Half-Baked Thoughts on ChatGPT and the College Essay

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a piece by Owen Kichizo Terry, an undergraduate at Columbia University, on how college students are successfully using ChatGPT to produce their essays.

The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step. You tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better.

As an example, I told ChatGPT, “I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.” (Just about every first-year student at my university has to write a paper resembling this one.) Here is one of its suggestions: “The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.” It also listed nine other ideas, any one of which I would have felt comfortable arguing. Already, a major chunk of the thinking had been done for me. As any former student knows, one of the main challenges of writing an essay is just thinking through the subject matter and coming up with a strong, debatable claim. With one snap of the fingers and almost zero brain activity, I suddenly had one.

My job was now reduced to defending this claim. But ChatGPT can help here too! I asked it to outline the paper for me, and it did so in detail, providing a five-paragraph structure and instructions on how to write each one. For instance, for “Body Paragraph 1: The Gods as Moral Arbiters,” the program wrote: “Introduce the concept of the gods as moral arbiters in the Iliad. Provide examples of how the gods act as judges of human behavior, punishing or rewarding individuals based on their actions. Analyze how the gods’ judgments reflect the moral codes and values of ancient Greek society. Use specific passages from the text to support your analysis.” All that was left now was for me to follow these instructions, and perhaps modify the structure a bit where I deemed the computer’s reasoning flawed or lackluster.

The kid, who just completed their first year at Williams, confirms that this approach is already widespread at their campus.

I spent a few hours yesterday replicating the process for two classes in my rotation: one the politics of science fiction, the other on global power politics. Here are my takeaways about the current “state of play.”

First, professors who teach courses centered on “classic” literary and political texts need to adapt yesterday. We don’t expect students to make original arguments about Jane Austen or Plato; we expect them to wrestle with “enduring” issues (it’s not even clear to me what an “original” argument about Plato would look like). ChatGPT has—as does any other internet-based LLM—access to a massive database of critical commentary on such venerable texts. These conditions make the method very effective.

Second, this is also true for films, television, popular novels, and genre fiction. I ran this experiment on a few of the books that cycle on and off my “science-fiction” syllabus—including The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Dispossessed, The Forever War, and Dawn—and the outcomes were pretty similar to what you’d expect from “literary” classics or political philosophy.

Third, ChatGPT does significantly less well with prompts that require putting texts into dialogue with one another. Or at least those that aren’t fixtures of 101 classes.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to help me create an essay that reads The Forever War through Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. The results were… problematic. I could’ve used them to write a great essay on how actors in The Forever War construct the Taurans as a threat in order to advance their own political interests. Which sounds great. Except that’s not actually Schmitt’s argument about the friend/enemy distinction.

ChatGPT did relatively better on “compare and contrast” essays. I used the same procedure to try to create an essay that compares The Dispossessed to The Player of Games. This is not a common juxtaposition in science-fiction scholarship or science-fiction online writing, but it’s extremely easy to the two works in conversation with one another. ChatGPT generated topics and outlines that picked up on that conversation, but in a very superficial way. It gave me what I consider “high-school starter essays,” with themes like ‘both works show how an individual can make a difference’ or ‘both works use fictional settings to criticize aspects of the real world.’ 

Now, maybe my standards are too high, but this is the level of analysis that leaves me asking “and?” Indeed, the same is true of example used in the essay: it’s very Cliff’s Notes. Now, it’s entirely possible to get “deeper” analysis via ChatGPT. You can drill down on one of the sections it offers in a sample outline; you can ask it more specific prompts. That kind of thing.

At some point, though, this starts to become a lot of work. It also requires you to actually know something about the material. 

Which leads me to my fourth reaction: I welcome some of what ChatGPT does. It consistently provides solid “five-paragraph essay” outlines. I lose track of how many times during any given semester I tell students that “I need to know what your argument is by the time I finish your introduction” and “the topic of an essay is not its argument.” ChatGPT not only does that, but it also reminds students to do that. 

