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This workshop on Developing a Reflective Practice was offered in May 2023 for the MSU COLA Fellows. It was converted to this asynchronous format for those who weren’t able to attend.
This workshop consists of four main parts, with a reflection point separating each part. You may use the reflection prompt individually, or if you have a colleague, partner (or group of them) doing these activities together you may find it helpful to discuss and reflect together. To get the full benefit of working through these materials plan to spend about 45 minutes to watch through the videos, take the time for reflection, and to make any final notes.
Reflective Practice as defined by Donald Schon is “Thinking about one’s actions so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.” By engaging in an intentional reflective practice we are able to learn about ourselves and to make meaning from our experiences in ways that help us learn to do things differently, better, or otherwise in ways that are informed by our reflection. In this part of the workshop take some time to watch this short video and then consider the reflection/discussion prompt that follows
Watch video “What is Reflective Practice?” – 3 min 42 sec
This reflection/discussion topic is around your individual approaches to reflection and reflective practice. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:
Outcome from this activity: Find common methods of reflection/tools you use, and learn about other options from your discussion partners.
Watch video “Starting Your Reflective Practice” – 3 min 32 sec
This reflection/discussion topic is about the approaches your discipline uses for reflection. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:
Outcome from this activity: Identify ways your discipline conducts reflective activities. Learn from other disciplines and identify other possible frameworks, approaches, or tools for reflecting.
Watch video “Enacting Your Reflective Practice” – 7 min 14 sec
This last reflection/discussion topic is about critically engaging in the activities of reflection and reflective practice. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:
Outcome from this activity: Consider the affordances and limitations of different ways of reflecting and where/how you might want to share your reflection or not.
Take a few minutes to gather your notes and thoughts from the previous activities and then set your timer for another 5 minutes of self-reflection to set a plan up for developing/refining your reflective practice over the coming months.
If you are in the COLA Program you have to reflect at the end of the summer on all the work and thinking you are doing with the program, how might you develop and use an intentional reflective practice to document your work this summer? If you are not in the program think about how developing and implementing an intentional reflective practice might help you over the next couple of months.
How might you use the habits you form through reflective practice in these coming months to influence your teaching going forward? How might it help you in your next annual review or other reporting points, or how it might generally help you to become a better teacher, researcher, etc?
Remember that changing and developing habits is HARD WORK. You likely won’t develop a lasting practice overnight or in a short amount of time, a slow and steady pace is a great way to develop these habits that will last a long time.
Reflective practice is personal—the challenge is to figure out what works for you and supports your learning. Take some time to try out different things, see what works/doesn’t and what you connect with. Ask colleagues who are doing this work and learn from them.
Some ideas to get started and/or support your practice:
This workshop was recorded on May 25, 2023 as part of the MSU COLA Fellows workshop series.
Hi Pen Fans!
I’m very happy to announce something very unique that we have never done here at Edison!
We now have a Special Edition Collier in Garolite! This pen is part of the Production Line, so this pen cannot be purchased directly from Edison. It will be sold only by our retailers that you see HERE.
There is a lot to discuss regarding Garolite, but allow me to give a rough outline of this pen before getting into all of the finer details….
Let’s get into some details regarding this pen and material…
As stated, Garolite is a laminated glass-reinforced thermoset composite. Many people will want to call this G10. But G10 is a specific type of Garolite. There are G7, G9, G10, G11, and many other types with differing qualities. This is CE Garolite. But for the purposes of a pen, there will be no functional differences in the various types of Garolite.
Garolite is typically used for circuit boards. But most people know of its use for knife handles or gun stock handles, since it is very stable, very durable, and extremely wear resistant. It typically patinas to a darker color, leading to some nice character over the long term.
Along with this excellent wear resistance, Garolite is also lightweight. This Garolite version of the Collier is about 3 grams heavier than an acrylic version (26g vs 29g), so there really isn’t a perceptible difference.
Despite the excellent machining qualities, Garolite still won’t cut as clean as acrylic, especially when cutting threads. As you can see in the photo below, we have engineered the visible portions of outer threads from a solid butterscotch acrylic. This makes the pen much more attractive at that location compared to just using garolite for the threaded portions. This also makes the threads more accurate and feel very smooth compared to if we had threaded garolite-to-garolite.
There is roughly a 10-15% occurrence of some of these pens turning out darker. You can see how a darker version of this pen will appear by looking at the pen at the top of this photo…
We do not have control over the darker versions, and our retailers cannot honor special requests for a darker or lighter version.
Since this material is essentially a woven fabric, many people will wonder how it will react to ink staining. The short answer is that yes…the material can take on ink and show stains. However, we are finding that simply soaking the stain in water for a few minutes and then scrubbing with a test-tube brush or an old toothbrush works very well and has no negative effect on the material. The photo below shows Waterman Serenity Blue before and after a stain….
