274. ChatGPT

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode, Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins join us to discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and concern in higher ed. In this episode we discuss how to prepare students for a future in which AI tools will become increasingly prevalent in their lives.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Robert Cummings and Marc Watkins. Robert is the Executive Director of Academic Innovation, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia and is the co-editor of Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Marc Watkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He co-chairs an AI working group within his department and is a WOW Fellow, where he leads a faculty learning community about AI’s impact on education. He’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his writing and a Blackboard Catalyst Award for teaching and learning. Welcome, Robert and Mark.

Robert: Thank you.

Marc: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Marc, are you drinking tea?

Marc: My hands are shaking from caffeine so much caffeine inside of me too. I started off today with some I think it’s Twinings Christmas spice, which is really popular around this house since I got that in my stocking. My wife is upset because I’m in a two bag per cup person. And she’s like saying you got to stop that, so she cuts me off around noon [LAUGHTER] and just to let me just sort of like dry out, for lack of a better word from caffeine withdrawal.

Rebecca: Well, it’s a great flavored tea. I like that one too.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I could see why you would double bag it.

Marc: I do love it.

Rebecca: How about you, Robert?

Robert: I’m drinking an English black tea. A replacement. Normally my tea is Barry’s tea, which is an Irish tea….

Rebecca: Yeah.

Marc: …but I’m out, so I had to go with the Tetley’s English black tea.

Rebecca: Oh, it’s never fun when you get to go to your second string. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I am drinking a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Oh, an old favorite, John.

John: It is.

Rebecca: I’m back to one of my new favorites, the Hunan Jig, which I can’t say with a straight face. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the ChatGPT. We’ve seen lots of tweets, blog posts, and podcasts in which you are both discuss this artificial intelligence writing application. Could you tell us a little bit about this tool, where it came from and what it does?

Marc: I guess I’ll go ahead and start, I am not a computer science person. I’m just a writing faculty member. But we did kind of get a little bit of a heads up about this in May when GPT3, which is the precursor to ChatGPT was made publicly available. It was at a private beta for about a year and a half when it was being developed, and then went to public in May. And I kind of logged in through some friends of mine social media to start checking out and seeing what was going on with it. Bob was really deep into AI with the SouthEast conference. You were at several AI conferences too during the summer as well, Bob. It is a text synthesizer, it’s based off of so much text just scraped from the internet and trained on 175 billion parameters. It’s just sort of shocking to think about the fact that this can now be accessed through your cell phone, if you want to do it on your actual smartphone, or a computer browser. But it is something that’s here. It’s something that functions fairly well, that you make things up sometimes. Sometimes it can be really very thoughtful, though, in it’s actual output. It’s very important to keep in mind, though, that AI is more like a marketing term in this case. There’s no thinking, there’s no reasoning behind it too. It can’t explain any of its choices. We use the term writing when we talk about it, but really what it is, is just text generating. When you think about writing, that’s the whole process of the thinking process and going through, being able to explain your choices and that sort of thing. So it’s a very, very big math engine, with a lot of processing power behind it.

Robert: I completely agree with everything Marc’s saying. I think about it is, and I believe it’s true, Marc, as far as we know, it’s an open AI, but it’s still using GPT3, so it’s really the same tool as Playground. I think it’s really interesting that when openAI shifted from their earlier iteration of this technology, which was Playground and there were some other spin offs from that as well, but that was basically a search format where you got an entry, and you would enter a piece of text and then you would get a response, that when they shifted it to chat, it seemed to really take it to the next level in terms of the attention that it was gathering. And I think it’s rhetorically significant to think about that, because the personalization, perhaps, the idea that you had an individual conversation partner, I think is exceptionally cute. The way that they have the text scroll in ChatGPT so as to make it look like the AI is “thinking” to maybe push this out when it’s immediately available. I think all of that reminds me a little bit of Eliza, which is one of the first sort of AI games that you could play where you play the game to try to guess whether or not there was another person on the other side of the chat box. It reminds me a bit of that. But I can certainly see why placing this technology inside of a chat window makes it so much more accessible and perhaps even more engaging than what we previously had. But the underlying technology, as far as I can see, is still GPT3, and it hasn’t changed necessarily significantly, except for this mode of access.

Rebecca: How long has this tool been learning how to write or gathering content?

Marc: Well, that’s a great question. So it is really just a precursor from GPT3. And again, we don’t really know this because open AI isn’t exactly open, unlike their name. The training data cuts off for this model for ChatGPT about two years ago. And of course, ChatGPT was launched last year at the end of November. So, it’s very recent, pretty up to date with some of that information, too. You can always kind of check the language model and see how much it actually, as we say, knows about the world by what recent events it can accurately describe. It’s really interesting how quickly people have freaked out about this. And Bob’s, I think, building off of that, I think he’s very right that this slight rhetorical change in the user interface to a chat, that suddenly people are able to actually interact with, set off this moral panic in education. You guys know this through the state of New York, New York City schools have now tried to ban it in the actual classroom, which I think is not going to work out very well. But it is certainly the theme we’re seeing not just in K through 12, but also higher ed too… seeing people talk about going back to blue books, going to AI proctoring services, which are just kind of some of the most regressive things you could possibly imagine. And I don’t want to knock people for doing this, because I know that they’re both frightened, and they probably have good reason to be frightened too, because it’s disrupting their practice. It’s also hopefully at the tail end of COVID, which has left us all completely without our capacity to deal with this. But I do want to keep everyone in mind too, and Bob’s really a great resource on this too, from his work with Wikipedia, is that your first impression of a tool, especially if you’re a young person using this and you have someone in authority telling you what a tool is, if you tell them that that tool is there to cheat or it is there to destroy their writing process or a learning process, that is going to be submitted in them for a very long time. And it’s gonna be very hard to dissuade people of that too. So really, what I’ve just tried to do is caution people about the fact that we need to be not so panicked about that. That’s much easier said than done,

Robert: Marc and I started giving a talk on our campus through our Center for Teaching and Learning and our academic innovations group in August. And we’ve just sort of updated it as we’re invited to continue to give the talk. But in it, we offer a couple of different ways for the faculty to think about how this is going to impact their teaching. And one of the things that I offered back in August, at least I think it still holds true, is to think about writing to learn and or writing to report learning. And so writing to learn is going to mean now writing alongside AI tools. And writing to report learning is going to be a lot trickier, depending on what types of questions you ask. So I think it’s going to be a situation where, and I’ve already seen some of this work in the POD community, it’s going to be a situation where writing to report learning has to maybe change gears a bit and think about different types of questions to ask. And the types of questions will be those that are not easily replicated, or answered in a general knowledge sort of way, but they’re going to lean on specific things that you, as instructor, think are going to be valuable in demonstrating learning, but also not necessarily part of a general knowledge base. So, for instance, if you’re a student in my class, and we’ve had lots of discussions about… I don’t know… quantum computing, and in the certain discussion sessions, Marc threw out an idea about quantum computing that was specific. So what I might do on my test is I might cite that as a specific example and remind students that we discussed that in class and then ask them to write a question in response to parts of that class discussion. So that way, I could be touching base with something that’s not generally replicable and easily accessible to AI. But I can also ask a question that’s going to ask my students to demonstrate knowledge about general concepts. And so, if both elements are there, then I probably know that my short answer question is authentically answered by my students. If some are not, then I might have questions. So I think it’s gonna be about tweaking what we’re doing and not abandoning what we’re doing. But it’s really a tough moment right now. Because, as soon as we say one thing about these technologies, well then they iterate and they evolve. It’s just a really competitive landscape for these tool developers. And they’re all trying to figure out a way to develop competitive advantage. And so they have to distinguish themselves from their competitors. And we can’t predict what ways that they will do that. So it’s going to be a while before, I think, this calms down for writing faculty specifically and for higher education faculty generally, because, of course, writing is central to every discipline and what we do, or at least that’s my bias.

Rebecca: So I’m not a writing faculty member. I’m a designer and a new media artist. And to me, it seems like something that could be fun to play with, which is maybe a counter to how some folks might respond to something like this. Are there ways that you can see a tool like this being useful in helping or advancing learning?

Robert: So, we’ve talked about this a bit, I really think that the general shape to the response, in writing classes specifically, is about identifying specific tools for specific writing purposes in specific stages. So if we’re in the invention stage, and we’re engaging a topic and you’re trying to decide what to write about, maybe dialoguing with open AI with some general questions, it’s going to trigger some things that you’re going to think about and follow up on. It could be great. You know, Marc was one of the first people to point out, I think it was Marc said this, folks who have writer’s block, this is a real godsend, or could be. It really helps get the wheels turning. So we could use in invention, we can use it in revision, we can use it to find sources, once we already have our ideas, so identify specific AI iterations for specific purposes inside of a larger project. I think that’s a method that’s going to work and is going to be something that gets toward that goal that we like to say in our AI Task Force on campus here, which is helping students learn to work alongside AI.

Marc: Yeah, that’s definitely how I feel about it too, and to kind of echo what Bob’s saying, there’s a lot more than you could do with a tool than just generate text. And I think that kind of gets lost in this pipe that you see with ChatGPT and everything else. I kind of mentioned before Whisper was another neural network that they launched just quietly back in the end of September start of October of last year, that works with actually uploading speech. It’s multilingual. So you can actually kind of use that almost like a universal translator in some ways. But the thing that’s, like outstanding with it is when you actually use it with the old GPT3 Playground… I say the old GPT playground like it’s not something that’s still useful right now… it uploads the entire transcript of a recording into the actual Playground. So you actually input it into AI. If you think about this from a teaching perspective, especially from students who have to deal with lecture, and want a way to actually organize their notes in some way, shape, or form, they’re able to do that then by just simply issuing a simple command to summarize your notes, to organize it. You can synthesize it with your past notes, even come up with test questions for an essay you need to write or an exam you’re going to have. Now from a teaching perspective, as someone who’s like try to be as student-centric as possible, that’s great, that’s wonderful. I also realized those people who are still wedded to lecture probably going to look at this, like another moral panic. I don’t want my students to have access to this, because it’s not going to help them with their note taking skills. I don’t want them to be falling asleep in my class as if they were staying awake to begin with. So I’m going to ban this technology. So we’re going to see lots of little areas of this pop up throughout education, it’s not just going to be within writing, it’s going to be in all different forms, the different ways… that I’m right there with you using this tool to really help you begin to think about in designing your own thought process, as you’re going through either a writing project, some people using it for art, some people use it for coding, it’s really up to your imagination of how you’d like to do it. The actual area that we’re looking at has a name, I don’t even know it has a name until the developers we’re working with, guys at Fermat. So there’s this article from a German university about beyond generation is what they call the actual form of that. So using your own text as sort of the input to an AI and then getting brainstorming ideas, automatic summaries, using it to get counter arguments to your own version notes. They use it also for images and all different other types of new generations too. So it’s really out there and like I think ChatGPT is just kind of sucking all the air up out of the room because likely so it’s it’s the new thing. It’s what everyone is talking about but so much has gone on, it really has, in this past few months. The entire fall semester I was emailing Bob like two or three times a week and poor Bob was just like “Just stop emailing me. Okay, we understand. I can’t look at this either. We don’t have time.” But it really was just crazy. It really is.

John: What are some other ways that this could be used in helping students become more productive in their writing or in their learning?

Marc: It really is going to be up to whatever the individual instructor and also what the student comes up with this too. If your process is already set in stone, like my process is set in stone as a writer, I think most of us are too as we’ve matured, it’s very difficult to integrate AI into that process. But if you’re young, and you’re just starting out, you’re maturing, that is a very different story. So we’re going to start seeing ways our students are going to be using this within their own writing process, their own creative process, too, that we haven’t really imagined. And I know that’s one of the reasons why this is so anxiety producing, because we say that there is a process, we don’t want to talk about the fact that this new technology can also disrupt that a little bit. I’ll go and segue to Bob, too, because I think he’s talked a little bit about this as well.

Robert: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve come together in our group that Marc’s co-leading is, we’ve come together to say that we want to encourage our students to use the tools, full stop. Now, we want to help them interpret the usage of those tools. So really being above board and transparent about engaging the tools, using our systems of citation, struggling to cope as they are, but just saying at the beginning, use AI generators in my class. I need to know what writing is yours and what writing is not. But, then designing assignments so you encourage limited engagements, which are quickly followed with reflection. So, oh Gosh, who was is Marc, a colleague, that was, I think, was at NC State in the business class where last spring he had students quote, unquote, cheat with AI.

Marc: Paul Fyfe, Yes.

