Envisioning Cards from the University of Washington’s Value Sensitive Design Lab provide a very accessible and engaging tool for developing literacy about AI in Freshman Writing classrooms.

I have been working with several of the key design criteria for thinking about AI use: stakeholders and time, as well as developing skills with tinkering, trusting, and tailoring with AI. Students work in groups to discuss who the different stakeholders of AI models are, not just now but into the Long Now of the distant future. They think about how obsolescence will impact future stakeholders, and impacts on sustained friendships over time. Thinking across multiple generations is particularly useful for stretching students’ critical thinking about AI impacts on culture, the planet, and future generations.

Slides are here.

This Spring, students in my Writing 122 class used the inspiring stories in the Tech Policy Lab’s collection, Telling Stories: On Culturally Responsive AI ( ed. Ryan Calo, Batya Friedman, Tadayoshi Kohno, Hannah Almeter and Nick Logler. UWashington: 2020) to consider the cultural impacts of future widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. All of them wrote what we called “cautionary tales” that considered what would be gained and lost by the seemingly magical pervasive adoption of artificial intelligence in a wide range of realms.

Slides to Introduce the Project are here.

Some students were willing to share their stories in a collection (below)

This fall, I have wanted to infuse my course with some kind of AI-awareness activity with my Writing students. I found an article that discussed how much water is used for AI training and asked students to read it and then do an inventory of their own water usage. The results have been really interesting. Many students reported that they never use AI, but almost every student was surprised to discover the water costs of AI usage.

Here’s the prompt with a link to the form.

First read the article on AI and water usage to understand this assignment. ( PDF of Water Usage Article )Then name a writing project of any kind you have written recently–either using AI or not using AI. Fill out the form here so we can get a baseline understanding of our use of water when we use AI.

In November 2023, Angel David Nieves, Siobhan Senier and I were notified by Professor Jennifer Ross that our edited collection, People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center (Minnesota UP) was awarded the 2023 DH Caucus Book Prize by the American Studies Association. Unfortunately, Angel David died just weeks after this announcement. In honor of his extraordinary contributions, the DH Caucus book award is now named after him. “The ASA DH Caucus Ángel David Nieves Book Award was renamed to memorialize the profound scholarly, pedagogical, social justice, and personal impacts of Dr. Nieves on his colleagues and the field of digital humanities. The Ángel David Nieves Book Award recognizes exceptional work that grapples with urgent questions that are specifically situated in practices of studying at the intersection of American Studies, Digital Humanities, and Digital Studies.” I look forward to hearing about the 2024 recipient.

Here are my slides from the MLAsession “Teaching Digital Humanities at Community Colleges “

Slides

Paper

In May I participated in Lane’s Teaching and Learning Symposium with colleagues Aryn and Rachel. This is the third year we have used Flower Darby’s Small Teaching Online as an anchor text for making improvements to our online classes. This year I focused on using an equity lens to improve the warmth and sense of belonging in my online classes. The incremental approach that Darby uses is perfect for community college teaching contexts, because faculty at CCs get few extended opportunities to overhaul our courses or pedagogies. But consistent tinkering produces long-term improvement, I think. My slides are here:

My review of Robin Isserles’ important book, The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community Colleges (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2021) is out in Academe this month. You can read the review here or even better, order the book for yourself or for your college library!

On April 15, I had the pleasure of addressing faculty and librarians at Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, Florida. The Institute for Teaching Excellence there is an impressive facility, and it was a pleasure to be in a room filled with CC faculty who are interested in infusing digital humanities into their curriculum. Thanks to Mia Tignor and all the staff at IRSC for an invigorating discussion.

Here’s my PowerPoint presentation from the talk.

Assignments to inspire DH infusions and redesign at IRSC:

Link for Google Drive here:

This year I am participating in a Faculty Inquiry Group aimed at improving online pedagogy. We are reading Flower Darby’s Small Teaching Online and working to implement some of Darby’s principles. One of the key principles she encourages is that of student engagement, something I’ve been interested in since 2005 when I worked on a Title III grant whose aim was to improve student engagement.

Darby encourages incremental changes over time to improve online teaching and student engagement. With that in mind I went online and found that California is intentionally improving student engagement in its online STEM courses. It calls this process “Humanizing” an online course. I’m fascinated by this idea and am working to humanize my own humanities class.

The first thing I’ve done is to begin a “Liquid Syllabus” template that I will develop in Fall 2021. More about that here.

Source: https://alchetron.com/Kyoufu-Densetsu-Kaiki!-Frankenstein

My question: how to get online students to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and not just read an online summary of the novel. My solution: assume that students will encounter Spark Notes or some similar website in an era of “No Fear Literature.” Instead of trying to replace Spark Notes encounters, I extend those encounters by leading students back to the original and guiding them through a process of improving upon the notes by observing what is left out of them. Who knows if they still read the whole novel to get there, but my experience has shown me that they do encounter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with a fresh appreciation of the language and complexity of the original. 

Here’s the assignment.