In some respects, ChatGPT is just doing what I do when students me with me about their essays: helping them take very crude ideas and mold them into arguments, suggesting relevant texts to rope in, and so forth. As things currently stand, I think I do a much better job on the conceptual level, but I suspect that a “conversation” with ChatGPT might be more effective at pushing them on matters of basic organization. 

Fifth, ChatGPT still has a long way to go when it comes to the social sciences—or, at least International Relations. For essays handling generic 101 prompts it did okay. I imagine students are already easily using it to get As on short essays about, say, the difference between “balance of power” and “balance of threat” or on the relative stability of unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar systems. 

Perhaps they’re doing so with a bit less effort than it would take to Google the same subjects and reformulate what they find in their own words? Maybe that means they’re learning less? I’m not so sure.

The “superficiality” problem became much more intense when I asked it to provide essays on recent developments in the theory and analysis of power politics. When I asked it for suggestions for references, at least half of them were either total hallucinations or pastiches of real ones. Only about a quarter were actually appropriate, and many of these were old. Asking for more recent citations was a bust. Sometimes it simply changed the years.

I began teaching in the late 1990s and started as a full-time faculty member at Georgetown in 2002. In the intervening years, it’s becoming more and more difficult to know what to do about “outside sources” for analytical essays. 

I want my students to find and use outside articles—which now means through Google Scholar, JSTOR, and other databases. But I don’t want them to bypass class readings for (what they seem to think are) “easier” sources, especially as many of them are now much more comfortable looking at a webpage than with reading a PDF. I would also be very happy if I never saw another citation to “journals” with names like ProQuest and JSTOR.

I find that those students who do (implicitly or explicitly) bypass the readings often hand in essays with oddball interpretations of the relevant theories, material, or empirics. This makes it difficult to tell if I’m looking at the result of a foolish decision (‘hey, this website talks about this exact issue, I’ll build my essay around that’) or an effort to recycle someone else’s paper. 

The upshot is that I don’t think it’s obvious that LLMs are going to generate worse educational outcomes than we’re already seeing.

Which leads me to the sixth issue, which is where do we go from here. Needless to say, “it’s complicated.” 

The overwhelming sentiment among my colleagues is that we’re seeing an implosion of student writing skills, and that this is a bad thing. But it’s hard to know how much that matters in a world in which LLM-based applications take over a lot of everyday writing. 

I strongly suspect that poor writing skills are still a big problem. It seems likely that analytic thinking is connected to clear analytic writing—and that the relationship between the two is often both bidirectional and iterative. But if we can harness LLMs to help students understand how to clearly express ideas, then maybe that’s a net good.

Much of the chatter that I hear leans toward abandoning—or at least deemphasizing—the use of take-home essays. It means, for the vast majority of students, doing their analytic writing in a bluebook under time pressure. It’s possible that makes strong writing skills even more important, as it deprives students of the ability to get feedback on drafts and help with revisions. I’m not sure it helps to teach those skills, and it will bear even less resemblance to any writing that they do after college or graduate school than a take-home paper does.

(If that’s the direction we head in, then I suppose more school districts will need to reintroduce (or at least increase their emphasis on) instruction in longhand writing. It also has significant implications for how schools handle student accommodations; it could lead students to more aggressively pursue them in the hope of evading rules on the use of ChatGPT, which could in turn reintroduce some of the Orwellian techniques used to police exams during the height of the pandemic).

For now, one of the biggest challenges to producing essays via ChatGPT remains the “citation problem.” But given various workarounds, professors who want to prevent the illicit use of ChatGPT probably already cannot pin their hopes on finding screwy references. They’ll need to base more of their grading not just on whether a student demonstrates the ability to make a decent argument about the prompt, but on whether they demonstrate a “deeper” understanding of the logic and content of the references that they use. Professor will probably also need to mandate, or at least issue strict directions about, what sources students can use.