Of course, Waterman is a relatively gentle ink. But our tests are showing that just about every ink out there can be removed (we were actually able to remove Baystate Blue!). But more stubborn cases might require a household cleaner. If your pen develops stains that you cannot remove with just water, contact us for a more thorough method of cleaning.
But in the end…if you want to avoid the possibility of stains, we recommend not taking the pen ‘on-the-go’ where it might get bumped and jostled, causing ink to spurt from the nib. But if you do encounter stains, we can share excellent methods for removing them.
I think that’s everything! I’m sure that there will be questions regarding this new pen and material, so please reach out and we’ll be happy to help!
The post Special Edition Garolite Collier in the Production Line! appeared first on Edison Pen Co.
Hi Pen Fans!
We’ll be attending the Chicago Pen Show this weekend!
We will be bringing a Limited Edition Pen that is exclusive to the Chicago Show! This is a Brockton made from Jonathon Brooks Dragon Night.
We have been having fun lately with our Level-style ink windows, and we’ve always thought that this is a really sharp look on a Brockton.
The ink window is a subtle translucent mint shade. When the pen is capped, it appears to be equipped with a standard ink window. This is a converter filler, but only the clear portions of the converter are visible. This gives a bit of an illusion that the reservoir is the barrel (ala eyedropper, draw filler, or piston filler), when the converter is filled. It’s a pretty neat effect.
The edition will be limited to only 15 pens. These will be priced at $275 with a Steel nib or $375 with an 18k nib. (if a similar pen were ordered custom from us, it would be $325 or $425, respectively.)
We will limit our Friday sales to 10 pens only and our Saturday sales to the remaining 5 pens. First come, first served each day. We realize that a lot of people can’t get off of work to attend a pen show on a Friday and we want everyone who wants this pen to have a shot at it.
If you cannot attend the pen show and like this material, we do have plenty of it left for custom pens. While we cannot make a pen identical to this Brockton and also abide by the “rules” of a Limited Edition, we can still take custom orders for other pen models made from the same Dragon Night material. Be sure to email me if you’d like to speak about a non-limited edition pen made from this material.
Outside of this Limited Edition pen, of course, we’ll be bringing lots and lots of our normal inventory to the show. We will have well over 400 pens on display. Among these, we will also have somewhere around 100+ pens made from craft materials by Jonathon Brooks, Tim McKenzie, and Jennifer Earley.
Click here to see all pens that we’ll be bringing to the pen show.
We hope to see you in Chicago!
The post Chicago Pen Show with Brockton Exclusive LE! appeared first on Edison Pen Co.
Hi Pen Fans!
I’m very excited to announce that my good friend, Pendleton Brown is now carrying the Production Line!
I’ve known Pendleton from the pen shows for at least 12-13 years, and he became a very good friend early on. He has primarily been a nib technician, offering some of the most amazing work that I’ve ever written with. I was very happy when my friend contacted me with interest in carrying Edison!
When looking through Pendleton’s offerings, you’ll notice that his pricing is a little higher than our other retailers. Please keep in mind that the price does include his amazing BLS (Butter Line Stub) nib. You can learn more about the BLS nib here. I’ll attach a writing sample below. I’ve written with this nib more than a few times at the pen shows, and it’s simply sublime!
In addition to the BLS nib, of course, Pendleton offers plenty of other specialty nibs such as added flex, customizing smoothness/crispness, dryer/wetter, oblique grinds, etc.
So when you are looking at our retailers that offer the Production Line, Pendleton is one of the few that can offer you a Production Line pen that also includes a customized nib.
You can learn more about Pendleton here, but trust me when I say that it’s not easy to find a nicer fellow!
I wanted to include a photo that goes way back. This photo is from the Chicago Pen Show many years ago. For perspective…in this photo, Pendleton is with my son, Andrew. Andrew is now 17 and we are currently shopping for colleges!
Alas….the time, she flies!
Please head over to Pendleton’s Pens to look around and please reach out with any questions!
The post Pendleton Brown Carrying the Production Line! appeared first on Edison Pen Co.
Today I spent a wonderful afternoon with colleagues engaged in the Pathways to Presencing Fellows program talking about our projects and sharing ideas. The fellowship program gives “space and time” for us to engage in ways we are enacting the Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) framework.
CPIL seeks to “empower staff and faculty to put their values into intentional practice by aligning institutional practices with the values that animate university life” (Fritzsche, Hart-Davidson, & Long, 2022). Empowering all members of our community to engage in this endeavor requires us to develop a framework for individuals in a variety of university roles to excel in their careers by identifying their core values, setting career goals aligned with their values, cultivating pathways toward those goals, and enabling them to seek support along the way.
