Tag Archives: teaching and learning

Teaching with AI Book Coming Soon! PRE-ORDER NOW at JHUPbooks

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https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53869/teaching-ai

I am doing my new AI workshop from coast to coast this fall and there is a new book on the way too: Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning that I am doing with C. Edward Watson. (We also co-wrote Teaching Naked Techniques together.)

With everything being written about AI, this is coming together quickly and it will be out from Johns Hopkins University Press in early 2024. It will be SHORT and PRACTICAL, but also hopefully relatively comprehensive (AI for research, AI at work, AI assignments, cheating, writing a policy etc.)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has is revolutionizing the way we learn, work and think. Its integration into classrooms and workplaces is already underway, impacting and challenging ideas about creativity, authorship, and education. We are hoping to help teachers discover how to harness and manage AI as a powerful teaching tool.  More to come.

Preparing for Fall: Pandemic Workshops

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New workshops from José Antonio Bowen offered virtually. Contact me for more info. Read Is Higher Ed Asking the Wrong Questions? in InsideHigherEd. OR watch my new TED talk on the New 3Rs.

Teaching 1/2 Naked: Preparing for Uncertainty

How can you prepare to create the most significant learning experiences possible for students this fall, regardless of the mode? Most faculty have neither the time nor expertise to create either an online course that utilizes the best new technology or the ability to pivot quickly to online in the case of a campus outbreak. Here is a way to plan for whatever comes and continue to support your students while also taking care of yourself. There are a few technical tricks, but mostly it is about setting up flexible communication channels, designing learning that motivates students, focusing on the most powerful experiences, and prioritizing your own efforts. Here are ways to lower stress and reframe rather than replace. Nimble design can prepare you for excellent teaching in rapidly changing circumstances.

Pandemic Strategy: Planning for Uncertainty

The hope for stability is a powerful cognitive bias. With uncertainty comes fear. For leaders that brings the fear of missteps and a bias to reassure and delay. If we just had a little more information, we could make a better decision. Covid-19 is an ambiguous threat. We do not know for how long it will continue and we certainly do not know how it will change people’s behavior. This is not the time to stay the course and downplay. Hope is not a strategy and there is no best rational response. There is no knowable “new normal,” only more chaos, volatility, stress and disorder to come. We like plans, but what we need is nimbleness. Efficiency becomes a vulnerability during rapid change: the more efficient supply chains of milk and toilet paper, for example, were not easily adaptable. Humans have a bias to wait for more certainty, but when new information is almost certain to be contradictory and random, we are waiting in vain. We need optionality and asymmetric opportunities. Leaders need to accept that we will make mistakes, but still act with urgency, transparency and honesty that you do not know the future and then iterate. 

Virtual Leadership

A crisis reduces motivation, creativity and cognitive bandwidth—for everyone. An ambiguous threat, like Covid-19, only intensifies the uncertainty that reduces performance. Loss of choice, only compounds this; so being forced to work from home is further demotivating. Virtual leadership requires new definitions of process, purpose and permission. Relationships, care and belonging matter more, but so does the opportunity to experiment. How can we create new ways for people to add value? Variety and extreme examples become more valuable during a time of uncertainty, so we need to create more potential for meaningful and creative work. Given the opening, anyone can become a hero in a time of crisis; now is a great time to support and encourage agency and forward thinking.

Crisis and Innovation 

One of the first things to go in times of crisis is innovation. This happens both because we are out of bandwidth, but also because we falsely perceive that now is not the time. There is a tendency to focus on the tactical (making sure people can do their jobs from home), but disruption is the time when market share moves the MOST. There is much more opportunity for strategy when a situation is fluid, especially if the basic business model seems to be failing.

Innovative ideas start as subtle, awkward ideas, but they benefit from disorder. In a chaotic situation, it is impossible to predict which new idea or which plan may be most useful in advance. But more options, more experiments and the ability to respond quickly are essential to thrive. We will explore a process for greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.

Teaching the Pandemic

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Should you teach a stressful topic during a stressful time? While there are risks about focusing about what is on every student’s mind right now, there are good reasons to try. And yes, this is all works for your new online teaching.

First, virtually everyone is hungry for information about this quickly changing situation and the urgency and our natural curiosity are leading most people to click on anything coronavirus. Why not redirect this curiosity to a more productive purpose? Second, teaching is about motivation: only the person who does the work does the learning. Students are highly motivated to learn about this right now. Third, it is a complex interdisciplinary problem that involves ethics and judgement, precisely the sort of skill that employers say they want and we say we teach. Finally, it might even be a public service. With all of the misinformation available, helping students practice understanding sources and credibility could save lives and also demonstrate the value of this life skill.

I’d start with support and empathy—this is a great moment to demonstrate you care and build some community: both essential for good teaching and especially important as students are anxious and probably isolated. Then a pause to make sure students are ok diving into this topic, with acknowledgement some may have hesitations or other issues. I’d perhaps also say that staying healthy requires good information and the ability to find and analyze conflicting advice and sources.