(To be clear, that increases the amount of effort required to grade a paper. I’m acutely aware of this problem, as I already take forever to mark up assignments. I tend to provide a lot of feedback and… let’s just say that it’s not unheard of for me to send a paper back to a student many months after the end of the class.)

We also need to ask ourselves what, exactly, is the net reduction in student learning if they read both a (correct) ChatGPT explanation of an argument and the quotations that ChatGPT extracts to support it. None of this strike me as substantively all that different from skimming an article, which we routinely tell students to do. At some level, isn’t this just another route to learning the material?

AI enthusiasts claim that it won’t be long before LLM hallucinations—especially those involving references—become a thing of the past. If that’s true, then we are also going to have to reckon with the extent that the use of general-purpose LLMs creates feedback loops that favor some sources, theories, and studies over others. We are already struggling with how algorithms, including those generated through machine-learning, shape our information environment on social-media platforms and in search engines. Google scholars’ algorithm is already affecting the citations that show up in academic papers, although here at least academics mediate the process.

Regardless, how am I going to approach ChatGPT in the classroom? I am not exactly sure. I’ve rotated back into teaching one of our introductory lecture courses, which is bluebook-centered to begin with. The other class, though, is a writing-heavy seminar. 

In both my class I do intend to at least talk about the promises and pitfalls of ChatGPT, complete with some demonstrations of how it can go wrong. In my seminar, I’m leaning toward integrating it into the process and requiring that students hand in the transcripts from their sessions. 

What do you think?

“Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students

“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.”

That’s Garret Merriam, associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University, who recently caught 40 of the 96 students in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a take-home final exam.

The story begins with him using Google to see if some of the questions on his final exam were online, and finding a copy of one of his previous final exams on the website Quizlet. Ostensibly a study aid website, Quizlet allows users to upload materials to the site, such as exam questions and answers, and is one of many sites students use to cheat on their assignments. He emailed a request to Quizlet that they take down the exam, which they did. But finding the exam gave Merriam an idea.

I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously​ wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were.

When the students turned in their finals, and he noticed that many of the students had selected the “obviously wrong” answers from the planted version of the final, he had to decide how to distinguish the cheaters from those who merely made mistakes. He ended up using the following standard: if there was no more than a 1 in 100 chance that the number of matching wrong answers a student gave was a coincidence, he counted them as having cheated, as he explains:

When my students turned in their finals this semester, I compared their answers with the wrong answers from the planted test. A total of 45 questions on this semester’s final were on the planted final. (The exact questions change every semester, depending on a number of factors.) As expected, nearly all students had at least a few wrong answers that matched; statistically speaking this is likely given the number of questions. I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so by coincidence. That was my (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) threshold, and anyone who matched at least that many, I suspected of cheating. (The highest match was 40 out of 45, which has a 1:10-Quintillion chance of being a coincidence.)

To my amazement, that threshold implies that 40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions. 

When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are still being determined:

I emailed these students telling them what I had done and what I found. About 2/3rds of them confessed right away or denied it at first and quickly changed their tune. The remaining third either haven’t gotten back to me yet or have insisted on their innocence. (I am considering that possibility for one student who is right ‘on the bubble’, but the rest are upwards of 1:1 billion chance, or more.)

I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.

He adds:

As you can probably imagine, this has been exceptionally stressful for me (I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.)

Professor Merriam wanted to share what happened on Daily Nous to see what other people in philosophy made of the situation and the actions he took. He had discussed it a little on Twitter, and while some people were, he says, “sympathetic and supportive,” others (for example) expressed the view that what he did was itself unethical. He disagrees:

As far as I can tell, their argument seems to boil down to the claim that my actions were deceptive or dishonest. I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’. They suggested I should have just taken the copy of my test down and left it at that. As far as I can tell most of these people are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities.