My project for this fellowship has been the development of the Formative Annual Review (FAR) Framework. While CPIL itself is a framework, the FAR framework actions CPIL into an academic reporting apparatus that facilitates formative feedback and growth. FAR helps to balance future aspirations with current needs, goals, and requirements by helping to situate what we are currently doing within our short-mid-long term goals while also acknowledging and showing our contributions and impact to our current jobs and
unit. This is especially important for those of us in positions outside of the tenure system, and doing jobs that combine applied work on our campuses, alongside more traditional scholarly endeavors such as teaching and research.
Rather than an end-of-year, reactive (or even passive) process — reporting under the FAR framework happens at one or more of several regular checkpoints during the year as a natural part of the reflective process. Reporting occurs as a function of telling a story of where you are going, what you are doing to move forward, and telling the story about how you got to the space that you are.
My short presentation on the FAR Framework gives an overview of the main components of the framework – Critical Planning, Reflective Practice, and Context Making. These components support identifying and pursuing relevant and meaningful work, redefining what scholarly work is for us, and connecting with individual professional objectives, and unit mission/goals.
I’m in the process of developing a workshop on the framework that can introduce colleagues interested in applying it to their own work. The workshop involves engaging in better understanding your digital presence, doing long-term planning, starting a reflective practice, surfacing your process, and creating artifacts as a way of telling your story, and conducting a short-term planning process.
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Flipping through old photo albums, enjoying long conversations with grandparents—these experiences are familiar and treasured parts of family life. But they can have a significance that transcends personal connection as way of creating and preserving a precious historical archive.
This work is vital. Learning about our elders doesn’t just connect us with our roots; it also opens us up to bygone ways of living, Elizabeth Keating argues in her book The Essential Questions. Plus, listening to this lore is good for kids’ development, Elaine Reese, the author of Tell Me A Story, wrote in The Atlantic in 2013. It helps children understand emotions, deepens their sense of identity, and makes them better at constructing their own narratives.
The value of these archives becomes even more stark when they’re threatened. Megan Buskey, who wrote Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, couldn’t access secret-police files about her older relatives when Ukraine was under Soviet control. Only after a new government took over could she see the files and think, “So this is what my grandfather’s handwriting looks like.” Now, she writes, if the archives don’t survive the war, others won’t be able to do the same. But even after the most destructive conflicts, people find ways to remember. Daniel Loedel, the author of Hades, Argentina, whose half-sister was disappeared during the Argentine Dirty War, has long cherished the photos of her that remain: a blown-up yearbook portrait; a snapshot of her with her boyfriend, “smiling mischievously”; pictures of her as a child with “round cheeks, light hair, searching blue eyes.”
Indeed, mundane images and stories can be powerful. “They remind you that they were a person, not a stat, not a little side note, not a little entry in a genealogical chart. They were a real, living, breathing human being,” Noah Lewis told Clint Smith in 2021 of his reaction to hearing his great-great-grandfather’s account of daily life under enslavement. Too often, Black Americans in particular are depicted in one-note ways—as either under violent attack or utterly exceptional. Everyday snapshots, such as those gathered in Black Archives by the artist Renata Cherlise, offer an alternate portrayal. The photos in Cherlise’s book show no pain or pretensions of eminence. Rather, they capture the simple pleasures of living—the tenderness, the fun, the togetherness.
Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Smith Collection / Gado / Getty; The Atlantic
The questions we don’t ask our families but should
“Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”
📚 The Essential Questions, by Elizabeth Keating
Arben Celi / Reuters
What kids learn from hearing family stories
“What most parents don’t know is that everyday family stories ... confer many of the same benefits of reading—and even some new ones.”
📚 Tell Me A Story, by Elaine Reese
Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: LOC.
The secret-police files that revealed my family’s history
“Given the Soviet tradition of warping the truth, history research in Ukraine has an important political function: It allows what was hidden to finally be known.”
📚 Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, by Megan Buskey
Courtesy of Daniel Loedel / The Atlantic
My sister was disappeared 43 years ago
“The search for ghosts, the effort to prevent the dead from being entirely disappeared, is inevitably a communal one, a strange multigenerational game of telephone. And, as in that game, all you get and have to pass on is a whisper.”
📚 Hades, Argentina, by Daniel Loedel
Reprinted with permission from Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life, by Renata Cherlise
What ordinary family photos teach us about ourselves
“The pleasure of viewing photographs in Black Archives derives mainly from the fact that none of the images are abstract, and they don’t engage in righteous protest, defending, or rebelling against cultural and social erasure. The book’s pages are dedicated to familiar joys and listless days, to the sense of personhood that remained intact while the war for civil rights continued just outside the frame.”
📚 Black Archives, by Renata Cherlise
About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson.
Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.