Robert: Yes, thank you. And so he, in so many words, he basically designed the assignment so that students would have AI write their paper and almost uniformly they said, “Please, let me just write my paper, because it’d be a lot simpler. And I would like the writing a lot more.” So that type of engagement is really helpful, I think, because they were able to fully utilize the AI that they could access, and then try a bunch of different purposes with it, a bunch of different applications with it, and then form an opinion about what its strengths and weaknesses were. And then they pretty quickly saw its limitations. So, I mean, to specifically answer your question, John, I do think it can be helpful with a wide range of tasks. Again, invention stage, if I just have an idea, I can pop an idea in there and ask for more information and I’ll get more information. Hopefully, it will be reliable. But sometimes I’ll get a good deal of information and it’ll encourage me to keep writing. There are AI tools that are good about finding sources, there are AI tools that will continue to help you shift voice. So we’ve seen a lot of people do some fun things with shifting voice. Well, I can think of a lot of different types of writing assignments where I might try to insert voice, and people would be invited to think about the impact of voice on the message and on the purpose. And let’s not forget, so one of the things that irks Marc and myself is that a lot of our friends in the computer science world think of writing as a problem to solve. And we don’t think of writing that way. But, as I said to Marc the other day when we were talking about this, if I’m trying to write an email to my boss in a second language, writing is a problem for me to solve. And so Grammarly has proven to us that there are a large number of people in our world who need different levels of literacy in different applications with different purposes and they’re willing to compensate them for some additional expertise. So I had tried to design a course to teach in the fall, we were to engage AI tools, specifically in a composition class, and I had to pull the plug on my own proposal because the tools were evolving too quickly, Marc and Marc’s team solved the riddle because they decided that they could identify the tools on an assignment basis. So it would be a unit within the course. And so when they shrank that timeline, they had a better chance the tools they identified at the beginning of the unit would still be relatively the same by the time they got to the end of the unit. So getting a menu or a suite of different AI tools that you want to explore, explore them with your students, give them spaces to reflect, always make sure that you’re validating whatever is being said if you’re going to use it, and then always cite it. Those are the ground rules that we’re thinking about when we’re engaging the different tools and then, I don’t know, it can be fun.

Marc: You mean writing can be fun? I’ve never heard such things.

Rebecca: It would be incredible. One of the things that I hear you underscoring related to citations, it was making me think about the ways that I have students already using third party materials in a design class, where we use third party materials when we’re writing a research paper, because we are using citations. So we have methods for documenting these things and making it clearer to an audience, what’s ours and what’s not. So it’s not like it’s some brand new kind of thing that we’re trying to do in terms of documenting that or communicating that to someone else. It’s just adapting it a bit, because it’s a slightly different thing that we’re using, or a different third party tool that we’re using or third party material that we’re using, but I have my students write a copyright documentation for things that they’re doing, like, what’s the license for the images that they’re using that don’t require attribution? I go through the whole list, the fonts that they’re using and the license that they’re using for that? So for me, this seems like an obvious next step or a way that that same process of providing that attribution or that documentation would work well in this atmosphere.

Robert: I think the challenge, and Marc and I’ve talked about this before, the challenge is when you shift from a writing support tool to a writing generation tool. So most of us aren’t thinking about documenting spell checker in Microsoft Word, because we don’t see that as content that is original in some way, right? But it definitely affects our writing, nor do we cite smart compose, Google’s sentence completion tool. But how do you know when you’ve gone from smart compose, providing just a correct way to finish your own thought, to smart compose giving you a new thought. And that’s an interesting dilemma. If we can just take a wee nip of schadenfreude, it was interesting to see that the machine learning conference recently had to amend its own paper submission, Marc was pointing this out to me, their own papers submission guidelines to say: “if you use AI tools, you can’t submit.” And then they had to try to distinguish between writing generators and writing assistance. And so that’s just not an easy thing to do. But it’s just going to involve trust between writers and audiences.

Marc: Yeah, I don’t envy the task of any of our disciplinary conventions trying to do this. We could invest some time in doing this with ChatGPT or thinking about this. But then it’s not even clear if ChatGPT is going to be the end of the road here. We’re talking about this as just another version of AI and how he would do that. I’ve seen some people arguing on social media about the fact that a student or anyone who is using an AI should then track down that idea that the AI is spitting out. And I think that’s incredibly futile because it’s trained on the internet, you don’t know how this idea came about. And that’s one of the really big challenges with this type of technology is that it breaks the chain of citations that was used to actually, for lack of a better word, to generate text. I was gonna say to show knowledge, but it can’t really show knowledge, it’s just basically generated an idea, or mimicked an idea. So that really is going to be a huge challenge that we’re going to have to face too and think about. It’s going to be something that will require a lot of dialogue between ourselves, our students. And also thinking about where we want them to use this technology. I think for right now, it’s something that you want to use a language model with your students, or invite them to use it too, tell them to reflect on that process, as Bob mentioned earlier too. There are some tools out there, LEX is one of them, where you could actually track what was being built in your document with the AI, which sort of like glow and be highlighted. So there are going to be some tools on the market that will do this. It is going to be a challenge, though, especially when people start going wild with it, because when you’re working with AI, when it just takes a few seconds to generate a thing and keeping track of that is going to be something that will require a great deal of not only trust with our students, but you really are going to have to sit down and tell them, “Look, you’re gonna have to slow down a little bit, and not let the actual text generations sort of take over your thinking process and your actual writing process.”

Robert: Speaking a little bit of process right now, I’m working on a project with a colleague in computer science. And we’re looking at that ancient technology, Google smart compose. And much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a literature where anyone had really spent time looking at the impact of the suggestions on open-ended writing. I did find some research that had been done on smaller writing. So, for instance, there was a project that asked writers to compose captions for images, but I didn’t see anything longer than that. So that’s what we did in the fall, we got 119 participants, and we asked them to write an open-ended response, an essay essentially, a short essay in response to a common prompt. Half of the writers had Google smart, compose enabled, and half didn’t. And we’re going through the data now to see how the suggestions actually affect writers’ process and product. So we’re looking at the product right now. One of our hypotheses is that the Google smart compose participants will have writing that is more similar, because essentially they will be given similar suggestions about how to complete their sentences. And we expect that in the non-smart compose enabled population we’ll find that there was more lexical and syntactical diversity in those writing products. On the writing process side, we’re creating, as far as I know, new measures to determine whether they accept suggestions, edit suggestions, or reject suggestions. And we all do some of all three of those usually, but the time spent. And so we’re trying to see if there’s correlations between the amount of time spent, and then again, the length of text, the complexity of text, because if you’re editing something else, you’re probably not thinking about your own ideas, and how to bring those forward. But overall, what we’re hoping to suggest, and, again, because we’re not able to really see what’s happening in smart compose, we’re having to operate with it as a black box. What we’re hoping to suggest is that our colleagues in software development start inviting writers into the process of articulating our writing profile. So let’s say, for instance, you might see an iteration in the future of Google smart compose that says, “Hey, I noticed that you’re rejecting absolutely everything we’re sending to you. Do you want to turn this off?” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: Or “I noticed that you’re accepting things very quickly. Would you like for us to increase the amplitude and give you more more quickly?” Understanding those types of interactions and preferences can help them build profiles and the profiles can then hopefully make the tools more useful. So, I know that they, of course, do customize suggestions over time. So I know that the tool does grow. I think as John you might have said, you know, how long is it learning to write, well, they learn to write with us. In fact, those are features that Grammarly competes with its competitors on. It’s like our tool will train up or quickly. At any rate, what does it mean to help students learn to work alongside AI? Well, what I believe, when it comes to writing, part of what it’s going to mean, is help them to understand more quickly what the tool is giving them, what they want, and how they can harness the tool to their purposes. And until the tools are somewhat stable and until the writers are invited into the process of understanding the affordances of the tool and the feature sets. That’s just not possible.

John: Where do you see this moral panic as going? Is this something that’s likely to fade in the near future? And we’ve seen similar things in the past. I’ve been around for a while. I remember reactions to calculators and whether they should be used to allow people to take square roots instead of going through that elaborate tedious process. I remember using card catalogs and using printed indexes for journals to try to find things. And the tools that we have available have allowed us to be a lot more productive. Is it likely that we’ll move to a position where people will accept these tools as being useful productivity tools soon? Or is this something different than those past cases?

Marc: Well, I think the panic is definitely set in right now. And I think we’re going to be in for some waves of hype and panic. We’ve already seen it from last year. I think everyone kind of got huge dose of it with ChatGPT. But we were kind of getting the panic and hype mode when we first came across this in May, wondering what this technology was, how would it actually impact our teaching, how would it impact our students too. There’s a lot of talk right now about trying to do AI detection. Most of the software out there is trying to use some form of AI to detect AI. They’re trying to use an older version of GPT called GPT2 that was open source and open release before openAI decided to sort of lock everything down. Sometimes it will pick up AI generated text, sometimes it’ll mislabel it. I obviously don’t want to see a faculty member take a student up on academic dishonesty charges based on a tool that may be correct or may not be correct, based off of that sort of a framework. TurnItIn is working on a process where they’re going to try to capture more data from students that they already have. If they can capture big enough writing samples, they can then use that to compare your version of your work to an AI or someone who’s bought a paper from a paper mill or contract cheating because of course, a student’s writing never changes over the course of their academic career. And our writing never changes either. It’s completely silly. We’ve been sort of conditioned, though, when we see new technologies come along to have it’s sort of equivalent to mitigate its impact on our lives. We have this new thing, it’s disruptive. Alright, well give me the other thing that gets rid of it so I don’t have to deal with it. I don’t think we’re going to have that with this. I’m empathetic to people. I know that that’s a really hard thing for them to hear. Again, I made the joke too about the New York City school districts banning this but, from their perspective, those people are terrified. I don’t blame them. When we deal with higher education, for the most part, students have those skills set that they’re going to be using for the rest of their lives. We’re just explaining them and preparing them to go into professional fields. If this is a situation where you’re talking K through 12, where a student doesn’t have all the reading or grammatical knowledge they need to be successful and they start using AI, that could be a problem. So I think talking to our students is the best way to establish healthy boundaries, and getting them to understand how they want to use this tool for themselves. Students, as Bob mentioned too, and what Paul Fyfe was doing with his actual research, students are setting their own boundaries with this, they’re figuring out that this is not working the way the marketing hype is telling them it is, too. So, we just have to be conscious of that and keep these conversations going.

Robert: Writing with Wikipedia was my panic moment or my cultural panic moment. And my response then was much as the same as it is now. Cool. Let’s check it out. And Yochai Benkler has a quote, and I don’t have it exactly right in front of me, but he says something like all other things being equal, things that are easier to do, are going to be more likely to get done. And the second part, he says is all of the things are never equal. So that was just like the point of Wikipedia, right? Like people really worried about commons based peer production and collaborative knowledge building and inaccuracies and biases, which are there still, creeping their way in and displacing Encyclopedia Britannica and peer-reviewed resources. And they were right, if they were worried because Benkler is right. It’s a lot easier to get your information from Wikipedia and if it’s easier, that’s the way it’s going to come. You can’t do a Google search without pulling up a tile that’s been accessed through Wikipedia. But the good news is is now the phrase about Wikipedia that she’s is that Wikipedia is known as the good grown up of the internet, because the funny thing is that the community seems so fractious and sharp elbowed at first about who was right in producing a Wikipedia page about Battlestar Galactica. Well, so that grew over time, and more and more folks in higher education and more and more experts got involved and the system’s improved, and it’s uneven, but it is still the world’s largest free resource of knowledge. And it’s because it’s free, because it’s open and very accessible, then it enters into our universe of what we know. I think the same thing holds here, right? If it’s as easy to use as it is now, the developers are working on ways to make it easier still. So we’re not going to stop this, we just got to think about ways that we can better understand it and indicate, where we need to, that we’re using it and how we’re using it, for what ends and what purposes. And so your question, John, I think was around or at least you used productivity. So I don’t agree with his essay, and I certainly don’t agree with a lot that he’s done, but Sam Altman, one of the OpenAI co-founders, does have this essay, his basic argument is that in the long run, what AI is doing is reducing the cost of labor. So that will affect every aspect of life, that it’s just a matter of time before AI is applied to every aspect of life. And so then we’re dropping costs for everyone. And his argument is we are therefore improving the lives and living standards of everyone. I’m not there. But I think it’s a really interesting argument to make if you take it that long. Now, as you mentioned earlier about earlier technologies… the calculator moment, for folks in mathematics. My personal preference would be to have someone else’s ox get gored before mine is, but we’re up, so we have to deal with it. And our friends in art, they’re dealing with it as well. It’s just a matter of time before our friends in the music, obviously our friends in motion capture are dealing with it, I think you’re handling it in design as well. So it’s just a matter of time before we all figure it out. So that we have to sort of learn from each other in terms of what our responses were. And I think there’ll be sort of these general trends, we might as well explore these tools, because this is the world where our students will be graduating. And so helping them understand the implications, the ethical usage, the citation system purposes, it’d be great if we had partners on the other side that would telegraph to us a little bit more about what the scope and the purpose and the origins of these tools are. But we don’t have that just yet.

