When I received word that one of the papers I submitted to the SoTL Commons Conference in Savannah, Georgia was accepted as a poster, I was disappointed. Then, I began to work with friend and colleague Andrea Woods who designed this amazing poster, inspired by visions of the educational future in the 1950s.
I carried a three-foot tube through several airports. It fell off a ledge from Departures to Arrivals in Edmonton, and got wedged in an overhead compartment in Atlanta, but when it finally made it to Savannah, it inspired over two hours’ worth of awesome conversations.
The paper this poster comes from is the piece of writing I am most proud of. While Franklin and this paper does not specifically mention artificial intelligence, Franklin’s observations on technology as practice are still relevant. First, genAI can assist with the dismantling of teaching from a holistic to a production level technology. Program and course design can now leverage AI to increase the speed of development. Smart Subject Matter Experts will maximize the value of these tools, and smart institutions should expect more and better from their SMEs (in themselves a form of unbundling).
GenAI also intensifies the need to design assessments to minimize disaster, specifically the disastrous risk of mass academic integrity violations. The research paper and weekly discussion posts are two forms of assessment that can be created in minutes, and faculty rightly wish to regulate and punish their inappropriate usage. This shifts an important part of teaching to the manager by way of those individuals who will be involved in cheat-proofing assessments and investigating academic integrity violations.
Even more importantly, using genAI as a teaching tool will likely make postsecondary institutions supplier-led, add to their technology expenditures, and make them less sustainable (financially and envrionmentally). The rush to maximize the value of these powerful technologies to achieve scale will override other forms of social logic.
The poster presentation ended up being the best part of the conference, and I am glad Ursula made the journey with me. It was nice to have a physical presence for someone whose writings carry much weight in my mind.