These charges don’t make sense to me. I did not encourage or nudge my students to cheat, I did not do anything to make such cheating more likely or easier. Quite the opposite: I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them cheating, and I gave them a comprehensive study guide for the final.

As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. I honestly do not see what is objectionable about that. My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating  (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)

Though he disagrees with his critics, he “open to the possibility that I might be wrong”

Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here. But I would take that possibility a lot more seriously if that were the judgment of my immediate peers (philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists), and even more so still if those peers could articulate an argument beyond simplistic accusations of dishonesty or ‘entrapment.’

So, I thought I would reach out to you and see if you could share this with Daily Nous readers and ask them: Am I the unethical one here?

That’s one question. But it might be more useful to consider more generally: (a) feasible cheat-deterring strategies for professors teaching large classes, (b) what professors should do when they catch their students cheating (when this is not settled by university policy), and (c) the extent to which professors should concern themselves with whether their students are cheating.

The post “Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students first appeared on Daily Nous.

Open Recognition + Critical Pedagogy = empowerment, dialogue, and inclusion

At the crossroads of education, social justice, and personal development stands critical pedagogy, a concept associated with the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire. His conviction was that education should be egalitarian, democratic, and transformative; his work has had an outsize impact on my educational philosophy. Critical pedagogy emphasises the significance of dialogue, critical thinking, and active participation. The further I delve into the world of of Open Recognition, the clearer the links with Freire, both in essence and practice.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire states that:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Open Recognition, like critical pedagogy, is about empowering individuals to take ownership of their personal and professional development. The approach not only foregrounds knowledge, skills, and understanding, but also behaviours, relationships, and experiences.

Freire believed that through open and honest conversations, individuals could challenge existing power structures, question assumptions, and engage in transformative learning experiences. Similarly, Open Recognition offers a way for individuals to engage in meaningful conversations about their skills, experiences, and aspirations — using language and approaches that make sense to them.

In facilitating dialogue over power dynamics, Open Recognition nurtures a sense of community and belonging. It empowers individuals to share their stories and learn from one another, and this exchange of ideas and experiences not only contributes to personal growth but also fosters a sense of collective responsibility and solidarity

Critical pedagogy is grounded in the belief that education should be a vehicle for social change and empowerment. Open Recognition aligns with this vision by providing ways for individuals make meaningful contributions to their communities, challenge the status quo, and actively participate in shaping their own futures.

So it’s fair to say that Open Recognition and critical pedagogy share a common goal: the empowerment and transformation of individuals through dialogue, inclusion, and active participation. By explicitly embracing the principles of critical pedagogy, it’s my belief that Open Recognition can help create a more inclusive and equitable world.

If you’re interested in Open Recognition, critical pedagogy, and doing something different than the status quo, I’d highly suggest joining badges.community!

The post Open Recognition + Critical Pedagogy = empowerment, dialogue, and inclusion first appeared on Open Thinkering.

“There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed

"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."

The post “There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed appeared first on Public Books.

Reports from Abroad: Dr. Getty Lee Lustila

This series questions and complicates what ‘reporting from abroad’ can mean in a globalized world that faces interconnected and local crises alongside forces grappling with how to liberate our beings from oppressive structures rooted in past and present (neo)colonialism and imperialism. We can take this as a chance to collectively and constructively consider both broader […]

New Article: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue

Readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog may be interested to learn about a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of World Philosophies: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University). The journal is open-access, and you can download the article here.

Here’s the abstract:

There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such as the Sanskritic traditions of pramāṇavāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramāṇavāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism.

I enjoyed reading the article, and I found it extremely thought-provoking. I hope readers of this blog will check it out. Also, be sure to look for the forthcoming online debate platform that Donahue mentions on p. 5! Maybe we’ll make an announcement on the blog when it’s ready. Or reach out to Dr. Donahue if you’re interested in collaborating.