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Nature, Published online: 22 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05768-4
The current observations and understanding of black holes is reviewed, and the future of the field of black-hole astrophysics is discussed.This winter, the university where one of us works sent out an email urging employees to wear a hat on particularly cold days because “most body heat is lost through the top of the head.” Many people we know have childhood memories of a specific figure—perhaps 50 percent or, by some accounts, 80 percent of the heat you lose is through your head. But neither figure is scientific: One is flawed, and the other is patently wrong. A 2004 New York Times column debunking the claim traced its origin to a U.S. military study from the 1950s in which people dressed in neck-high Arctic-survival suits were sent out into the cold. Participants lost about half of their heat through the only part of their body that was exposed to the elements. Exaggeration by generations of parents got us up to 80 percent. (According to a hypothermia expert cited by the Times, a more accurate figure is 10 percent.)
This rather trivial piece of medical folklore is an example of a more serious problem: Through endless repetition, numbers of dubious origin take on the veneer of scientific fact, in many cases in the context of vital public-policy debates. Unreliable numbers are always just an internet search away, and serious people and institutions depend on and repeat seemingly precise quantitative measurements that turn out to have no reliable support.
For years, the three of us have been tracking the origins of numbers that claim to measure illicit activities, which are by their nature hard to measure. You may have heard that more than $1 trillion in bribes is paid each year, or that corruption costs the world economy $2.6 trillion annually. The $1 trillion figure comes from a set of extrapolations from a handful of surveys conducted by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum in the early 2000s in a variety of countries. These calculations produced a wide range of estimated annual-bribe payments—from about $600 billion to $1.7 trillion. The $1 trillion figure is roughly the midpoint of that range. The problem with taking just the average is that doing so strips the data of the enormous uncertainty in already-questionable estimates. And yet, the figure keeps resurfacing—the World Bank’s website, for example, cited it as recently as 2020—as if the annual amount of bribery were constant.
The $2.6 trillion corruption estimate, meanwhile, traces back to a one-sentence bullet point in an advocacy brief from a group of respected organizations, including the World Economic Forum and Transparency International. The brief cited no source, and, as far as we can tell, the number was likely based on a careless misreading of an earlier study. But the figure was later cited by the heads of prominent international bodies, including the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
These numbers are what we might call “decorative statistics.” Their purpose is not to convey an actual amount of money but to sound big and impressive. That doesn’t keep them from being added, subtracted, divided, or multiplied to yield other decorative statistics. Some organizations and news outlets combine the bribery and corruption estimates and declare that the planet experiences $3.6 trillion in graft year after year.
Unfortunately, the very pervasiveness of meaningless numbers undercuts the credibility of statistics more generally, even when the numbers never make it into anyone’s financial calculations.
We recently came across a study by two respected researchers that put the scale of illegal bets placed each year at $1.7 trillion. Where did such a precise figure for hard-to-measure, clandestine activities come from? Their paper cited a document published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. That document, however, actually gives a range of $340 billion to $1.7 trillion, cites no source, and rightly warns about the inherent difficulty of measuring the underground economy. But the $1.7 trillion figure has taken on a life of its own.
The plague of decorative statistics goes back decades. In one of a series of 1991 speeches about America’s supposed decline in global economic competitiveness, Vice President Dan Quayle remarked that the United States had too much litigation and too many lawyers, as evidenced by the fact that 70 percent of the world’s lawyers were American—a number that was then repeated by authority figures across the political spectrum. But as the law professor Marc Galanter calculated at the time, America’s share of lawyers was probably more like 25 to 35 percent, roughly in line with the U.S. share of global GDP in the early 1990s. Quayle also claimed that lawsuits (and the threat of lawsuits) cost Americans $300 billion a year. That equally alarming estimate—also widely quoted in discussions of tort reform—came from a Forbes magazine article that quoted a back-of-the-envelope calculation by a corporate-defense lawyer who used as his foundational cost estimate an offhand, unsourced assertion that a CEO had made at a roundtable discussion. The news that the civil-justice system costs the country $300 billion annually was, in Galanter’s memorable phrasing, “news from nowhere.”
[Read: The missing statistics of criminal justice]
Our suspicion is that junk statistics have only proliferated in recent years. The internet should make debunking them easier; the sort of painstaking detective work that Galanter went through to trace the origin of Quayle’s figures can now be done quickly. However, even putting aside the obvious problem of deliberate falsehoods spread online, the web is an endless bazaar of unreliable source materials. When numbers are so readily available, they’re also easy to combine in various permutations to come up with attention-grabbing new statistics.
Audiences should be skeptical of numbers that get thrown around without sufficient explanation of their provenance. But the greater responsibility for addressing this problem lies with journalists, scholars, government departments, reputable civil-society groups, international organizations, and everyone else whom citizens and policy makers rely upon for basic facts. The press has a particular responsibility—unlike, say, politicians or advocates, journalists operate under a code of ethics that demands the accurate reporting of factual statements.
For writers and speakers who might feel obliged to adorn their argument with numbers, we have some advice: First, before quoting a statistic, work back to the original source rather than citing a downstream source that references something else (which may reference something else, which references something else). Phrases such as studies have shown that or it has been estimated that should be red flags. Citing a source for a statistic isn’t good enough; you need to track down the original source.