Marc: I agree completely with what Bob said, too.

Rebecca: One of the things that’s been interesting in the arts is the conversation around copyright and what’s being input into the data sets initially, and that that’s often copyright protected material. And then therefore, what’s getting spit out is derivative of that. And so there becomes some interesting conversations around whether or not that’s a fair use whether or not that’s copyright violation, whether or not that’s plagiarism. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not these similar concerns are being raised. over ChatGPT or other systems that you’ve been interacting with.

Marc: Writing’s a little bit different, I think there are some pretty intense anti-AI people out there who basically say that this is just a plagiarism generator. I see what they’re saying, but any sort of terminology with plagiarism, it doesn’t really make sense. Because it doesn’t really focus on the fact that it’s stealing from one idea. It’s just using fast and massive chunks of really just data from the internet. And some of that data doesn’t even have a clear source. So it’s not even really clear how that goes back to it. But that is definitely part of the debate. Thank God I’m not a graphic artist, ‘cause I don’t know, I’ve talked to a few friends of mine who are in graphic arts and they’re not dealing with this as well as we are, I can say that, to say the least too. And you can kind of follow along with some of the discourse on social media too. It’s been getting intense. But I do think that we will see some movement within all these fields about how they’re going to treat generative text or generative image, generative code, and all that way. In fact, openAI is being sued now in the coding business too, because they’re copilot product was supposedly capable of reproducing an entire string of code, not just generating, but reproducing it from what it was trained on too. So I think it is an evolving field, and we’re gonna see where our feet land, but for right now, the technology is definitely moving underneath us as we’re talking about all this in terms of both plagiarism and copyright in all the things.. And I’m with Bob, I want to be able to cite these tools and be able to understand it. I also am kind of aware of the fact that if we start bringing in really hardcore citation into this, we don’t want to treat the technology as a person, right? You don’t want to treat the ideas coming from the machine necessarily, we want to treat this as “I use this tool to help me with this process.” And that becomes complicated, too, because then you have to understand the nuance of how that was used and what sort of context it was used in too. So yeah, it’s it’s going to be the wild west for a while.

Robert: I wanted to turn it back on our hosts for a second if I can and ask Rebecca and John a question. So I’ve could remember the title of Sam Altman’s essay, It’s Moore’s Law for everything. That really, I think, encapsulates his point. What do y’all think as people in higher education? Do you think this is unleashing a technology that’s going to make our graduates more productive in meaningful ways? Or is it unleashing a technology that questions what productivity means?

Rebecca: I think it depends on who is using it.

John: …and how it’s being used.

Rebecca: Yeah, the intent behind it… I think it can be used in both ways, it can be used to be a really great tool to support work and things that we’re exploring and doing and also presents challenges. And people are definitely trained to use it to shortcut things in ways that maybe it doesn’t make sense to shortcut or undermines their learning or undermines contributions to our knowledge.

John: And I’d agree pretty much with all of that, that it has a potential for making people more productive in their writing by helping get past writer’s block and other issues. And it gives people a variety of ways of perhaps phrasing something that they can then mix together in a way that better reflects what they’re trying to say. And I think it’s a logical extension of many of those other tools we have, but it is also going to be very disruptive for those people who have very formulaic types of assignments that are very open ended, those are not going to be very meaningful in a world in which we have such tools. But on the other hand, we’re living in a world in which we have such tools, and those tools are not going to go away, and they’re not going to become less powerful over time. And I think we’ll have to see. Whenever there’s a new technology, we have some people who really praise it, because it’s opening up these wonderful possibilities, such as television was going to make education universal in all sorts of wonderful ways and the internet was going to do the same thing. Both have provided some really big benefits. But there’s often costs that are unanticipated, and often benefits that are unanticipated, and we have to try to use them most effectively.

Robert: So one of the things I‘ve appreciated about this conversation it’s that you guys have made me think even more, so I want to follow up on what you’re saying, and maybe articulate my anxiety a little better. So Emad Mostaque, I think is his name, is the developer or the CEO of Stability AI, and he was on Hard Fork. And I listened to the interview and he basically said, “Creativity is too hard and we’re going to make it easy. We’re going to make people poop rainbows.” He did use the phrase poop rainbows [LAUGHTER] but I don’t remember if that was exactly the setup. And so I’m not an art teacher, but I’m screaming at the podcast. No, it’s not just about who can draw the most accurate version of a banana in a bowl, it’s the process of learning to engage the world around you through visual representation, and I’m not an art teacher. So that’s my fear for writing. I guess my question for everybody here is, do you think these tools will serve as a barrier, because they’ll provide a fake substitute for the real thing that we then have to help people get past? Or will that engagement with the fake thing get their wheels turning and help them find that as a stepping stone and a reduction to the deeper engagement with literacy or visual representation.

Rebecca: I think we already have examples that exist, that the scope of what someone might do so that it appears, looks, feels really similar to something someone already created. So templates do that, any sort of common code set that people might use to build a website, for example, they all then have similar layouts and designs, these things already exist.That may work in a particular area. But then there’s also examples in that same space, where people are doing really innovative things. So there is still creativity. In fact, maybe it motivates people to be more creative, because they’re sick of thinking the same thing over and over again. [LAUGHTER]

John: And going back to issues of copyright, that’s a recent historical phenomenon. There was a time when people recognized that all the work that was being done built on earlier work, that artists explicitly copied other artists to become better and to develop their own creativity. And I think this is just a more rapid way of doing much of the same thing, that it’s building on past work. And while we cite people in our studies, those people cited other people who cited other people who learned from lots of people who were never cited, and this is already taking place, it’s just going to be a little bit harder to track the origin of some of the materials.

Marc: Yeah, I completely agree. I also think that one thing that we get caught up in our own sort of disciplinary own sort of world of higher education is that this tool may not be really that disruptive to us, or may not be as beneficial to us as it would be somewhere else in some other sorts of context. You think about the global South, that is lacking resources, a tool like this, that is multilingual, that can actually help under-resourced districts or under-resourced entire countries, in some cases. That could have an immense impact on equity, in ways that we haven’t seen. That said, there’s also going to be these bad actors that are going to be using the technology to really do lots of weird, crazy things. And you can kind of follow along with this live on Twitter, which is what I’ve been doing. And every day, there’s another thing that they’re doing. In fact, one guy today offered anyone who’s going to argue a case before the Supreme Court a million dollars if they put in their Apple Air Pods and let the AI argue the case for them. And my response is, if you ever want the federal government to ban a technology in lightning speed, that is the methodology to go through and do so. But there’s going to be stunts, there’s already stunts. And Annette Vee was writing about GPT4chan, which is a developer that used an old version of GPT2 on 4chan, the horrible toxic message board, and deployed that bot for about three days where it posted 30,000 times. In 2016, we had the election issues with the Russians coming through, now you’re going to have people with chat bots do this. So it can help with education, definitely, I think that we’re kind of small potatoes compared to the way the rest of the world is going to probably be looking at this technology. I hope it’s not in that way, necessarily, I hope that they can kind of get some safety guardrails put in place. But it’s definitely gonna be a wild ride, for sure.

John: Being an economist, one of the things I have to mention in response to that is there a lot of studies that found that a major determinant of the level of economic growth and development in many countries is the degree of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, that the more languages there are and the more separate cultures you have within the society, the harder it is to expand. So tools like this can help break those things down and can unleash a lot of potential growth and improvement in countries where there are some significant barriers to that.

Marc: Absolutely. I just really want to re-emphasize the point that I brought up at the beginning too, especially now in the wake of what Bob said too. I was not introduced to Wikipedia in a way that would be interesting or anything else. I was introduced to this as a college student with a professor saying to me, “This is a bad thing. This is not going to be helpful to you. Do not use this.” Keep that in mind, the power that you have as an educator when you’re talking about this with your students too, that you are informing their decisions about the world too, about what this tool actually is, when you’re introducing talking about this with them, when you’re actually putting the policy in place of yourself of saying “This is banned.” And I just kind of want to make sure that everyone is really kind of thinking about that now with this because we do actually have a lot of power in this. I know we feel completely powerless in some ways. It’s a little odd that the discussions have been about this. But we actually have a lot of power in how we shape the discussion of this, especially with our students.

Robert: Yeah, that’s a great point and I’m glad you raised it. My question is, I wonder, John, as an economist, and also what you think Rebecca as well, do you guys by the Moore’s Law for Everything argument? So 20, 30 years from now, does generative AI increase the standard of living for people globally?

John: Well, I think it goes back to your point that if we make things easier to do, it frees up time to allow us to do other things and to be more creative. So I think there is something to that.

Rebecca: Yeah. And sometimes creativity is the long game. It’s something that you want to do over a period of time and you have to have the time to put into it. I think it’s an interesting argument.

John: I have been waiting for those flying cars for a long time, but at least now we’re getting closer to self-driving cars.

Robert: I was about to say they gave you a driverless car instead. [LAUGHTER]

John: But, you know, a driverless car frees up time where you could do other things during that time, which could be having conversations or could be reading, it could be many things that might be more enjoyable than driving, especially if there’s a lot of traffic congestion.

Rebecca: …or you could take a train, in which case, you’re also not driving, John

John: …and you’re probably not in the US, [LAUGHTER] or at least not in most parts of the US, unfortunately.

Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Marc: What’s next? Oh, goodness. Well, again, like I said, there are going to be waves of hype and panic, we’re in the “my students are going to cheat phase.” The next wave is when educators actually realize they can use this to actually grade essays, grade writing, and grade tests, that’s going to be the next “Oh, wait” moment that we’re going to have to see too. That will be both on hype and panic too. And to me, it’s going to be the next conversation we need to have. Because we’re gonna have to establish these boundaries, kind of in real time, about what we want to actually do with this. They are talking about GPT4, this is the next version of this. It’s going to be supposedly bigger than ChatGPT and more capable. We know all the hype that you can kind of repeat about this sort of thing too. But 2023 is probably going to be a pretty wild year. I don’t know what’s gonna go beyond that. But I just know that we’re going to be talking about this for the next, at least,12 months for sure.

Robert: I agree with Marc, I think an discipline at least, the next panic or I don’t know, jubilee, will be around automated writing evaluators, which exists and are commercially available. But the big problem is the research area known as explainable AI, which is to me tremendously fascinating, that you can build neural nets that will find answers to how to play Go, that after I don’t know how many hundreds of years or even 1000s of years that humans have played Go, find winning strategies that no one has ever found before, but then not be able to tell you how they were found. That’s the central paradox. I would like to say I hope explainable AI is next. But I think, before we get explainable AI, we’re gonna have a lot more disruptions, a lot more ripples when unexplainable AI is deployed without a lot of context.

John: One of the things I’ve seen popping up in Twitter is with those AI detectors that apparently ChatGPT, if you ask it to rewrite a document so it cannot be detected by the detectors, will rewrite it in a way where it comes back with a really low score. So it could very well be an issue where we’re gonna see some escalation. But that may not be the most productive channel for this type of research or progress.

Rebecca: Sounds like many more conversations of ethics to come. Thank you so much for your time and joining us.

Marc: Well, thank you both.

John: Well, thank you. Everyone has been talking about this and I’m really glad we were able to meet with you and talk about this a bit.

Robert: Yes. Thank you for the invitation. It’s been fun to talk. If there’s any way that we can add to the conversation as you go forward, we’d be happy to be in touch again. So thank you.

John: I’m sure we’ll be in touch.

Marc: The next panic, we’re always available. [LAUGHTER]

John: The day’s not over yet. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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173. Pseudoscience

In an era of conspiracy theories and fake news, our students come into our classes with misconceptions and misunderstandings about our disciplines. In this episode, Kristin Croyle and Paul Tomascak join us to discuss how a first-year science seminar class confronts pseudoscience. Kristin is a Psychologist and Paul is a Geochemist. Kristin is the Dean and Paul is the Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Oswego.

Show Notes

  • Shermer, M. (2014). Why People Believe Weird Things. Naturalist.
  • Zener cards – American Psychological Association
  • Huff, D. (1993). How to lie with statistics. WW Norton & Company.
  • Van Der Kroon, C. (1996). The Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine Therapy. Wishland Incorporated.