Here are a few of my questions for further discussion:

1. Since pramāṇavāda was an elite discourse in historical South Asian societies and it requires some educational training (as Donahue notes on p. 4 and p. 5), can it do the work Donahue asks it to do?
2. Are jalpa and vitaṇḍā so bad? While most Naiyāyikas have denigrated them as illegitimate as Donahue notes (p. 6), a few have distinguished “tricky” and “honest” forms of vitaṇḍā (Matilal 1998, 3). And then there’s Śrī Harṣa’s debate at the beginning of the Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya with a Naiyāyika opponent about whether one must accept the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) in order to enter into a debate about the pramāṇas (he mentions that one understands the discourse of the Madhyamakas and Cārvākas, perhaps thinking of Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi; I will have more to say about the Cārvākas in an upcoming conference presentation—see information below). Matilal has also argued that vitaṇḍā can make sense as resulting in a “commitmentless denial” similar to an “illocutionary negation” (Matilal 1998, 50-56). In terms of a modern public sphere, could vitaṇḍā be a useful tactic for, say, pointing out the inherent contradictions of various harmful dogmatisms? Or maybe the deepest benefit of the vāda-jalpa-vitaṇḍā framework is a bit of self-awareness about which form of debate one is using?
3. Is vāda necessarily more prone to discrediting false beliefs than a Habermasian public sphere or the type of marketplace of ideas in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty? (p. 11) My point is most definitely not that we have nothing to learn from Indian logic and debate. Far from it! But I wonder how effective vāda can be. After all, you don’t find much philosophical agreement in the classical Indian tradition, which is precisely why I find it so interesting!
4. Is the archive (p. 12) essentially part of vāda, or is it a cultural artifact of the Indian and Tibetan tradition of commentaries? Was there something similar in Hellenistic, Roman, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions, which were also heavily commentarial?

My questions here are meant to be taken in the spirit of vāda to keep the conversation going. I hope others will read Donahue’s thought-provoking article and join this worthwhile conversation.

Also, if you will be attending the upcoming Central APA Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on Feb. 22, 2023, you will have the chance to discuss these and other issues in person! 

Wed. Feb. 22, 2023, 1-4pm

2022 Invited Symposium: Vāda: Indian Logic and Public Debate 

Chair: Jarrod Brown (Berea College)

Speakers: 

Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University) “Vāda Project: A Non-Centric Method for Countering Disinformation”

Arindam Chakrabarti (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) “Does the Question Arise? Questioning the Meaning of Questions and the Definability of Doubt”

Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)  “Cārvāka Skepticism about Inference: Historical and Contemporary Examples” 

(More information about the conference here, including a draft program that includes several other panels on Indian philosophy.)

Works Cited

Donahue, Amy. 2022. “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Public Sphere.” Journal of World Philosophies 7 (Winter 2022): 1-14.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna.  1998.  The Character of Logic in India.  Edited by Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari.  Albany: SUNY Press.

What Do Experiments in Philosophy Teaching Look Like? (guest post)

“There is room to think creatively about how to improve learning and love of philosophy via innovation in pedagogy.”

That’s Russell Marcus, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, and Catherine Schmitt, an undergraduate at Hamilton studying philosophy and neuroscience, writing about the experiments in philosophy teaching they’ve facilitated as part of the Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy (HCSPiP). In the following guest post, they share some observations about successful philosophy teaching innovations, and invite readers to share their own.

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What Do Experiments in Philosophy Teaching Look Like?
by Russell Marcus and Catherine Schmitt

We often think of innovations in our philosophy teaching in terms of introducing new content. Student learning, though, may depend as much on how we teach as it does on what we teach. Moreover, since few of our undergraduate philosophy students will continue on to graduate work, and since philosophy departments are widely under pressure to justify our curricula and classes, attention to improving the classroom experiences of our students is essential. And diversifying our discipline may be a matter not only of broadening the kinds of texts we produce and study but also of how we manage classroom discourse.  So, what do experiments in philosophy teaching look like?

The Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy (HCSPiP) was developed on the principle that there is room to think creatively about how to improve learning and love of philosophy via innovation in pedagogy. We offer instructors a uniquely unrestricted platform to experiment: no content requirements, no prescribed classroom structure, and no grades. To three instructors each year, we provide twenty eager undergraduate students, three graduate student tutors, and the opportunity to try something new. The courses selected for the program have varied widely in content, more and less familiar: democracy in Athens, argument mapping, personal identity, existentialism, philosophical methods, comedy, discourse in the digital age, racial and gender violence.  More important: they have allowed us to explore new ways to engage students. The magic of the program lies in the countless number of ways a course might be taught and the multitude of lessons and new ways to teach that participants and instructors might leave with. After three successful years of the program, we’ve compiled a list of five observations from some successful experiments in pedagogy.

(1) Successful experiments must be accessible to and inclusive of all students; balancing inclusiveness with innovation is a challenge.

Every philosophy teacher has had the experience of some voices dominating a classroom and others shrinking away. One or two voices can end up monopolizing creative projects or conversations, especially if they are imaginative and unstructured. Some philosophers are naturally more fast-thinking than others or feel more empowered to add their voices to a conversation. Ensuring that students are able to participate equitably requires adding some rigidity and rules to class structure.

Some classroom experiments require equal participation from each student. In 2022, Ashley Pryor (University of Toledo) used improv games in a course, “Philosophy and Comedy.” Students had specific roles in each improv game that required speaking in turn. In 2018, Prof. Juli Thorson (emeritus, Ball State University) had each student creating their own art in her “Drawing your Identity.” However, many innovations in pedagogy are most rewarding with open ended discussion, or student driven projects and ideas, and some voices tend to dominate in such more loosely structured classrooms.

To the end of helping us to manage this challenge, we are grateful to have received funding from the Grant for Innovation in Teaching from the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT). In preparing for next summer, we hope to have the help of an inclusivity coordinator who can aid us in implementing techniques to bolster equity and diversify perspectives while still enabling innovative teaching styles. A call for applicants is on our website here.

(2) Successful experiments in philosophy teaching often integrate non-traditional kinds of source material, including literature, art, comedy, and games.

Philosophical conversations and learning can be initiated by all sorts of human experiences and interactions.  Philosophy becomes significantly more interesting to students when integrated with a broad variety of contemporary tools. This summer at the HCSPiP, Prof. James Garrison (Baldwin Wallace University) plans to mix teaching Wittgenstien with a variety of games, while Prof. Rebeccah Leiby (University of Baltimore) will teach Hobbes’s political theory on the Minecraft platform. Modern innovations continually provide more possibilities for tools with which to teach philosophy; last summer, Prof. Mike Barnes (Australian National University) taught a class on disagreement in the digital age, using online platforms with varying degrees of anonymity to explore how human self-expression and decision-making change in different contexts.

(3)  Successful experiments in philosophy teaching often allow students to share their talents or skills.

Teaching is a relational practice, and effective teaching entails meeting students where they are. Students learn well when allowed to bring their own lives and interests into the classroom and they often have talents that go unrecognized in the philosophy classroom. An experiment might ask them to put philosophical views to music, draw pictures of theories, or design games around philosophical problems. Philosophy can be a meeting point between an instructor’s expertise and student skills.

For Prof. Leiby, the idea for her course “State of Nature (Ultimate Survival Mode)” was borne out of teaching a course in which most of the students, in her words, “Would have preferred to be playing Minecraft.” Rather than divorce student interest from classroom experience, Leiby had the idea to merge them; what might happen if students play out Hobbes’ creation of social contract in an online game? The Minecraft platform enables students to live out and experience political philosophy in the classroom.

(4) Successful experiments in philosophy teaching need not aim at purely academic learning.

