The Universe and Universities in a Digital Age

What a delightful surprise it was to be invited to be the keynote speaker for the rebooted Baylor University Educational Technology Showcase event at the end of March. Although I left Baylor for Virginia Tech over twelve years ago, I still keep up with several Baylor colleagues, and I credit my time at Baylor with some of the deepest and most transformational opportunities I’ve been offered as a professor and as an administrator. That topic deserves its own blog post (which I plan to write as soon as my final grades are in for this semester at VCU). For now, I’ll share the talk I gave for the recent event, as it reflects not only some Topics Of The Day (as Charlotte Bronte once termed them), including of course generative AI, but also ideas I’ve been working on even before I came to Baylor in 2008.

The conference’s theme was “RE:Connected: The Future of University Culture and Technology.” I found the emphasis on university culture inspiring, and I wanted to honor the organizers’ vision by doing something big and a little audacious in my talk, so I cast a wide net that brought in not only generative AI but influencers, the name-image-likeness stats for big-time college athletics, Jane Jacobs, and a Roman Catholic philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre. Oh, and news coverage of the “information superhighway” from thirty years ago, too.

I am very grateful to Baylor for inviting me back, after lo these many years, to share my thoughts with colleagues yet once more. It was an honor and a privilege.