Transcript

John: In an era of conspiracy theories and fake news, our students come into our classes with misconceptions and misunderstandings about our disciplines. In this episode, we discuss how a first-year science seminar class confronts pseudoscience.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Kristin Croyle and Paul Tomascak. Kristin is a Psychologist and Paul is a Geochemist. Kristin is the Dean and Paul is the Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Oswego. Paul also had been the Associate Director here at our teaching center at SUNY Oswego before he entered the Dean’s office and Rebecca joined us as Associate Director.

Kristin: Thank you.

Paul: Hi, John. Hi, Rebecca.

Kristin: We’re happy to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:

Paul: I have a special tea for you. I have a tea that has a best buy date of March 2000. A special tea.

Kristin: Does it have flavor still?

Paul: In a way… Yeah, It’s got a special flavor. [LAUGHTER]

John: A vintage tea…

Paul: Yeah.

John: …a good year.

Kristin: And I have coffee in a Christmas mug because the Christmas mugs are still out.

Rebecca: Mine are out year round.

John: And I have Prince of Wales tea.

Rebecca: And I have Big Red Sun.

John: …for a change.

Rebecca: Ah, it’s a little switch up. It seems sciency… It’s what I had open.

John: We’ve invited here today to discuss the first- year seminar course you both offered on “How to Think about Weird Things: science confronts pseudoscience.” First, could you remind our listeners a little bit about what the first-year seminar courses are here. We’ve done some past podcasts on them, but it’s been a while since we talked about that program.

Kristin: The first-year seminar course at SUNY Oswego is a relatively new initiative started just before I came here in 2018. But that’s before I came to SUNY Oswego, so I’m allowed to be wrong on dates before I started. It was initiated by our Provost, Scott Furlong. And the first-year seminar courses, the way that we envisioned them, is partially as passion topic courses for faculty, but also as a transitional experience for new freshmen so that they can have an experience in which they have both some social bonding, some interesting and challenging and really fascinating materials to talk about in course, but also some built-in experiences to help them connect to their new university and transition into kind of the college student way of functioning and being in a supportive atmosphere. So both academic challenge and excitement along with kind of the adjustment to the new university culture… Oh, and those are all taught in classes of 19 or less, so that there can be a strong peer-to-peer experience. And they also have writing intensive experiences involved.

John: What are some examples of pseudoscience that you address in your classes?

Paul: I’ve been teaching this course prior to the first-year seminar series for some years in a variety of different places: as an upper-level Gen Ed course for non majors, as a honors course, because the topic just transcends level, and it’s something that everyone can get something out of. And every time I’ve taught it, I’ve ended up emphasizing different things. And that persists. At one time, I was adamantly avoiding talking about conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories are just bollocks. It’s a zero-sum proposition, there’s really no way out of it. There’s no good dealing with the topic. But given the fact that conspiracy theory is something that we all really need to be talking about nowadays, it’s something that I’ve brought in little by little, but it’s still dicey. You can talk about creationism, and have some strong things that you can bring up as, this is why this really is not tenable in there, lots of things you can talk about in terms of cryptozoology or psychical ability, or persistence of life after death, consciousness after death. And there are scientific things that you can point to with these. But with conspiracy theories, it’s always going to be “Oh, well…” there is always an “Oh, well” out of it. And so that’s a hard one to grapple with in any real constructive way.

Kristin: Well, one of the things that attracted me to the course…. Actually, let me tell you about how I got into it. As Dean, I wanted to get a stronger connection to the students. It’s good to have the experience in the classroom, especially at a new university for me, because I can see what faculty were going through in terms of: setup your course shell… What are the policies that you have to include? What are the students like in the classroom? How do you submit your grades? …all those kind of technical aspects also that Deans know. I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen Fall 2020 if I had perfect foresight about what that would have been like, but still… not necessarily as my first experience teaching at Oswego. But I still think it was valuable. But one thing that attracted me to the courses when I was thinking about what courses to teach, intro psych was actually my first choice because I enjoy hanging out with freshmen. It was my field. But then I thought… these freshman seminar courses, and I got a chance to talk with Paul on a regular basis in previous years, he was teaching a bit about all the interesting things we were talking about. And I think that course is fascinating, but as a psychologist, some of the things that really attracted me are pseudoscientific beliefs, particularly about interventions and treatments and the way people are scammed the way that having an understanding of how the brain and body actually work, and what evidence for treatment looks like versus people who are charlatans who are taking advantage of people who are in vulnerable positions. That’s the part that really hooks me into pseudoscience and why it’s so important to teach students about it. But with that, as a hook, you’ve got all kinds of possibilities, because it’s many of the same thinking errors and misunderstandings that open you up to paying thousands and thousands of dollars for getting your future read repeatedly. It’s the same kind of thinking errors that opening you up to those and some other things that are not necessarily mainstream.

Rebecca: So how do you overcome some of those thinking errors, or help students overcome their thinking errors?

Paul: I’m going to say “um” a lot and I’m going to pause a lot, because I know that it’s something that John enjoys editing out.

Kristin: But you should totally leave that…

Rebecca: Um….what do we think about that? [LAUGHTER]

Paul: When I teach this class, there are a number of things that I emphasize. But I emphasize that we are on some level, all scientists, we are all critical thinkers. And in order to get through life successfully, you have to be able to do these things. And I like to draw the horizontal line on the board on the first day and say, on this end is complete gullibility, complete credulousness, you’ll accept anything as truth. And on the other side is complete dismissiveness, complete cynicism, and you won’t accept anything, regardless of how well it’s shown to be acceptable or true. And that it’s important that you understand that there is a spectrum. And that being skeptical doesn’t mean being dismissive. It means that you ask questions, it means that you don’t accept things at face value, especially if they don’t really smell right. And if something has the taint of, “Well, this is too good to be true” …it probably is. And you’d be doing yourself a favor by looking more closely at things, getting some more information. So I try to disabuse students of preconceptions by asking questions and by forcing them to ask questions. And even with things that seem to be “Well, that makes sense, so yeah, I’m going to buy into it.” Well, why does that make sense? What’s the physical reality that underlies that, that makes you think that that is the way it should be, the way it might be? And where do you get your information? And that is a very productive line of inquiry, where you start to break down the “Well, I heard it from this person…” Well, what does this person know? “Well, I heard it from this website.” Well, let’s go to that website and look and see if there’s anything that we can connect to. And is this someone who’s just manufacturing information? Or do they have links to somewhere where you can say, “Wes, this is verifiable on some level.” So it’s good regardless of whether you’re talking about something that’s way out there or something that’s not so way out there. It’s good, basic, critical thinking.

Kristin: And one of the things that I think is very helpful is repetition. I went through a lot of topics, but in each case, there is this harking back to what kind of thinking errors might be present, what kind of scientific errors might be present. And as they start to do that over and over, they get better. For example, one of the early topics that I talked about was alien abduction. When we talked about alien abduction, we talked about how does memory formation work, we talked about sleep, the sleep cycle, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. We talked about false memories, and how false memories are formed, and that they are experienced in the same way as real memories. If you have a false memory, it’s not like a different thing for your experience. We talked about all of those kinds of normal processes, as well as, unfortunately, the role of hypnosis in creation of false memories, which has a lot to do with beliefs and induction. I say, unfortunately, as a psychologist, it’s horribly embarrassing for the field. it really is a terrible thing. So we talk about all of the scientific contributions, and then we talk about “Okay, now the experience of alien abduction.” How does hypnosis fit in there? How do sleep paralysis, and hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, fit in here? Those are hallucinations as you’re falling asleep or waking up…it feels very real, but are actually more like a dreamlike state. How do all of this fit in? And then we look at an account of alien abduction and say, “Okay, what do you see here?” And then they can identify some of the thinking errors, like “Okay, here’s this part… looks like a false memory.” But sure, they’re really upset because it feels real. This part here, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There’s no extraordinary evidence, so they can start to identify both how do we separate the science from the non-science and then where can we start to identify thinking errors. And as we do that topic after topic, they get better and better and better at it.

John: In all of our classes, following up what Paul said, students come in with models of the world and those models aren’t always accurate… or we often have better models that we’d like to share with our students. But it’s important to break them down. And you’ve talked a little bit about how you can provide them with evidence to help them perhaps modify their models of how the world works. But, what do you do with those students who are really resistant, who really deeply believe in some of those pseudo science principles?

Paul: Yeah, this is something that Michael Shermer talks about in one of the books that I’ve used as a quasi textbook has been Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. And in the later editions of the book, he has a specific chapter, that is “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things.” Because, again, early on in the class, there’s something of an inclination to think of, “Well, I don’t think crazy things like that, and it’s only the gap-toothed yokels that believe in alien abductions or that believe in whatever it is.” But it’s important to understand that this is not something that’s limited to people who aren’t smart. There are plenty of people who are genius-level smarties who believe, not just weird things, but things that are patently out there. And so getting students to accept that, “Okay, we can talk about this as a group, because we’re not just pointing out that you’re a dummy, these are things that lots of people believe, and there are reasons why they believe them other than just being morons.” So the idea that preconceived notions are things that aren’t necessarily rooted in ignorance, or rooted in stupidity, but they’re rooted in misinformation, they’re rooted in being told something by someone you trust at some point, and not questioning it. So I think creating an atmosphere that people can feel good about talking about these things, and not just sitting there going, “Oh, I hope he doesn’t talk to me about this, because I actually believe in ghosts,” is useful. And I’ve had students in class who are ghost hunters. And we’ve gone through an entire lesson on why some of the classical ghost hunting techniques really don’t make sense when you analyze them. And I’ve had a student say, at that point, “Well, we don’t really do that, what we do is this,” and everyone in the class looks nervously at one another, that “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize that they were among us.” But, they are among us, because we are them. They are us, we all have an equal opportunity for believing weird things.

Kristin: One of the things that I also talk about is different ways of knowing. And that when you say science proves X, Y, Z, it has to meet a scientific standard. But if you say, for example, my faith tells me X, Y, Z, that’s a different way of knowing. And it’s not subject to the same kinds of proofs, it’s subject to different proofs. An example that we explicitly talked about is angelic visitations: are angels real? If you say science proves that angels are real, it has to stand up to scientific scrutiny. And in many religions, that would not only be a weird thing to say, it would be antithetical to their religious perspective. As soon as you start saying science proves my religion is correct, it becomes in some ways, a non-religious argument, and that it’s perfectly fine to have different ways of knowing different aspects about the world. But if you say science says this, this is the way the world works, because scientists have proved it, then you can subject it to scientific scrutiny. Another example is intuition and personal experience, that there are aspects of intuition and personal experience that may tell you certain truths about yourself or your relationships with others or whatever. And you don’t have to have the kind of scientific scrutiny in order to believe that you understand the way that your relationships work. But that’s a different way of knowing, it’s a different aspect of the world, and we do talk about that explicitly. And it’s fine with me if students choose to hold two ideas in their mind at the same time, they say, “Well, perhaps this idea that I have doesn’t actually make any scientific sense. I still believe it right now.” But I have some faith that if they continue this process to continue to analyze different ideas using the same skill sets: How does this make sense? What are their thinking errors? Is there an underlying explanation that makes some scientific sense that fits with the way that we know the world works. If they continue to do this, that eventually some of those closely held beliefs, which are scientifically disprovable, that they will start to kind of chip away at the edges there.

Rebecca: I know both of you are big advocates of active learning. Can you talk a little bit about some of the activities or exercises or things that you have students do as part of this course.

Paul: One of the classics, when we talk about psychical ability is pairing students up and having them basically test each other and their clairvoyant skills. So you give them the set of five Zener cards with the star and the squiggly lines and the square and you have them run through a series of “Okay, I’m projecting an image to you, you write down what it is.” And that’s good from a couple of standpoints. One is that it’s active and people are taking part in it, two is that people can understand: “Okay, if I really wanted to do something to show that there is something viable here, what would I have to do differently? Why is this test flawed?” And we talk about the development of good scientific tests. And that’s very productive, because there’s a lot of situations where you can say, “Well, you know, you’re still not controlling for this…” Okay, and the series of sort of nested tests that you have to go through in order to get to something that everyone would say, “Okay, I will accept the results of this” gets to be pretty complex. The other thing that’s good about this on a basic level is that it regresses to the mean. And regardless of the number of students, the number of tests, occasionally students will cheat and you can talk about that. But aside from cheating, you end up with a bunch of people that score exactly what statistics would say you should get and you can talk about one of the big things that I like to emphasize is not to let people use numbers to try to prove something to you that isn’t accurate, basically lying with statistics. A former student in the class sent me a book at some point, this little book called How to Lie with Statistics. And it’s a great medium to talk to students about things that are mathematical in a world where people are fearful of math, and they hate math. And this is a good application of mathematics, sort of basic mathematics to show something that is easy to wrap your head around. And it’s something as well in Shermer’s book, he talks about going to Edgar Cayce’s Institute, and doing this sort of mental ability test or psychical ability test. And he does the same thing. And he tries to convince people that “Well, just because you got 5 right out of 25 doesn’t mean that you’ve got some exceptional ability,” and he draws a bell curve, and they talk about it. And in the end, the person still doesn’t accept it. But it’s a good experiment to run, it gets people thinking about something that is not necessarily easy to think about otherwise.