Few of our undergraduates end up pursuing graduate work in philosophy, but philosophy can be useful for all of our students. We can help students to write, think and communicate better. We might even help them to live lives of greater fulfillment. Even our most ambitious students, like those who apply and are accepted for summer philosophy programs, approach their work with an undercurrent of wondering how philosophical thought and argument might be applied outside of the classroom.  (Incidentally, if you are or have a student who would be a good fit for our program, applications are due on March 13.)

In 2019, Prof. Ann Cahill (Elon University) taught a course on metacognitive reflection on classroom interactions. Students were asked to reflect, for each of their contributions to discussion, on the kind of conversational move they were making. For example, are they giving supporting evidence of another’s claim, a counterexample to a principle under discussion, or a request for more information? The process naturally slowed down the conversation and was difficult for participants, especially at first. Asking students to reflect on their conversational moves could be done in any class. Cahill asked students to do it in a course on racialized and sexualized violence, focused on work by George Yancy and Susan Brison.

(5) Successful experiments should be available to other philosophy teachers.

A technique that depends essentially on one person is not useful for us. A professor with a good sense of humor, for example, might engage students in lecture readily and actively. Not every professor is naturally funny, though, and successful pedagogy cannot hinge on an individual trait if it is to be replicable. In contrast, an innovation such as using improvisation in class to loosen students’ minds and lower the barriers to entry in conversation is open to any instructor; the rules of an improv game are straightforward and require no special training to employ.

We also need to pay attention to disseminating our work broadly and accessibly. There are some platforms available, many of them on social media which can be restrictive or otherwise problematic. Traditional journals, like the preeminent Teaching Philosophy and AAPT Studies in Pedagogy are useful, but can tend to favor theoretical approaches over nuts-and-bolts teaching innovations. There is room for other platforms, like the Talking Teaching initiatives of the AAPT, weekly casual conversations around pedagogy available to anyone. Every good teacher is a thief. We need more opportunities and freedom to share our ideas.

The HCSPiP culminates in a pedagogy conference, streamed live and archived, at which instructors reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and what they might carry forward to their home institutions. In addition, this year, from the Small Grant Fund of the American Philosophical Association (APA) grant, we have support to bring in a pedagogy resident to help us to reflect on our work and disseminate it better. A call for applicants is also on our website here.

So, what do your pedagogical experiments look like?

Fuck You, Silicon Valley

It’s not that I want to be angry, or despairing, but when I see this email in my inbox, on top of the daily hourly whalloping I get from the news and friends and family on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, I can’t help be angry, and despair:

Hey! A virtual summit! You don’t call something a summit unless it’s important! And it’s virtual, so it must be doubly important! And is that lens flare in the logo? And concentric circles? Lens flare and concentric circles? Shit just got real.

But who’s this GSV, I wonder? Quick search!

Global Silicon Valley?

Huh.

I don’t get it. Silicon Valley is a place. A very specific place on the West Coast of the United States. You know, the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, etc. So what’s Global Silicon Valley?

Oh, wait, I do get it. Global refers to the ideology of Silicon Valley, not its geography. And Silicon Valley sees itself as exporting that ideology to the rest of the world. Or maybe colonizing is a better word. But do we really want the rest of the world to look like Silicon Valley? Here’s all you need to know about the ideology of Silicon Valley: they’ve got startup guys working on an app that gives you badges for multiple-day meditation streaks while outside nearly 30,000 homeless people scrape by.

With the third largest homeless population in the United States (behind NYC and LA), you can see why the tagline for this virtual summit declares “geography no longer matters.” It’s a kind of wishful thinking. You can fucking ignore what’s happening right outside your door. Because geography no longer matters.

Isn’t that the most Silicon Valley thing you’ve ever heard? It’s like saying bodies no longer matter. When what you really mean is, only the right bodies matter. The same way some bodies get to shelter-in-place safely during the coronavirus lock-down, while other bodies risk their lives.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. I shouldn’t judge this summit solely based on its name and tagline, as off-putting as those may be. I should judge it based on its speakers. Who’s at this summit?

