Teddy Svoronos describes how today’s agentic AI changes what and how we teach on episode 617 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

An AI agent is an LLM that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.
-Teddy quoting Simon Willison’s definition

The process of having a task, write a report, use a tool, web search, and do it over and over again until you feel like you’ve gotten the full sort of spectrum of things—that I think is what an agent really is.
-Teddy Svoronos

These LLMs are now becoming like this intermediary between me and the actual content. And so I’m optimizing in a different way than I used to.
-Teddy Svoronos

I think there’s an analogy with these tools that I’ve been thinking of as cognitive debt, which is that as you offload to them, there are things that they’ll do that you won’t quite understand.
-Teddy Svoronos

Nancy Chick, Peter Felten, and Katarina Mårtensson share about The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning on episode 616 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

We see SOTL as simply inquiry into teaching and learning for the purposes of improving teaching and learning in context and then contributing to what we know about teaching and learning in support of the broader aims of higher education.
-Nancy Chick

What I usually say when I speak to colleagues and academics who are sort of starting a SOTL journey is to start small, small steps, and whatever is a low threshold.
-Katarina Mårtensson

I can’t go through this book and say who wrote this sentence or this section or whose idea this part was, because it really is a product of the three of us.
-Peter Felten

Matthew Mahavongtrakul and Bonni Stachowiak have a conversation about being kind to our future selves on episode 615 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Not everything that comes your way is an emergency. Not everything that comes your way has to demand your immediate attention.
-Matthew Mahavongtrakul

Once you are comfortable with your system and you’re iterating, it actually starts to become second nature, not only to professional life, but to personal life as well.
-Matthew Mahavongtrakul

An exercise that I did with my supervisor once was to actually go through each of these tasks and to see what I thought was high priority, was it actually high priority for the job that I was in?
-Matthew Mahavongtrakul

Bonni Stachowiak shares how to keep your Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) real simple with RSS on episode 614 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Rather than get that overwhelmed feeling of how hard it’s going to be to keep up, I don’t have to, and neither do you. Enter RSS, Real Simple Syndication.
-Bonni Stachowiak

It’s pretty spectacular how, if somebody knows about RSS, and they’ve subscribed to a blog or a website, how you can find people that you have a lot in common with, and get going with your curiosity.
-Bonni Stachowiak

It’s amazing what happens when, before we start trying to lecture or share information,  we ask people to predict something. Even if they end up predicting incorrectly, there still is that connection where we’ve piqued their curiosity.
-Bonni Stachowiak

Marc Watkins shares about cultivating skepticism and curiosity in an age of AI on Episode 613 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

I do think online education is going to be the focal point for this next year, and how it can survive with an agentic AI. My feeling is, we need to be offering students more embodied experiences and disembodied spaces.
-Marc Watkins

Every technology has its affordances and the things that are negative about it too; your cell phone, the computer, the fact we’re talking about this right now on the systems that we are using, cloud computing, that all has a cost.
-Marc Watkins

For an incoming freshman student in college to take 4 or 5 classes and have 4 or 5 very different AI policies, 4 or 5 very different understandings of what AI is, it is incredibly confusing.
-Marc Watkins

Lynn Meade uncovers how to make learning visible with portfolios on episode 612 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

Quotes from the episode

An ePortfolio is basically a curated collection of student work. It includes reflection, and it’s usually across the college experience.
-Lynn Meade

Anytime I teach portfolios, it’s really big that we talk about audience and purpose. Who is your audience and what is your purpose?
-Lynn Meade

There’s something particularly lovely about seeing student or faculty members’ written comments about my work. Both the critiques and those comments that build me up, and how very powerful they are, and how much they mean to me.
-Lynn Meade

It’s not about the tech. The most important thing is, am I writing? Am I able to think about myself? Am I able to reflect about myself?
-Lynn Meade

Danny Mann shares about fostering peace, joy, and community in teaching and leading on episode 611 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Great teaching, and I think great life, is this adaptive, responsive thing, pulling out the bugs or getting things back in balance.
-Danny Mann

Peace and joy are really interrelated, and I gravitated a lot towards these, as I spent time studying and practicing mindfulness practices.
-Danny Mann

If you discover your why, you could basically feel much more energized and joyful about what you do, if you align your life with that.
-Danny Mann

Giving students space to speak and share ups and downs. So the ironic leading by listening.
-Danny Mann

Mike Cross shares about his experiments (big and small) in teaching and learning on episode 610 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

The reason I did it is because I just wanted to better understand what my students were going through.
-Mike Cross

I love that, that idea of tiny experiments. I think that that is absolutely critical because we’re all so busy.
-Mike Cross

Anytime you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it makes you a better person, right? Whether that’s a better teacher, a better spouse, a better friend, a better citizen, anything.
-Mike Cross

Theresa Duong on episode 609 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

“All we’re really trying to do is create these conditions that can help our students flourish and thrive within our classrooms while maintaining the rigor of our work.”
– Theresa Duong

“I felt like I could thrive in my PhD program because I had these people who kept pushing me to go and kept pushing me to take care of myself.”
– Theresa Duong

“Pedagogy, the formal definition in my mind, is this art and science of teaching and learning.”
– Theresa Duong

“To me, wellness is really about thriving and flourishing in the work that you’re doing.”
– Theresa Duong

Sheila Tabanli shares ways to overcome the curse of expertise and other ways to be inclusive in our teaching on episode 608 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

Quotes from the episode

“I suggest, sign up to a course that you have no idea, and then we’ll talk later. In other words, feel what it means to be a novice.”
– Sheila Tabanli

“An expert in a field doesn’t necessarily mean they will be able to effectively teach that content.”
– Sheila Tabanli

“There are differences between how experts and novices look at this content.”
– Sheila Tabanli

“We can still slow down. We can still show how an expert solves a math problem without sacrificing from the rigor or the content.”
– Sheila Tabanli

Josh Brake shares metaphors and other ethical considerations regarding AI on Episode 607 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

“When you’re moving fast, it’s really easy to do things unreflectively and to make a poor decision without even realizing it.”
-Josh Brake

“The special thing about bicycles, at least in their non-electronic versions, is that they’re totally human-powered. So it’s all based on the energy that you put in, and it’s just transforming that energy, to make you more efficient and be able to move faster.”
-Josh Brake

“When you have something like an E bike, that augmentation can be used in a variety of different ways, so it can be used to actually extend your capacity.”
-Josh Brake

“It’s really this question about what’s the intention that you’re bringing to the technology when you come to the tool, what are the questions that you’re asking? And fundamentally, it’s a question of purpose and intention. Why are you using this?”
-Josh Brake