Kristin: I’ll start by saying that I have huge sympathy for all the new faculty that started in Fall 2020 and were trying to build new courses while coming up with different teaching techniques. I was challenged this semester, this last semester, to build the course while trying to adapt to what was an unfamiliar form of teaching for me. Paul was very gracious in sharing materials. But, you know, when you teach the course yourself has to be rebuilt because it’s your own thinking, and your own style. Just for disclosure, though, I had intended the course to be a hybrid course in which we met with our faces, at least, three times a week, sometimes in the classroom altogether, and sometimes all online together. But as the semester went on, it did not work that way. I ended up having some students that always want to come face to face (a small number), and some that always ended up being online. So it was not the course I anticipated. But that’s okay. I know that we all experienced that. What my students responded to the most enthusiastically ended up being analysis of web comments. So I would often bring in slightly adapted web comments, I would correct for grammar and, you know, readability …say here is this diatribe this person and removing their identity and things because it’s about analysis of argument and they would go to town on it. Here’s this diatribe about astrology, it runs from how scientists are paid to debunk astrology all the way down to how you should stop being sheep and see the truth in front of you and everything in between, with all kinds of false analogies that don’t make any sense in the middle, all that good stuff. They loved that. And I loved it too. We all loved it, because that’s what I really want them to be able to walk out doing, to be able to see kind of something that looks like a well argued and well written diatribe against the world who doesn’t understand and to be able to look at it and say, “Oh, wrong, wrong. wrong, thinking errors, misstatement, false analogy, ripples in a pan have nothing to do with how stars move, and all kinds of different things. [LAUGHTER] So we ended up doing a lot of those kinds of similar things. I think one of the last things I did in the last homework that we worked on together was on a manifestation website service, you sign up for $1,000, you get these courses, and you can manifest wealth in your life and their analysis there was really excellent. It was excellent about why this might appeal to people. What is wrong with all of these arguments? It doesn’t matter how many incredibly well done video anecdotes you get from individuals who have manifested wealth in their life, that that’s not gonna transfer to other people. So lots of analysis of web comments.

John: With social media, there’s a very rich source of data that could be used for this.

Kristin: Exactly.

John: Could you tell us a little bit more about the course structure and what you’re doing in these classes?

Kristin: I have avoided student presentations in class for 10 years, because I usually find them to not be a good use of course time, let’s just say that. But Paul was using student presentations, and I put them in for this course and they were awesome. So, I have completely changed my opinion. But part of it is also that I was teaching larger classes in the past. So figuring out how to integrate student presentations in a way that is a useful use of everyone’s time, but the student presentations in this class were fantastic. They were typically on a specific pseudoscience topic that we wouldn’t have spent a lot of time in class on. But it gave them an opportunity to again, have this kind of repeated, “Here’s a thing that you think is really different.” Like. maybe… maybe not… Chromotherapy, you know, does exposing yourself to different colors of light effect different organ functions beyond jaundice, and beyond seasonal affective disorder where there’s clear evidence… if you look at blue light, or red light, or whatever. People go “Hmmm, I’ve seen videos on this on TikTok… well, wait a minute, doesn’t make any sense.” And here are the arguments, a little scaffolding from a student presenter, here are the arguments about why this doesn’t make any sense, then students popping up with other arguments. And having that experience repeatedly, of student presentation after student presentation, I have worked them like you know, three or four weeks, it gave them more experienced practicing. And honestly, some of those topics are fabulous to talk about in class. Although I allowed students to select their topic out of a menu so that they didn’t have to know what was pseudoscience right at the beginning of classes. No one selected urine therapy, though, I was hoping given how much success Paul has had in his classes with that.

Paul: Urine therapy is number one.

John: Could you elaborate on that a little bit, Paul?

Paul: The student response to the class has been really good historically. And I will occasionally, and sometimes out of the blue, receive a book in the mail from a student. This person that I had never heard from after the class, student says: “I was in a bookstore, I saw this and I thought of our class, and I thought you might like it.” So that’s always really nice. But it’s especially nice when the person sends you the definitive book on urine therapy, because my library was not inclusive enough of that topic. So now I have something that when a student chooses, or pulls the short straw, on urine therapy, I have something I can give them as a resource for this topic.

Rebecca: A whole book….

Paul: A whole book. I think it’s called the Golden Fountain. I’m not kidding. When I do the course and I have students do some sort of presentation, I will, so that I don’t run into the problem of a student doing something that they already know a ton about, I’ll have them draw them at random. And from the start, I’ve got the little hat with pieces of paper in it, and I’m telling them: “Who’s going to draw urine therapy?” …and it’s hotly contested. And it’s great when the student comes in to give their presentation that day, and starts out with a long pause and says, “This really makes me sick.” [LAUGHTER]

John: I’m not sure if I should ask, but what is urine therapy?

Paul: Well, I’m surprised being a man of the world that you are not well aware of this, John, but by consuming your own urine, you’re able to tap into a great deal of vitality and essential nutrients, etc, perhaps some reparations to your chakras as well, through consuming your urine. There are people out there who will attempt to get you to pay them money to teach you how you should be doing this. But it comes down to drinking your own urine and having that basically cure any disease. And you can take it purely internally, you can rub it on your skin to produce a healthy skin tone, you can use it in your hair. There are certainly people out there who will claim that it is a cure for cancer. And that’s sort of the bar for all pseudo-medicine is when are we going to get to the end, this cures cancer. And sure enough, there are people out there. It’s usually a sad case where the person had cancer, they went through a number of different treatments, nothing was working, and they hit on this and suddenly they’re cancer free. And it’s a good place to talk about correlation and causation. It’s a good place to talk about how we design clinical tests for medications, vaccinations, whatever. When an agency says “Yes, this is demonstrated efficacious or this is demonstrated safe…” what does that actually mean? Well, it has to go through a certain process, which is not some random process that someone hands over some money and “Okay, yeah, you’re good to go,” that these are real things. So that, I think, is another area in which I’ve significantly improved over. I think I started teaching this in 2006. I talk more about anti-vax. I talk more about clinical trials. I talk about the placebo effect, and Kristin has actually helped me a lot with that. Because she knows about things that I didn’t know about when it came to placebo effects. So there’s a lot of good stuff there that, again, it’s science, but it’s not something that you need to have a degree in something to understand and to be able to then apply in your own life.

John: In terms of the placebo effect, there’s two things that just really struck me in terms of fairly recent research. One is that the strength of the placebo effect seems to be growing over time. And secondly, that the placebo effect still seems to exist, even when people know they’re taking a placebo. Any explanations of why that’s happening?

Kristin: Isn’t that fascinating? I just think that’s amazing. No, no explanations. I have great admiration for the power of the mind.

John: Mystical powers? [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Well, for example, there is excellent research that says that people who have even late-stage cancer will survive longer, if they have social support. That’s not placebo. That’s because your mind and body are constantly one system and that we survive in a social environment… just one reason the pandemic has been so difficult… and that people survive and thrive better when they’re in a supportive social environment. Totally not placebo. But it is, in some ways, our traditional Western medical approach would see that as a psychological or mental intervention. It’s amazing. Although the early psychoanalysts, they did some strange stuff, and claimed some strange things, Freud and his students, some of that early work, it really does demonstrate if you believe that something is going to be very different. Hysterical pregnancy is a great example. People who believe that they are pregnant strongly believe that they are pregnant who are not actually pregnant, show many physical signs of pregnancy, including abdominal distension and ending of periods. Sso there’s a lot of different things that the mind can do. Unfortunately, only that only takes you so far. But that is definitely something that I talk about in class, as well as the waxing and waning nature of many illnesses, and how that opens people up for charlatans to take advantage of them. Multiple Sclerosis is a great example, where there’s unpredictable often waxing and waning symptoms. And people with MS have been targeted for many, many, many, many years for completely wacky, expensive, invasive, painful treatments because of the waxing and waning nature. And if their experience is that it has healed them, it’s hard to say that’s not your experience. But it is easy to say there isn’t any scientific evidence that this would help anybody else. They’re taking your money, unfortunately. And I also talk about how parents with children with significant developmental disability are often also at a point of desperation, where they’re sometimes ripe for this kind of thing too. One of the students in my class presented on hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment, which of course is a great treatment if you have the bends after scuba diving, but is not effective for autism, though there is a market to sell people, these chambers for $20,000 to have a chamber in their homes so that they can put their child who has autism in the chamber on a daily basis, which for one thing is expensive and not effective in any way. But it’s also potentially also really scary for a child who doesn’t understand what is going on being shut up in the chamber every day. So, beyond the improved understanding of how the world works, there is, also real harm being done by some of these things. And we’re talking with students about the importance of a control group. Why does having a control group make all the difference? And talking about that repeatedly as these other examples come up, I really believe will help them to understand the world better, and become better consumers and self advocates.

John: One of the things you just mentioned is the importance of a strong social network and of human connections. How did you nurture that in this somewhat challenging circumstance of fall 2020 during the pandemic?

Kristin: That was really hard, because it’s something that I have never struggled with in class before. And it was a real struggle this semester. I don’t know if that was the case for you too, Paul, or Rebecca. But this is something that I consider to be an easy and normal thing in my teaching. But this semester, it was really a challenge to have students make peer-to-peer connections. I feel fairly comfortable that they felt a connection with me. And I certainly felt a connection with them. But getting them to connect peer to peer was a challenge. And I attribute that to first, not ever having done it this way before. I think if I had another chance I could do it better. Just like any kind of teaching, the second time around is usually better than the first. But part of it was that I was so responsive to students who felt like they needed the face-to-face interaction that I continued to meet face to face every day with them with a chunk of students on Zoom. And it would have been, given my teaching style, it would have been a better experience, I think, for all of us if we’d stayed in one together format more often, if that makes sense.

John: I think this is a problem we all faced, that student peer-to-peer connections were challenging, both because of the modality and because of the circumstances in which we’re all living right now. Paul?

Paul: This past fall, I taught a different course. And it was an upper-level honors course. So these are students who… they’re high achieving, they had figured college out. And it was, for me the easiest of all scenarios, because they were on task, and not that they weren’t necessarily happy with the way that the world was going, but from an academic standpoint, it was a fairly easy scenario to adapt to.

Rebecca: I wanted to circle back for a minute about the diversity of topics that you addressed in class, and what you’re using as hooks, and the value of the different kinds of topics as hooks for students. So there’s some that I think fit in the category of very outlandish, which are probably really easy for some students to really get into… find fun… and then there’s also some of the medical things that you’re talking about that I think students might relate to more directly, and they can see how it fits into their lives. Can you talk a little bit about how you chose the topics and how your students may be related to those topics?