Also, beware of what we might call “statistics laundering”: A less-than-trustworthy source makes a questionable quantitative claim that a more respectable person or organization, either opportunistically or carelessly, then recycles in some official speech or document. Later on, that secondary source is cited as authority for the statistic, which gives the number a veneer of reliability. The $300 billion cost of lawsuits is a case in point: An offhand remark by a corporate executive becomes the basis of a lawyer’s cost calculation, which is then cited in a magazine column and then picked up and repeated by the vice president of the United States—and then by many others.
[Read: Our most reliable pandemic number is losing meaning]
Third, don’t put too much faith in a prestigious name. An estimate by a Harvard professor is not a “Harvard estimate.” A statistic that appears in an unpublished World Bank working paper, perhaps authored by an outside consultant, is not “the World Bank’s calculation.” Even some statistics officially issued by well-known institutions turn out to be groundless, but suggesting that an organization has endorsed statistical claims that it has not carefully vetted increases the likelihood that bad information will spread.
Finally, recognize that, in the game of broken telephone that occurs when a quantitative estimate migrates into public discourse, numbers get rounded up, and then rounded up again. Estimates that originally take the form of a broad range get turned into a single number; estimates that concern a fairly narrow and specific domain are treated as if they apply much more broadly. Important caveats drop away. Sometimes researchers make a good-faith effort to measure a difficult-to-quantify phenomenon only to have a distorted version of their findings later presented as truth.
You can make the case for what matters without using made-up numbers to imply a certainty you don’t really have. You don’t need to pretend that bareheaded people will lose 50 or 80 percent of their body heat in winter. Just wear a hat.
Nature, Published online: 08 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05742-0
A nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride was synthesized under high-pressure high-temperature conditions and, following full recoverability, examination along compression pathways showed evidence of superconductivity at room temperature and near-ambient pressures.Nature, Published online: 08 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00600-5
An analysis of mice carrying the protein tau — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — reveals that immune cells collaborate to drive tau-mediated neurodegeneration, and that drugs already in use in the clinic can combat this decline.Hi Pen Fans!
We can’t wait to get back to the Baltimore Pen Show this weekend! It is a strange thought that the last time we attended Baltimore, this new thing called Covid was just making the news. Sheesh! It’s been way too long since we’ve seen our Baltimore friends and we are very happy to be coming back!
The feature of the show will be a Limited Edition pen that will be exclusive to the Baltimore show. This will be our first collaboration with a material maker that is relatively new on our radar, Jennifer Earley with Stormwinds.
We had heard of Jennifer’s work in the recent past, but it wasn’t until a customer of ours requested a custom pen from Jennifer’s materials that we had our first hands-on experience. Since then, we’ve been purchasing more and more materials from Jennifer, as they are truly stunning!
So this Limited Edition Exclusive will be a Beaumont made from Jennifer’s Palomino Waltz at Sunset.
You will notice that this is the first time that we’ve implemented a new idea for hardware that we’ve been experimenting with…
(Side note – we are very happy with how this ceramic coated hardware turned out. Stay tuned for the possibility of seeing this idea implemented more!)
The edition will be limited to 15 pens. At past pen shows, our LE exclusives have sold pretty fast. Not everyone can attend each day of the show, and many cannot get off work to attend Friday. For this reason, we will limit our Friday sales of this LE to 10 pens only, and our Saturday sales to 5 pens. It will be first come, first served each day.
These will be priced at $275 with a Steel nib or $375 with an 18k nib.
Outside of this Limited Edition pen, of course, we’ll be bringing lots and lots of our normal inventory. Click Here to see our entire inventory of over 400 pens that will be coming to Baltimore with us.
In addition to the Limited Edition from Jennifer’s material, we will also have other pens inventoried from her materials, as well as pens from other craft material makers like Jonathon Brooks and Tim McKenzie. Click Here to see all pens made from handcrafted materials that will be coming to the show made by Jennifer, Jonathon, and Tim.
If you can’t make the pen show, our Current Inventory Galleries have been updated with lots of new pens. Any pens that don’t sell at the show will be available when we return. Feel free to email me with an inquiry if something appeals.
We hope to see you in Baltimore!
(slideshow showing all of our inventory is below, or click here)
The post Baltimore Pen Show with Jennifer Earley Exclusive! appeared first on Edison Pen Co.
In her excellent, tightly reasoned “Against Academic Boycotts” (Dissent, Summer 2007), Martha Nussbaum notes that the “main force of the boycott” is directed against “individual members of the [Israeli] institutions,” who are accused of not condemning their “government as much …
What is our primary mission? I turned to our new partner to briefly articulate that “the primary mission of higher education is to provide advanced learning opportunities beyond the high school level, with the aim of developing a highly skilled and educated workforce, advancing research and knowledge, and promoting critical thinking and personal development.” That was the leading sentence of ChatGPT Plus on Feb. 18, 2023, using default parameters responding to the prompt “What is the primary mission of higher education?”
