In higher education there is a need to temper the resistance and refusal of the technology with the understanding that students are using it anyway.

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

My use of the technology has really shifted over the last few years the more I think about it as a technology and not as a vehicle for language.

Let the English teachers who love English, teach English. Let the mathematics teachers who love math, teach math. Let the science teachers teach science. And where appropriate, bring these technologies in.

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Jackie Shay Shares about overcoming imposter syndrome through joyful curiosity on episode 571 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Sometimes I get in my head about imposter syndrome about being joyful.

Why can’t we recognize that these different types of intelligences have just as much value as intellectual intelligence?

It’s about supporting the learning by doing meaningful, challenging work that promotes growth, that allows us to find joy in the discomfort that comes from the vulnerability of pushing your mind to its boundaries and beyond.

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Laura Gibbs shares how to get started with interactive storytelling in any discipline on episode 570 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

I think what happens with a lot of people’s efforts to tell stories is that they’re staring at a blank page or a blank screen, and they just feel lost in it because they don’t have a form that they’re filling up.

Everybody was thriving with these hundred word stories.

Meaninglessness in education won’t work. Education has to be meaningful, personally meaningful.

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Mike Perkins and Jasper Roe share a practical framework for ethical AI integration in assessment on episode 569 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We wanted to be flexible and have some opportunities for students and faculty to really have open conversations about how AI might be suitably used given the individual circumstances and the cultural context.

One of the things that is happening that we can’t deny is that the rate of hallucinations is going down. The capabilities are getting better and better.

Criticality and pessimism aren’t the same thing, especially when it comes to GenAI models.

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