(Here, dear reader, I face a quandary. For if I just paste in the list of speakers there’s a good chance your eyes may catch fire and you’ll never be able to read again. Oh well.)

Eric Yuan
Founder & CEO, Zoom

Arne Duncan
Former U.S. Secretary of Education

Sal Khan
Founder & CEO, Khan Academy

Ted Mitchell
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Education

Joy Chen
U.S. Chief Investment Officer, TAL Education Group

Jeff Maggioncalda
CEO, Coursera

Sam Chaudhary
Co-Founder & CEO, ClassDojo

Michael Horn
Co-Founder & Distinguished Fellow, Christensen Institute

Marni Baker Stein
Provost & Chief Academic Officer, Western Governors University

Luis von Ahn
Co-Founder & CEO, Duolingo

Bridget Burns
Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance

Paul LeBlanc
President, Southern New Hampshire University

Josh Scott
President, Guild Education

Michael Moe
Co-Founder, GSV

? Hmmmm.

So none of the speakers for “The Dawn of the Age of Digital Learning” are…experts on digital learning?

I know what you’re saying! Sal Kahn, you’re saying, he’s an expert on digital learning.

No, Sal Kahn is an expert on content delivery.

But, what what about Luis von Ahn, the Duolingo guy? The reCaptcha guy? No, Luis von Ahn is an expert on turning unpaid human labor into machine learning training sets.

But what about Arne Duncan, you ask? (I joke. Nobody asked that.)

I’ll say this once: you can’t be an expert on “digital learning” if you’re not an expert on learning.

Fuck, I’ll say it again: you can’t be an expert on “digital learning” if you’re not an expert on learning.

The best we can say about these guest speakers is that many of them have sought to optimize the efficiency at which content can be put in front of the eyes of consumers.

You want an expert on digital learning? Get Audrey Watters on board. (LOL, good luck with that, Audrey scares these people shitless.) Get Tressie McMillan Cottom on the panel. Tressie has a thing or two to say about profiteering from learners.

You want an expert on digital learning? Get my student who sat through a 3-hour seminar on Zoom that fried her brain and of course you start to understand why Zoom includes a feature to detect if participants are in a window other than Zoom because that’s the only way to survive a 3-hour seminar on Zoom.

You want an expert on digital learning? Tell the CEOs to shut the fuck up and pay attention to every professor who ends their 50-minute Zoom class feeling like it was the worst class in their life, even worse than the previous worst class and can I just crawl in a hole and die now?

And it wasn’t the worst class because the professors don’t know how to teach. Or because students don’t know how to learn. It was the worst class because the technology sucks, the world sucks, we’re all burned out and tired and wondering if we’ll ever be in the same room with each other again. And meanwhile the shitty Global Silicon Valley folks have this to say in their announcement about their summit:

Being Digital has been a Megatrend for 30 years, and online learning has gone from a concept to a $100 billion industry. The fundamentals of the Knowledge Economy and Digital Infrastructure have been in place to see a massive market evolve—with COVID-19 clearly a catalyst for the market exploding right now.

There are people losing their jobs, people dying right now. A million crushed dreams and aspirations, my own seniors devastated that they’ll have no commencement in May. And Silicon Valley leaders want to talk about the massive market opportunities they see? This goes beyond poor taste. It’s predatory.

The email announcement for the summit concludes on a utopian note characteristic of Silicon Valley:

We had the World before Coronavirus. And we will have a New World after this challenge subsides. While we are all going through a turbulent storm right now, over the horizon is the Dawn of a New Age with great promise. The future is here.

New World. Horizon. Dawn. New Age. Are we talking about pedagogy or writing a crappy Ayn Rand ripoff? (Obviously, no, they’re not talking about pedagogy. They know shit about pedagogy.)

The future is here, and Silicon Valley circles overhead.