Paul: Certainly, when you’re just talking about science, it is harder with a mixed audience of students who aren’t necessarily buying in from the start. In previous incarnations of this class, it was nominally a natural science course, but realistically, it was being taken by everybody. When I taught it as a first-year seminar course, there was a fair number of psych majors. But really, it was a complete mixture. So, I felt obligated to present a certain amount of science. Here’s a big idea in science, why do we think this? What’s the evidence for this? Why is this important? Why should you care? So I was able to get to things like creationism through the door of “Well, how is it that we know that the earth is as old as it is? And why is it that this is not just something that was handed to us, and we believe it, but it’s something that’s objectively demonstratable?” And beyond that, when you start talking about biological evolution? And okay, why is it that we believe that this is at least a reasonable description of what’s going on in nature? Okay, here’s some stuff that’s a little bit dry. But the end goal is being able to say, “Yeah, I can accept this beyond just having it handed to me.” Evolution is a good one, in that it integrates a lot of different things. So you can bring in the purely biological, you can bring in populational, you can bring in geological and physics, and you don’t have to dwell in any one particular spot to try to make the point. But nevertheless, there are portions of the class that are somewhat more pure sciency, and I try to front load those in the course to keep the carrot out there of “Oh, we’re going to be talking about psychical abilities soon, and we’re going to be talking about UFOs soon,” because that’s fun stuff and ghost hunting and all that. But yeah, the science is a critical underpinning for the course and trying to get it so that it’s not just: “Here’s the scientific method, memorize this,” …to have it be science is a process that we all are invested in, and when you stop investing in it, then there’s trouble. And I think that the past year has really underscored the fact that that’s something that everyone should be… certainly every college educated person… but really everyone, should be understanding of the fact that science is a critical tool. And it’s not just the sacred tablets that have been handed down from the clouds, it is something that has objectivity, and there are processes… and what makes a scientific paper. We keep talking about, “Well, this vaccine test was done, and it was published in The Lancet, or it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Why do we care? Is it just we paid more to get our article in this journal that people quote? No, it’s that these journals actually have a high bar for what they accept as publishable. And if it’s published in there, it means something. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be true a week from now. I think in dealing with science, it’s good to emphasize that it’s not just something that is dusty books sitting on shelves. But by the same token, there’s an inherent danger when you expose the fact that we don’t know anything for certain. And it’s nice and comfortable to think that when you drop the apple, it’s going to fall at a certain rate. And when you get up tomorrow morning, the sun is going to be rising in the east. But when it comes to it, the more contentious the scientific question comes, perhaps, the bigger the scientific question becomes, the greater the likelihood that we’re going to continue to develop our understanding of things and rooting out the question of “Well, that’s just a theory.” Well, it’s not just a theory. If it’s a theory in science, it means something. It doesn’t mean that it’s a hunch. It means that this is something that we’ve put an awful lot of effort into, and awful lot of thought into. A lot of people have had their eyes on this. It’s not just one really smart person saying, “Okay, this is the deal.” …just the process by which we have to go in order to get to the point of saying, “Yes, we accept this as the way things work, whether it’s biological evolution, or whether it’s the verifiability of vaccine, or whether it’s anything.”

Kristin: And one of the things that you’re touching on there, I think, is also an important theme that comes out: that science is a continuing investigation, that it’s very comfortable for students, especially in K through 12, to think about scientists having answers instead of being an ongoing investigation. And typically the things that are taught in K-12 are the things science has answers for, not the things that are continually being investigated. So it can be scary for students who have that background to be confronted with news that our understanding of a virus is changing over time, because that’s the way understanding works. It changes over time as we learn more and more. This theme keeps coming up throughout the semester as well saying, “Hey, this is what we understand now. The state of our knowledge is this. The door isn’t closed to the state of our knowledge to be different in the future. It also gives us a good opportunity to bring in the importance of diverse voices as scientists. So one of the things that I talk about in my class is the roots of psychological assessment and intelligence testing, and how some of those roots have explicitly racist foundations among people who were explicitly racist and some probably unintentionally racist, but having racist impacts. And some of that is clearly because there were only white men doing work at that time in that area. And when you have only one perspective, it leads to one group of answers, that if you have a more diverse group of scientists who are studying a question, they expand the definition of the question, they expand the definition of what is possible evidence, the answers that they come up with are different and better answers because of the nature of scientific investigation. That it’s not just we have a question, and here’s the answer. It’s we have this question about the world, what does the question mean? Is that the right question? Is there a bigger question? How can we investigate it? Let’s look at different evidence, let’s expand our understanding. As part of that, we also talked about the foundations of photography, and what happens when you have only white people creating photographic film and processing. And what happens when you expand that into a more diverse group of people on a more diverse group of images, the same kind of idea. Although I have to say the horoscope and astrology stuff was the stuff that got the most excited,

Paul: Ah ha, the fallacy of personal validation. [LAUGHTER]

John: But I think we can also generalize what you were just talking about in that all of our disciplines involve in ongoing investigation, and that students come into our classes, thinking of them as these defined bodies of knowledge that they just have to memorize. And it is a bit of a shock and adjustment to students to see that there are many things we don’t know. And that takes a while to get them comfortable with that idea and accepting that idea.

Kristin: And that it’s not a flaw in the scientific process or the state of knowledge, the fact that it’s changing. That’s not a flaw, that’s actually a feature. Yeah, that’s a tough one.

Paul: And one of the things that I specifically talk about in the whole science, you know, what is science? What is pseudoscience? …is where things go wrong. And we talk about fraud. There are a number of times during the course where we’ll talk about “Well, this was published in this journal, and it was wrong.” And let’s see what happened later. And we talked about retraction and things like that. So the self- policing nature of science, when it’s working, right, it’s the best way to get to the point of feeling good about an explanation for something. It doesn’t necessarily mean that something is proved or something is fact. But we have this process in place, and as long as it’s a topic that people feel is important enough to have lots of eyes on it… well, there’s going to be no way of hiding that one set of results that doesn’t seem to agree with everybody else’s. And those things get found out, they get basically debunked, and the science moves on. So the idea that science is fallible, the idea that science isn’t perfect, it’s something that has to be embedded in that. But by the same token, because of the nature of the process, we can say that science is about as good as we can do when it comes to understanding and this was Carl Sagan… all that.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Kristin: What’s next? What’s next… I’m looking forward to spring semester. I’m looking forward even more to the next fall semester. I think we all are in that position. I really do appreciate the experience that I have with my students and I’ll teach again next year, but since the universe is paying me to be Dean, I have to do that work as well this spring.

Paul: Well, my life has been leading up to this podcast. So really after this, there’s not a heck of a lot left for me. Now, it’s nice to know that CELT wasn’t destroyed by my being part of it once upon a time, and it actually seems to have improved since then. That’s a nice job.

John: Thank you. I think this is a fascinating course. And teaching students to more critically analyze what they read and hear in social media and in their social network is a really valuable skill. So I’m glad you’re working on that

Rebecca: It really does seem like what college is all about.

Kristin: Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun. And throughout the whole semester, I was grateful to Paul for the scaffolding that he gave me. He was able to answer all kinds of questions and gave me interesting materials to work off of. So thank you, Paul.

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Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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52. Metaliteracy

Do your students create digital media in your courses or just consume it? Does the concept of information literacy seem too limited in this context? In this episode, Tom Mackey (Professor in the Department of Arts and Media at Empire State College) and Trudi Jacobson (Head of the Information Literacy Department and Distinguished Librarian at the State University of New York at Albany) join us to discuss metaliteracy as a framework for improving critical thinking and metacognition while students become active participants in the construction of knowledge in online communities.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Do your students create digital media in your courses or just consume it? Does the concept of information literacy seem too limited in this context? In this episode we discuss metaliteracy as a framework for improving critical thinking and metacognition while students become active participants in the construction of knowledge in online communities.

[Music]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guests today are Tom Mackey, Professor in the Department of Arts and Media at Empire State College and Trudi Jacobson, the Head of the Information Literacy Department and Distinguished Librarian at the State University of New York at Albany. In fact, she is currently the only Distinguished Librarian in the SUNY system. Welcome, Tom and Trudi.

Trudi: Thank you.

Tom: Thank you. Very happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Rebecca: Today our teas are…

Trudi: I am drinking highland blend.

Tom: I’m drinking sweet cinnamon spice.

John: And I am drinking chocolate mint tea, a Harney and Sons blend.

Rebecca: I’m back to my good ole English afternoon.

John: Such a surprise.

Rebecca: Sometimes you just need to have the dependable option.

John: Both of you have written very extensively and done a lot of research and workshops on metaliteracy, with three books, three MOOCs (with a fourth one under development), several articles, a badging system and the metaliteracy.org blog. Could you tell our listeners a bit about what metaliteracy is?

Tom: Sure. Thanks, John, I’ll start. Metaliteracy is a pedagogical framework that empowers learners to be active producers of information in collaborative environments. So that’s our elevator speech right there in terms of what it is. Basically, it is an approach to teaching and learning that prepares individuals to be reflective learners in addition to being critical thinkers, and we’ll talk a bit about how that reflection piece is especially critical for a metaliteracy, which, of course, applies metacognition. By doing so, learners are informed consumers of information, which means they ask good questions about the information they encounter in a variety of environments, and as you know, that’s important today with all the different environments and social media environments and access to different kinds of new sources that we have; it includes those especially mediated by technology. And we’ll talk as the idea was first introduced and developed why that was so important to the concept. When we first introduced it we really argued that because of the emergence of social media, online communities especially, think about web 2.0 and the change from the original web—what a critical moment that was—that what we really needed was a metaliteracy that promoted effective participation in these environments. As we know, these collaborative social environments have an engagement piece that is important; we build that into this metaliteracy framework; we thought there was a real need for that—how we were developing it. We also acknowledge that in addition to acquiring information and looking critically at information that individuals really needed to creatively create and share information in this connected network world. This idea of consuming information versus producing information, it’s an idea that’s been around for some time, but we really thought it was critical to develop it into a metaliteracy that also focused on reflection as a core concept. The idea of a metaliteracy is that we look at some of the common characteristics that unite different forms of literacy—that was the other piece of this. We introduced it as this comprehensive, unifying framework. The idea for that was that in this social media environment what we really needed was to try to better understand different competencies, different characteristics of literacies instead of just coming up with a new literacy every time there’s a new technology. We were trying to look at things in a more comprehensive way. As the idea developed in the first book, especially the meta in metaliteracy, intentionally invokes this idea of metacognition. Or thinking about your own thinking: this is really key to metaliteracy because metaliterate learners are reflective about their own learning experiences and they really take charge of their literacy and learning which is really where the empowerment piece comes in.

Trudi: Meta derived from the Greek… also means “after.” Metaliteracy is what happens after literacy. Basic reading and writing, what comes after that. Also what comes after information literacy, which is g enerally thought of as finding and locating information. The definition of information literacy has expanded since we started work on metaliteracy. In addition to reflecting on their own thinking, the metacognitive aspect of metaliteracy also means that individuals have the capacity to self-regulate their own learning, which means that they identify their own strengths and weaknesses and play a role in preparing themselves to adapt to new learning situations. Metaliteracy prepares learners to adapt new technology and to do so in a critical way, that is asking questions about how technologies are designed and the ways that technologies or platforms may impact how we access and create information as well as how we communicate with information. Originally we developed metaliteracy to emphasize how individuals participate in social media environments. And Tom, would you like to talk a little bit about that?

Tom: That piece is really essential to what we’re doing. We see this framework is relevant to a range of collaborative teaching and learning situations, but it is interesting that we saw a real need for emphasizing the social media aspect, online communities, this post web 2.0 environment that we are in, but we also don’t want it to be limited to that. We really see metaliteracy in all environments, all collaborative environments… communities of practice. This is something we should be thinking about beyond just the technology, but really how we engage with each other, how we participate and perhaps also how we blend the technology, how we mediate technology with those spaces as well.

Trudi: One of my favorite parts of metaliteracy is that it advances the idea that learners are teachers. We see this in collaborative environments where learners support and teach other learners, but what’s really important is that often students, for example, don’t think they have any particular expertise in something, and encouraging them to empower to teach others often leads to really interesting situations.

 Tom: That part is so key and that’s something that we saw in our own teaching experiences that when we had students in collaborative situations… group work… building technology tools together… building collaborative websites, for example, that the students themselves were as much a teacher as I was, and trying to foreground that so that they can see it, is critically important.

Rebecca: This is a really interesting framework and you’ve given us a lot to think about. Can you help us make it a little more concrete by providing an example of how you might emphasize metaliteracy in a class or what you mean by a student who might be metaliterate?

Trudi: One of the things that I would do in my classes is encourage students to be information creators and to explore the technology in doing so. So they don’t have a final paper that they have to write, but they may need to create a video or a tutorial or we’ll be talking about our badging system later, maybe creating content for that and doing it in small groups. If they’re doing something where they have to use a technology; I don’t teach them that technology; they sort of learn together and that “learner as teacher” often comes out in those situations because often there’ll be a student in a group who will have more expertise in that area or be more willing to just jump in and see what happens, and then the rest of the group will learn from that. One of the more interesting teams that I had when I’ve taught is one where none of the students felt they could do anything, but they actually accomplished it and their sense of pride and empowerment in doing that was wonderful.

Tom: I have an example: I’m currently teaching a course at Empire State College called “Digital Storytelling,” and the whole point of the course is that students learn about these resources, they locate them (with some prompts from me in the course), but it’s a fully online course and in many ways they have to figure this out on their own, they have to adapt to these new technologies, and I think that they’re looking at their own use of technology in a different way. So, for example, the very first assignment they have to create a selfie video with their cell phone. So they all have cell phones, they probably all done videos before, they probably all done selfies before, but this assignment is really designed for them to introduce themselves to everyone else in the class in a fully online course. From the very beginning they have to challenge themselves to present themselves a certain way to the class… to be themselves but to also think through that presentation, to really be the active producer of information in a collaborative setting where they’re doing something on their own but they’re sharing something about themselves to the other class. In an online course it allows us to get beyond just the text-based introduction and online discussion and to really seeing the students, to hearing from them. I posted a video of myself and it was great to see their response, so it was very much like a classroom situation but it happened asynchronously and online and it was a great way to get the class started, so from the very beginning they saw themselves as digital storytellers and they know that they now are starting their story and that we’re all going to participate and learn from them.