The generative artificial intelligence app went on to note that “Higher education institutions, such as universities, colleges, and vocational schools, offer various degree programs, certifications, and training opportunities that provide students with the knowledge, skills, and experiences needed to succeed in their chosen fields.” In order to accomplish that lofty mission, we face the intimidating new challenge of preparing our learners to integrate and optimize AI into their careers and vision of the future. We would be negligent if we were to fail to prepare the learners for what Stanford professor, innovator and CEO of Udacity Sebastian Thrun says is “the single biggest thing we are ever going to see in our lifetime.”
This is not a task for next year, next semester or even next month. It is the most important role change and challenge for us today. We must not let the graduating Class of 2023 leave their commencement ceremonies without a foundational understanding of what AI is and how it will impact their future careers. If, as ChatGPT says, our mission includes to “provide students with knowledge, skills and experiences to succeed in their chosen fields,” we must not ignore the now-certain role of AI in all professional fields. Yet, I suspect in many disciplines that has been ignored, while faculty continue to teach the skills and opportunities of the prior decades.
In earlier waves of AI and robotics, blue-collar jobs were most affected. Notably, assembly line and other factory workers doing repetitive assembly jobs found their jobs taken by the more accurate, less expensive and more efficient AI-driven machines. Today, most importantly to colleges and universities, the jobs that are becoming vulnerable to generative AI are those that include a wide swath of the graduates who will be seated in robes at graduation ceremonies in May, confident that they are prepared for white-collar careers. When we survey these 2023 graduates three years from now, what will they say regarding how well prepared they were for their careers?
Aaron Mok and Jacob Zinkula write in Business Insider, “ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace.” Among the ten are tech jobs (coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts); media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism); legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants); and finance jobs (financial analysts, personal financial advisers). And that’s not even half the top 10 fields listed by Mok and Zinkula.
A new Pew Research Center survey reports that many Americans are aware of common ways they might encounter artificial intelligence in daily life, such as customer service chat bots and product recommendations based on previous purchases. However, only 30 percent of U.S. adults are able to correctly identify all six uses of AI asked about in the survey, highlighting the incomplete and still-developing nature of public understanding. That would seem to be true about the depth of faculty understanding of how AI is now, or will be soon affecting the careers for which their students are preparing.
How, then, do we assure that our faculty members are fully aware of the AI trends and potential in their disciplines? Can we bring home to them the message of just how impactful AI will be in careers?
One response to consider is to train faculty members, small groups at a time, on how to responsibly and effectively use generative AI in their own work, such as revising syllabi and lesson plans. I don’t mean merely using the default parameters in crafting ChatGPT prompts, but rather to dig a bit deeper to understand and use such parameters as temperature, model engine, in-the-voice-of and number to better test out the potential of the tool.
While we need to inform faculty members now, we must also recognize that this is a tool that is undergoing active development and updates. Competition is bringing other tools that will offer up-to-the-minute knowledge bases and more options and become more reliable than the current edition of ChatGPT, which of course also will revise and improve. So, we must project those improvements just as one might have projected in 1988 what the then newly released Motorola “Bag Phone” would evolve into handheld smart phones first released in 1994 and the iPhone in 2007. The development of generative AI will come much more rapidly than the mobile phone evolution, in part because it is made available via user software that can be updated seamlessly on existing hardware.
In turn, faculty members must perform the due diligence of bringing their teaching into line with the changing careers that students in their field of study are likely to pursue. For undergraduate students paying an average of more than $100,000 for a college education, there is an expectation for nothing less. We must teach for the future, not through the rearview mirror. It is unconscionable for students who receive less than forward-leaning teaching. Imagine whole classes of students carrying tens of thousands of dollars in college debt, to emerge unqualified for employment because the faculty did not go to the effort to research trends and developments in order to teach toward the jobs that will be available in 2025 and beyond!
Fortunately, we have a new partner in generative AI that will help us keep abreast of the trends and forecasts. We need to share what we learn now about how to get the most out of our AI partner with our students this semester. They must become fully facile with the technology as soon as possible. This cannot be left to chance, or to someone else, because the ever-evolving generative AI will be our students’ partner as they launch their own careers. Their jobs and futures depend upon it.
Nature, Published online: 01 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05852-9
Light Curves and Colors of the Ejecta from Dimorphos after the DART ImpactThe two activities on this page will step you through an initial Visitor and Resident Map of your online presence, then using some of the places that you have identified in that work to create a constellation map of your activities. once you’ve done the activities on this page you can start to make a plan for how you are going to continue to build out and maintain your online presence in the longer term.