There are connections with virtually every subject we offer on campus. There is certainly math, modeling, science, epidemiology and networking in abundance. Why would a small change in the mortality rate or the infectiousness matter? Why are airplane cabins safer than your gym right now? If some are finding it hard to understand the severity of precautions, that is an entry into the psychology of our bias against the future or how politics bias how we view evidence. Culture, history and sociology? Why do we shake hands anyway? Would we be healthier with different cultural greetings? Will people really self-quarantine? 

Music and art might seem less promising, but as Ted Gioia points out in his new book, Music: A Subversive History, people who survive a crisis, stop taking things for granted, and look at the familiar with fresh eyes. He argues that the Renaissance, Shakespeare and jazz all emerged in places and times that made them “sources of virality from both an artistic and epidemiological standpoint.” Discuss.

This is a particularly good moment for philosophy and ethics. With young people at relatively low risk for the most serious consequences, why were schools among the first to close? What are the obligations of individuals to society? How should people and governments (political science anyone?) make decisions to restrict the movements and lives of low-risk people for the benefit of high-risk people? 

With the stock market crash, empty shelves and questions about what stimulus might work in a situation where money isn’t the problem, business and economics classes should be equally interesting right now.

Teaching begins with engagement and there could hardly be a more engaging subject right now. 

Learning is S.W.E.E.T.

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My last WYPR commentary on learning

Discoveries in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, design thinking and behavioral economics have given us substantial new insights into how learning works. 

At its core, learning is what happens to the structure in your brain and it turns out that the five most important things anyone can do to improve learning are S.W.E.E.T.: sleep, water, exercise, eating, and time are the most important conditions for supporting your brain in learning.  

We have great experimental confirmation of all of these things. Moderate exercise, even 4 hours after studying improves retention. Being dehydrated reduces both cognitive and physical performance. And T is for time: teaching matters, but you learn more when you practice more.

The S for Sleep and it is critical because sleep is when your brain sorts memories and decides what to remember: if you get only 7 hours of sleep, your emotional reactions to yesterday’s class predominate. You remember that you felt stupid in math class.  But 90% of your REM sleep occurs in that 8th hour, so with an extra hour of sleep, your brain re-lives that math class and de-emotionalizes the memories: so you better remember the math part. 

These research findings can help us improve learning. Your brain lives in your body, so it only functions and learns well when it gets what it needs biologically. Emphasizing wellness and the SWEET part of learning is as essential as what happens in classrooms. 

There is a chapter on SWEET in the Nudge book, due out in 2022.

Expanding Comfort with Discomfort

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Here is the text of my latest public commentary on WYPR: https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-expanding-comfort-discomfort

Some tolerance for ambiguity is essential for learning, change, and growth. When we encounter a new idea, technology or method, it feels strange at first. That is almost the definition of new: something foreign to what we already know. 

Goucher College requires all students to study abroad. And when students ask where they should go to study abroad, the answer is simple. Go to the place that makes you as uncomfortable as you can stand. Learning to be comfortable with your discomfort is a key aspect of learning. All creative people and self-regulated learners have learned to expand their own comfort with discomfort.

If I reject all ideas that are foreign, I will miss opportunities to change. But if I accept all new ideas as better, I will simply substitute one set of assumptions for another. Learning is about creating a space, at least temporarily, for what might be true. 

Learning is also about making distinctions. All the music we hate sounds the same. OR more accurately, the less we know about something, the more it seems to all be the same. As we learn, we distinguish, and things become more complex. Knowledge is also always changing: new discoveries will change what we thought we already knew. 

Our tolerance for ambiguity is useful because it mirrors how knowledge is assessed and accumulated. The answer to most good questions, is “it depends.”

The future of work: what you do will not define who you should be.

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My series on WYPR continues here.

As parents, we want our children to be happy after college, just not in our basement. Given the cost, it is reasonable to expect one benefit of college to be a better job—and college graduates earn, on average, $1M more over a lifetime over those with no college education. 

But technology is creating new jobs and eliminating old ones. No college can give you all of the content that you will need in 10 years, because a lot of it has not yet been discovered. The future is unknown. But it will involve technology.

If you want to be prepared for the future job market, focus on the places where computers do less well. You will still need to be able to interface with computers and understand data analytics, but the future of work is about being complimentary to technology.

So an modern education should help you ask better questions. Computers will increasing be able to answer our questions faster, but thinking of new and more creative questions to ask is something humans are likely to be better at for a very long time. It is our ability to leap into the unknown that provides the advantage.

Technology is also changing the nature of work. Artificial intelligence might make your job obsolete, but might also make work obsolete. Here again, determining not only what CAN be done, but what SHOULD be done, and what is worth doing—these will remain fundamentally human decisions. Education should also provide the tools to create meaning in life. Helping students understand who they can be and not just what they do is an essential part of college.