John: So it’s encouraging students not just to critically analyze information as consumers but to be active participants in social dialogues as producers as well. Is that a reasonable short summary?

Trudi: Yeah.

Tom: Absolutely. And what does that mean? …especially in today’s environment, which is very participatory but were divided and partisan in so many different ways. How do we get across those divides? What does it mean to be a responsible participant of information now? What does it mean to be an ethical contributor to these spaces? The whole idea is to really to get them to reflect on this, and not just to produce and share something, but now especially to think about the implications of that so that the informed consumer part is still important so that they’re thinking about these different sources that they’re encountering but also thinking about what they’re creating themselves and sharing.

Trudi: I think when they’re asked to be information producers in this way they think about themselves differently. They create information and share it on social media, but they don’t really think of themselves as information producers, and so I think it expands their horizon.

Tom: They may not have necessarily been asked to do so in an academic environment. This blurring of boundaries between informal learning and formal learning, I think it helps to push that a little bit. Not to say that they’re not beyond our classes, because they might be, but clearly they’re doing it in their everyday practice with their cell phones and the way they consume information now, but this really foregrounds, I think, in some of what the responsibilities are and what the empowerment of that is as well when they’re asked to construct something, so instead of a research paper maybe that is a collaborative media project with their peers—what kind of learning do you gain from that experience?

Trudi: Just one other point. The projects that I was talking about, they need to create them for public consumption. It’s not something that’s just directed at me as the professor of the course. They have to think about it a bit differently.

Tom: That’s a great point, because in the digital storytelling class they’re not just creating it even for the Moodle environment that we’re in; they have to actually upload their selfie videos to YouTube so that they’re thinking a bit about that public consumption piece even beyond the instructor and even beyond the class itself because now it’s up on YouTube and hopefully that’s having an impact on what they’re thinking about in terms of how they present themselves in the information that they’re producing.

Rebecca: I’m hearing two key things bubble up in what you’re talking about and one is audience and the second is reflection. Are those two key things to move up beyond traditional information literacy to this metaliteracy level?

Trudi: I think that those are two key pieces, but I think, well, there’s the old definition of information literacy and then there’s the newer one, which somewhat influenced by metaliteracy, but I think that often information literacy is thought of primarily as consuming and evaluating information, so not the responsible, creative production of it. It’s also too often, I think, seen in the academic setting as just related to research and not sort of life-wide. I think that that’s another element here.

Tom: In many ways that’s what I think we were really originally working against that original information literacy definition, the ALA definition and also the Association of College and Research Libraries, the original standards, b       which were very prescriptive in the way that they were designed, so that we were as a framework were really just trying to open this up and also take into account the technology piece—not make it all about technology, certainly, but in many ways the advance of web 2.0 and emerging technologies was kind of being, at the time, anyway, sort of avoided. We knew that there’s a real shift happening in our culture and I think that we’re sort of on the other side of that now, but I think that was important to bring that into the learning experience to have students really reflect on those environments and what they’re doing in those environments.

John: You both mentioned the new ACRL information literacy framework. How does metaliteracy relate to that?

Trudi: We developed metaliteracy in part because of a frustration, with this old definition as we were talking about and Tom mentioned the standards really were very prescriptive, very skills based, concentrated on behavioral and cognitive learning domains. Metacognition was not a part of it, so you identified metacognition so that reflection as something new and they didn’t explicitly address the affordances of web 2.0. So I was co-chair of the task force that was convened by the Association of College and Research Libraries and I brought the idea of metaliteracy to the group for consideration. There were a lot of forces at work in developing the structure of the framework and there were like 2000 people weighing in so it’s a very interesting process. Threshold concepts or core concepts was one of the primary features that we used with the framework. I sort of quote from the introduction to the frameworks; there are those ideas in any discipline that are passageways or portals to enlarged understanding or ways of thinking and practicing within that discipline. For example, in biology, evolution would be a threshold concept. That was one element and then the other was metaliteracy. The idea of learners as information creators as well as consumers—which we’ve talked about—definitely has a presence in the framework. There are four learning domains in metaliteracies: behavioral, cognitive, affective and metacognitive. These all have made their way into the framework, so there really is in part a close relationship between the two. For example, the affective domain maps to the whole sections on learner dispositions. I think that there really is a close relationship and I think metaliteracy has gotten additional notice from people because it is explicitly mentioned in the framework.

John: So it’s complementary that they fit well together, they link well together.

Trudi: That’s right.

Tom: I think that’s a good way to put it that they’re complementary, because that also allows each approach to still move forward because we see metaliteracy as this evolving concept and we’ve been working together—we’re working with a team of colleagues called the “Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative” on these ideas, we’re writing together and we’re developing this different MOOC and badging projects. Every time we do something new we’re learning something new and we’re trying to build that into the core ideas here. I think that this idea of complementarity is really important to these two; they’re not mutually exclusive, they work together, and as Trudi mentioned, when we go out and talk to different audiences on this they’re interested in both concepts and working with both. One interesting comment we often hear from people is that with metaliteracy they’ll say you found a way to talk about something that we were trying to do or that we were already doing but you found a name for that really made sense. We really like that: the fact that we were able to name something that really probably was in practice but maybe didn’t have as in-depth of a framework built around it and we like that dialogue with practitioners and something we try to do so this idea of theory and practice for metaliteracy is critically important and allows you to move forward.

Trudi: And the ACRL information literacy framework information literacy is not something that can be taught only by librarians so it’s really directed also towards faculty and administrators. It still seems to have a librarian focus to it, whereas metaliteracy, I think, extends beyond that. Librarians are interested in it but we’re also seeing all sorts of things that are being written or talked about by academics in a really broad range of disciplines.

Tom: And we’ve found that in the books we’ll talk about the two unedited books we’ve done in addition to the first metaliteracy book and we saw evidence of that when we do a call for proposal; it’s really from a wide area of academics. We definitely have librarians, but we also have faculty from many different disciplines, and also instructional designers. That piece of it has been really fascinating as well because we’ve been trying to really open it up to as many people as possible and not seeing it just within one particular discipline.

John: How have faculty and librarians responded to your work?

Trudi: There’s been a lot of interest in it to explore one of the collaborations. Somebody that I’m working with at the University at Albany is a political science professor. This will give you an indication how at least one person has responded to our work. She teaches a 200 level political science course that includes some of the general education competencies, one of which is information literacy, and she was developing this course from Pollock. She came to me to talk about information literacy. We ended up talking about metaliteracy and she was so excited by some of the things we’ve talked about that it would do for her students, so this idea of information creators, the empowerment that she has made metaliteracy sort of a key part of her course. She has the students do about 8 activities connected to metaliteracy. These activities come from a digital badging system that we can talk about a little bit later. She actually has students create an activity that would fit into this digital badging system, which is pretty exciting. This year she asked us to extend what we’re doing and we have been creating questions for the students about what it means to be an information creator, information producer, a teacher, a translator of information and we found this very exciting. It’s not just a collaboration in that she is using some of this material for her students, but her students are creating things for us and she’s giving us ideas. It’s just one example but it’s one where it has become a core part of this course, not only when she teaches it but when others teach it as well.

Tom: Collaboration has been key to what we’ve been doing from the very beginning. The first SUNY IITG we received was really to initiate to launch a metaliteracy learning collaborative and that first project led to the development of our first connectivist MOOC… b eginnings of the digital badging system, although it wasn’t part of the initial grant, but that’s something that we started working on, and also what was most important at the time was the development of the first metaliteracy goals and learning objectives which we’ve recently revised but it was important when we developed that that instead of just Trudi and I working on this together, we really opened it to a SUNY-wide audience that included faculty and librarians. Those goals and learning objectives are available via metaliteracy.org and we recently revised them as well. I think that collaboration with the metaliteracy learning collaborative also led to thinking about metaliteracy in a different way and thinking about those four domains of learning that Trudi mentioned previously; we would look at the metacognitive, which we’ve mentioned is key but also the behavioral, the cognitive and the affective domain so that what we’re really looking at is really the whole person. We’ve also through the metaliteracy learning collaborative we’ve been working on papers together, we’ve been working on these MOOCs; we were lucky enough to have the experience of working on a connectivist MOOC really early on and then I took Coursera MOOC and then a Canvas MOOC and now we’re working on open edX and all those projects involve faculty librarians from Empire State College, the University of Albany and other parts of SUNY, that’s really key. We’re very lucky that we’ve been invited to speak on this which also shows the level of interest and how people are responding to it and many different venues and last year we were lucky enough to present at a conference at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico for this literacy and learning conference and it was just a great experience to be there with international scholars who were talking about literacy in various ways and then we added something by talking about metaliteracy and there’s a lot of interest in what we were talking about. We appreciate those opportunities to have conversations that are both theoretical and practical; the response has just been really positive.

John: We should just clarify the IITG program you mentioned is a SUNY-wide competitive grant program for all of the colleges and universities within SUNY. You were one of the early recipients of that and have received some further funding from that, just to explain that to our listeners who are not as familiar with the SUNY system.

Trudi: John, since you mentioned the innovative instruction technology grant, just to show sort of interest from others, we did get one with School of Education faculty member, actually one from Albany and one from Empire State College because they were really interested in the digital badging, but also the idea of a digital citizen. The plan was and happened that graduate students in education who were going to be teachers would have an opportunity to learn about digital citizenship that’s important for them when they’re teaching, also what digital badging is, so there were a couple of different takeaways. We were able to move metaliteracy or an aspect of metaliteracy into graduate education for educators.

Rebecca: There’s been a lot of mention of metaliteracy badges so maybe we can talk about those?

[LAUGHTER]

Trudi: Yeah, certainly. This was something that developed out of one of those innovative instruction technology grants. We’ve been working on them ever since. What we did was we took the learning goals and objectives for metaliteracy and created open content, very ambitious scheme. There’s four digital badges in the system. Each one of which has anywhere from 12 to 20 activities, starting with lower level quests, moving up to challenges and ultimately you get to these four digital badges. They were written by members of the meta literacy learning collaborative. Tom has written some, I’ve written some. Students have written some, so undergraduate and graduate students they’re being used currently at Albany about 2,500 students have gone through parts of this badging system. The only ones so far who’ve actually earned badges are ones who have taken my courses. It’s content that can be used in classes across a range of disciplines. Also, adaptable to the disciplines. I mentioned earlier the political science professor and sometimes she sort of tweaks the assignments in there so it really relates to what she’s teaching in her political science course. The badge system itself at this point is restricted to University of Albany because there’s a single sign-on process, but we do have a website that has all of the content openly available. People are welcome to use this.

Tom: And from the perspective of someone who has developed some content for this it’s really a fascinating experience because you know that you’re somehow reaching learners that are not in your course but that it’s something that you’re opening and you’re sharing, so this idea of thinking about them as open educational resources that can be then adapted for different contexts. It’s really interesting and exciting to know that something I might create as a learning object could be used by a faculty member here at the University at Albany who’s having their students go through it. Some of them that I developed are based on learning activities I had created in some of my information science courses when I taught here at the university, but I’ve adapted them or updated them. That piece of it from a faculty perspective, as long as you’re open to it, is really engaging and interesting and a way to reach other learners who may not be students in your class but you’re sharing those ideas with them.

Trudi: And I don’t know if it’s ok if I plug a book that I just co-edited with Kelsey O’Brien… Just published this month, September 2018, Teaching with Digital Badges, which was published by Rowman & Littlefield. In that book there is a chapter written by Kelsey O’Brien on the metaliteracy badging system.

Rebecca: Great, you’re both working on a new book together, right?

Trudi: Yes.

Tom: Yes.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about that new book and how it connects to your earlier work?