The Visitor and Resident Map is helpful in that it gives you an opportunity to critically think about the places and spaces you inhabit on the internet, both in terms of those where you leave some sort of artifact intentionally and places where you are simply visiting and using the tools, but not really intentionally leaving evidence of you having been there.
To break this down a little bit more:
Visitor: The web as a series of tools and a pool of information. You are not leaving a social trace of your being there.
source: V&R Mapping by David White
Resident: The spaces and places where others are, where you express yourself or work on elements of your identity. You leave evidence of your visit there through posts, comments, or other work attributed to you.
In addition to considering where you are a visitor and where you are a resident, you will also be considering where you use these tools for personal use versus where you use them for professional use. If you are a student you will need to think a little about the future as most of the work you do right now is probably very work/professional related or clearly personal. However many of the places that are purely personal now (e.g. social media may be something you don’t think of as professional) may have some bearing on your professional life in the future.
To get started with Visitor and Resident map
Mapping your online presence into a Constellation of Activities is a way of engaging actively in curating your digital presence. Just like a constellation in the night sky, your digital constellation map identifies a number of different points that when connected together represent a story, in this case, the story of you and your professional work.
To make your constellation map turn over your Visitor and Resident Map and use the back of the paper.
Now that you have identified your main portfolio or profile visit it and ensure that you can log in and edit when you wish. Take your constellation map and look at the connections you drew, are all of these connections represented? Do any of them need to be updated or created? Take some time to ensure that your portfolio/profile is up to date.
One of the most difficult things that we find in working with a digital presence is maintaining and curating it over a longer period of time. Many people set up their portfolio sites and link them to places where they are doing work but fail to put a plan into place for updates and maintenance.
It can be helpful to think about a regular schedule for going back over your digital presence and ensuring that links are still working, that you are updating it with you are more recent work, and that you are removing or migrating old content as needed. Before you finish doing these activities take a few minutes to think about what would be a reasonable schedule for you to maintain and update your work.
Take some time to write down a reminder in your calendar to return to this on a regular basis and maybe even give yourself a reminder of what you need to do when you do return to it in order to continue this process of curation and long-term maintenance. This update schedule can be weekly, monthly, or even at the beginning/end of every semester. You may also wish to take some time to write down where/how you access the different components of your presence so it’s easily accessible when you want to make updates.
If you give a bear cocaine, he’s going to ask for more cocaine.
When you give him the cocaine, he’ll probably ask you for a vodka chaser.
When he’s finished, he’ll ask you if you’ve ever thought about honey, like really thought about how great it is, how it’s all-natural and totally free, just a gift from the fucking earth, and how that’s so great.
Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have white powder on his muzzle.
When he looks into the mirror, he’ll think what a great mirror it is for doing cocaine on. So he’ll probably ask you for more cocaine.
When he’s had a bump, he’ll tell you he has this incredible idea to open an upscale men’s salon in the forest. It’ll be called Getting Your Bearings, and it’ll have stylists who sharpen their own straight razors on bespoke leather straps, and an array of curated beard oils and styling pastes that smell like whiskey, and there’ll be a billiards table in the waiting area, and it’ll be totally rad, this is a real investment opportunity and you should get in on it now, on the ground floor, it’s gonna be so fucking amazing.
When you say an upscale men’s salon deep in the woods doesn’t sound like a very good business plan, he’ll say you never believed in his dreams. He’ll get a little weepy.
When you apologize and give him five hundred dollars, he’ll put that money straight up his nose.
Soon he’ll be in debt to the squirrels, the deer, and all his other friends in the forest who’ve invested in the salon, which is now called Bear Necessities. He’ll say he’s interviewing manicurists, but really he’s doing lines off the hood of a park ranger’s Jeep. He’ll introduce a fox as his business partner, but the fox is his dealer.
When the date for the soft opening passes and there’s still no salon, the forest creatures will start asking questions. The bear, red-eyed and jittery, will rant about permits and health inspectors and how he just needs a little more time.
He’ll start rooting through campsites and trash cans, looking for more cocaine.
When one day his friend the woodpecker finds him at the bottom of a dumpster behind a Dunkin Donuts, strung out and rubbing powdered sugar into his gums, the bear will admit he has a problem.
He’ll check himself into a rehab center called Think Pawsitive. He’ll get clean and go to group sessions and talk about his father, who went viral after breaking into a house and playing piano on a security camera, how the press called his father “Bear-thoven,” and how that put a lot of pressure on him when he was growing up.
He’ll take a personal inventory. He’ll do trust falls and make a list of wrongs he’s done to others. He’ll try meditation and accidentally hibernate for a few weeks. He’ll try art therapy and paint watercolors that are pretty good, actually, he really captures the way light falls through the canopy and dapples the forest floor, and he’ll feel good about himself for the first time in a long time.
When he gets out, he’ll make amends to the squirrels, the deer, and all his other friends in the forest. He’ll be relieved and grateful that they’re so supportive.
Back in the forest, he’ll get help from a substance abuse nonprofit called Bear Conditioning.
When he’s ready, he’ll invite you to meet him at a café / art gallery called The Den, where some of his watercolors are on display. You’ll tell him how good he seems, how healthy. You’ll tell him how proud you are. But he’ll seem distracted, repeatedly glancing at a fox drinking a macchiato in the corner.
He’ll stand up and excuse himself. He’ll go to the restroom. A few seconds later, the fox will follow him.
And chances are, if a bear is hanging out in a bathroom with a fox, he’s going to do some cocaine.
Returning to campus after the events of Feb 13 we find ourselves in a space of continuing to process our own feelings and emotions, caring for others, and providing opportunities and space for all of us to return to our teaching and learning routines. MSU has provided guidance to our community suggesting that we use the coming weeks to be flexible and accommodating, and to plan for the remainder of the semester.
Looking back, last week was a week of shock where the work we were doing was to try to understand what happened and to get ourselves situated. This week has been one of reconnecting with our students, colleagues, and routines.
As we move into next week we need to begin to plan for what our courses will look like for the remainder of the semester once we return from Spring Break. Spring Break will be a time for rest, relaxation, and restorative activities to help us be ready to finish the semester. However, we must remember that there may be tough times or things we simply aren’t able to do that we had intended. This is OK, and we can plan for flexibility to lessen the impact it will have on our classes and work when it does happen.
Generally, as you think about adopting a blended model in your course it’s a process of reimagining when and where the labor of teaching and learning takes place. Take the opportunity to think about what the needs of you and your students are in this moment, and consider what makes the most sense to use your in-person or synchronous class time for, versus what might be best done as homework or asynchronously.
Returning to a routine after an event like this is not “returning to normal,” in fact it is impossible to return to a normal state that existed prior to any event as the disruption itself has fundamentally changed the context and our understanding of it. Instead of looking for, or longing for a return to normal, it can be helpful to lean into the changes the disruption has caused, and to look for opportunities these changes provide for strengthening your teaching and professional work.
In the context of teaching, this can mean looking at opportunities this offers you to make changes to your courses to accommodate while maintaining the connections and community you have built in your course. There are countless tools and techniques we have to make the best learning environments possible for students while still providing flexibility. Below are a few resources and ideas to help you get started. Note: If you are still working on welcoming students back to the classroom the document titled Dealing with the Aftermath of Tragedy in the Classroom is helpful for giving some ideas and language for addressing your class.
Your students are likely in many different places with respect to their comfort in returning to the classroom and this may continue for some time. As you welcome students back to the classroom keep in mind that clearly communicating what you are doing in class that day and why it’s important for students to be there is helpful. Some faculty have found that this extra “nudge” can be the difference between a student attending class and not. Consider how you might build in this communication before each class session in the coming weeks, perhaps even using the scheduled send feature in your email to automatically send these updates to your students.
Adopting some of the principles of a Resilient Pedagogy, in particular focusing on the following core principles can help your course absorb some of the shock of the change and make it easier to complete the semester for both you and your students.
Return to your learning objectives as a first step. Review them and consider what you have covered already during the semester.
Interaction is the heart of a college classroom. Interaction facilitates engagement, where students connect and become invested in content and move from a passive learner to an active learner. When we talk about interaction we often think about student-student, or student-instructor interaction (e.g. class discussion) but interaction extends to other types of interactions as well, including student-course content interaction, student-technology interaction, and student-world interaction.
Maintaining access for students is important. This is both from a digital accessibility perspective (Eg. Captions, etc.) but also access in terms of students being able to get to the course content for review or if they need to miss a class session.
The syllabus is often thought of as a contract with your students. Typically the syllabus would only have minor changes during the course, but in times of crisis, there are opportunities and reasons to make changes to benefit the faculty, students, and course in general. As you consider what changes you might make to the syllabus keep in mind:
You may also want to survey your students to understand where they are at and to inform your work doing any modifications you need to do. Some ideas for this might be:
The Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative team came up with a sample survey template you can copy and modify/use.
As you make changes to the course please ensure you are clearly communicating with your students about what you are doing and why. Some ideas for this might be to cover
All of the ideas and suggestions above should be able to be implemented in your course without a shift of modality from in-person to remote or online. However, if you feel that your course or students would be better served please reach out to your Chair or Program Director to discuss options that may be available. If you need further help or ideas there are resources available on campus, please contact your local educational technology staff to discuss.
Note for readers not at Michigan State University. This post was initially intended for educators at MSU as they start our second full week of classes after the Feb 13, 2023 mass shooting. While the context and timing are specific to MSU, there are elements of this approach that may be useful at other institutions and at other times and in different situations.
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