Tom: Sure, the new book is called “Metaliterate Learning for the Post Truth World.” We’ve shifted somewhat from I think what was a really optimistic view of the connected world and how great it is to be producers of information and be participatory to really trying to further emphasize some pieces that were there but I think needed to be fleshed out a bit more for the new environment we’re in post truth, which is based on confirmation bias and misinformation, false information and questions about new sources and all kinds of misleading facts that are being sent out. We really wanted to take that head-on because we saw metaliteracy in many ways even though it’s an idea that had developed previously as something that is a strong education response to some of the concerns and issues that we’re seeing today. Soon after the 2016 election we wrote a piece about fake news and that term is certainly changed even from the time that we originally wrote it. Wrote a piece for the conversation called “How to Reject Fake News in a Digital World,” so again taking a metaliteracy approach to looking at fake news in a critical way. Since that time even the term fake news, of course, has been weaponized, so we have conflicting thoughts about even using that term based on the research some educators think that it’s important to still keep using it and others want to reject it completely but I think we all generally know the narrative of that. The new book we decided to foreground metaliteracy in this environment and to make it an edited book so that we could engage other educators about this idea. Wasn’t just us but that it was other educators who were dealing with it. About half of the book is very theoretical and the other half of the book is more practical. When we did a call for proposals we tried to intentionally keep that open because we wanted different perspectives on this. I wrote the framing chapter to really talk about post truth, to reframe metaliteracy within this context and to also talk about a new figure that Trudi and I developed together based on the metaliteracy learning characteristics. The new book is going to present a new image, a new figure that further develops the metaliteracy idea from a theoretical perspective and talk about the importance of those characteristics in the post truth world. We’re joined by incredibly prestigious authors who from a theoretical standpoint look at things such as the importance of documentation in metaliteracy, and again, what they’re doing is they’re flushing out pieces of metaliteracy that we have not engaged with yet, so it was really exciting to see that. Another author talks about inoculation theory preparing learners to in many ways be resistant to some of the post truth issues that we’re currently engaged in. Scientific literacy, so there’s a whole chapter on the importance of scientific literacy and looking at it through the lens of metaliteracy. Also, looking at the synergy of word and image and photojournalism, Tom Palmer who teaches here in the journalism program at the University of Albany and it was also a journalist who works for the Times Union wrote that chapter. A few of the chapters do deal with the ACRL framework for information literacy for higher education, so we had that perspective. We were talking previously about both concepts are complementary and we have a few authors who really prove that. We also have a few authors who look at such topics as teaching students to be wrong, genre writing in the first year, writing instruction and the application of poetic ethnography in digital storytelling to create narratives in Philadelphia neighborhoods. I’m very interested in digital storytelling. I mentioned that previously and one of our authors also talks about digital storytelling to empower voices and to encourage students to really raise their voice in the current times that we’re in.

Trudi: And earlier you sort of asked how faculty, other educators, librarians have responded to metaliteracy. I think it’s really interesting. Tom and I did a workshop on metaliteracy at Temple University and a couple of these chapters actually came from people who were in that workshop. It was really sort of exciting to see the immediate impact that that had had.

Rebecca: That’s cool. So this sounds like a really great book; when can I get it?

Trudi: Next spring. [LAUGHTER]

John: Ok. Your current MOOC is a Coursera MOOC but you’re developing a new open edX MOOC. Could you tell us a little bit about that and how that new MOOC will differ from the prior MOOCs, because you’ve had more than one in the past?

Tom: This is part of a continuum of those three MOOCs. We actually wrote a paper in Open Praxis that talked about metaliteracy as a pedagogical framework that was applied in these different MOOCs, so we did a kind of compare and contrast of the different MOOC environments but also talked about our experiences and those different platforms and what it was like, and at the end of that paper one of our conclusions was that what we really needed to do next was create a kind of hybrid MOOC environment because what we had previously was the connectivist MOOC which was our first one and that Stephen Downes type approach. We actually used his grasshopper programming to run that MOOC, then we had the more structured xMOOCS, the Coursera and the Canvas. In many ways the paper was about that but what we decided at the end of the paper was we analyzed it was that we needed a hybrid version and it would it be possible to do that, is there a platform out there that has the learner-centered freeform approach of the connectivist MOOC with some of the structures that were valuable in the video that was really key to the xMOOCS. One of the ideas that propelled this idea forward… We also then, of course, had this shift to this thinking of a transition of kind of a connected world to a post truth world and what does that mean, and because we were working on this book “Metaliterate Learning for the Post Truth World,” we thought that’s a theme for a MOOC. We won’t go out there and call it the metaliteracy MOOC, but it’s a post truth MOOC that’s powered by metaliteracy that really applies the metaliteracy framework to each of the modules within the MOOC, so we’re really excited about that. We did apply for another SUNY IITG and we did receive funding for that, which allows us now to build a team—again it’s another Empire State College, University at Albany team—and we’re really excited about it, we’re developing it now, we’re exploring the open edX environment and as part of that too we’re working with the University of Buffalo because they’ve just launched an instance of open edX for their continuing education program and so they’ve already done a lot of the analysis and a lot of the footwork in terms of creating this instance of open edX on their campus, so they’re letting us experiment with what they’ve done and the idea is that our experience as one of the first two SUNY institutions beyond UV that are using open edX that we will hopefully pave the way for other SUNY faculty librarians that want to develop an open edX MOOC.

Trudi: One of the things that we’d like to do with this—Tom mentioned earlier—we’ve recently revised the metaliteracy learning goals and objectives. We are using those as the framework for this new MOOC. We would like to address issues such as confirmation bias, the role of expertise and authority in today’s environment, issues related to safety, security and personal privacy online, representations of reality in a virtual world and all the while sort of empowering participants to raise and share their voices while rebuilding communities of trust.

Rebecca: Who do you see is the audience for this particular MOOC?

Trudi: I think that we’re really hoping that it’s a very broad audience. We’ve had that, for example, with the Coursera MOOC where there were a lot of international participants everywhere from high school students to non-traditional types of students. We learned about their professions which just ran the gamut and I think that although we do hope to introduce this MOOC as part of courses both at Empire State College and at the University at Albany we’re really hoping that the participants are traditional learners and non-traditional learners. I think that what we’re going to be including in the way of content is something that needs to be broadly disseminated.

Tom: I think because that’s one of the advantages of MOOCs is that they do open up a potentially global audience, so we’re hoping for that international perspective as well, and as Trudi mentioned, we are developing courses so that we could on each of our campuses—I’m calling them wraparound courses—so that the courses that introduce students to the MOOC and they can then earn credit for doing so, because that’s been one of the big questions about MOOCs; can you learn credit, so what we’re doing is creating separate courses and in my version of the course I’m doing a full semester course so that the first half of the course will be introducing students to, well, what is a MOOC? What is post truth? What is metaliteracy? And I have a whole section on how to prepare for success in taking a MOOC, and then that will hopefully prepare them to be a successful learner in a MOOC environment so then they’ll take the six-week course and then there will be reflection piece at the end, which is very metaliteracy, and I actually think that a course about a course is very meta, so we’ve got that piece of it, and that idea to emerge from our very first connectivist experience where we tried to do it for credit and sure, you can talk about this experience at the University at Albany. In particular, in many ways the students were not prepared for the connectivist environment, so what we’re trying to do is in mind, since mine will be a full semester course, is invite students to take it but to really prepare them for being successful in MOOC because we know too that completion rates and MOOCs are not always great, but what if you offer it and prepare students for that environment. I think it is unique enough of an environment where that’s worth exploring.

Trudi: And Tom referred to our connectivist MOOC, which I did use as part of a course, essentially a blended course, and I was amazed when the students actually asked for more in-person class meetings because they couldn’t really grasp the idea of the MOOC and the fact that they were making decisions about their own learning. They were making decisions about which readings would be important. They needed to participate through a personal blog that was sort of elected and shared, and what they essentially did was doubt. I had about a 60% dropout rate in the course and the ones who were left were the ones who just wanted their hands held essentially through the rest of the course and that’s where we really learned that what Tom is going to be doing with his course, which is a full semester course, mine will be a quarter course again, is preparing them for this. This MOOC will be a more directed connectivist MOOC, but it was a very important takeaway.

Tom: And I’m hoping that by doing that it prepares them not only for our MOOC but it opens up the possibility of picking other MOOCs for lifelong learning. So that I think there are potential benefits, even beyond this experience. We’re hoping to launch the MOOC,—we’re developing it now—but we’re hoping to launch it for March 2019. It will be called “Empowering Yourself in a Post Truth World,” which is really important because we really want it to be a positive learning experience and one that provides resources for learners to be successful. You can imagine that talking about the post truth world could be a real downer, but what we really want it to be is a real positive focus of how to address the issues, look at these issues critically, but then to leave with some concrete ways of dealing with it. It also builds on some of the other MOOCs we had. The Coursera MOOC, for example, involved empowering yourself in a connected world and we’re running that now as an on-demand version. So when we first ran it in Coursera we were in the course and it was moving along and we were there in the discussions and following it but then Coursera changed its format a little bit and open up this possibility of on-demand and we actually like that because it allows us to have that content out there and to have learners engage with it in a self-paced way. Up to this point we’ve had, based on the stats we continue to receive from Coursera;—it’s running all the time—we’ve had 1,900 registrants and 900 active learners. We were really happy about that because it really gets some of these concepts out there, and I think it’s probably it’s been out there for a couple years now; it’s probably due for a revision, but that’s one of our projects that we’d like to do eventually, but I think that the post truth MOOC will in many ways build on that as well, so if someone wanted to go back they could look at that on-demand version, but as Trudi mentioned, the post truth MOOC is a six module, six-week learning experience on a very specific topic. I think it will be even more of a clearly-defined focused than even the other one.

John: Would be really nice to have all voters taking in the next couple of years. [LAUGHTER]

Trudi: We would like that.

Tom: Yes, yes.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a lot about the learner side and some of the tools and materials and MOOCs and things that can help learners become more metaliterate. How do you help faculty coach students through this kind of process? What are the takeaways for faculty? They’ve listened to this episode, they’re really interested in the idea; where do they get started?

Trudi: I think not to just promote our books, but I think that perhaps if they took a look at the two edited volumes they might get a sense of how others are doing it and the range of disciplines is pretty broad, so they might find someone in their own or a related one. I think that that might be a good place to start. I think also taking a look at the learning goals and objectives might provide some ideas of things they’re already doing, but perhaps finding ways to highlight them or frame them slightly differently.

Tom: And not to promote our blog, but metaliteracy.org; everything is in there, including the goals and learning objectives. Summaries of all the books, because we’ve had the blog now for a few years, so it’s interesting even to kind of go back and look at some of the original postings, but it links to the books, it links to all the presentations. The presentations are available, and a few of the keynotes that were recorded are in there. I do think the metaliteracy goals and learning objectives are definitely key because those can be easily applied. Should we mention what we were just invited to write because that would actually address this audience as well?

Trudi: Yeah, we’re going to be writing a piece for higher education jobs. They have a couple of newsletters and going to be talking about the importance of teaching or emphasizing metaliteracy on campus for administrators and also what instructors can do. We think that those are going to be appearing in November.

Tom: Because we’ve had a commitment to making everything open—I know it’s a lot to look for, but we do have the metaliteracy YouTube channel, the blog, of course, the presentations and a lot of these resources were intentionally constructed that way so that other educators could use them, so go to “Empowering Yourself in a Connected World” on Coursera and access the videos, use the learning activities in any way you want. Go to the first module; there’s a PDF in there that has the metaliteracy learner roles and we’ve used them as learning activities in our own classes and it has some reflective questions, so you have this diagram that really explains the different roles a learner could take and then it has questions for learners to really think about those roles. So I think a lot of those resources can be adapted in any way that people want, and it’s really an open concept, so we want people to get involved and apply their own approaches to this.

Rebecca: We wrap up by always asking: what next? You’ve given us so much, but what else? [LAUGHTER]

Tom: That’s a really good question. The next book that we mentioned is coming out in the spring. We’re currently working on the open edX MOOC, “Empowering Yourself in a Post Truth World.” We also, of course, will be launching that in the spring.

Trudi: With the digital badging system we would like to if we can find some more funding have a learning pathway portion to it where instructors can really tailor the information or add components for their own disciplines. We’re also working on a metaliteracy module for another innovative instruction technology grant funded project called “I succeed,” which is being developed in western New York, and they’ve asked us to provide a module on metaliteracy and this is going to be directed to high school students who aspire to college or first year college students and can be used by instructors, so we are putting that together with four units.

Tom: We have a few upcoming panel presentations that OLC accelerate in Florida in November.

John: I may see you there.

Tom: Oh, great! I haven’t been there in a couple years so I’m looking forward to getting back and that’s such a great conference.

John: It is.

Tom: And of course there will be continued research and writing. I’m certain that the open edX experience that we’re currently immersed in will lead to a paper, and we’d like to do a research project that assesses the application of the metaliteracy goals and learning objectives. So much of what we’ve been doing is really theorizing and talking about practice and developing these environments, but we would like to delve into that a bit more. We might have an opportunity to work with an international scholar that we met last year at the University of Guadalajara, but we’re not sure about that if that’s going to happen, but that would allow us to really expand the metaliteracy concept: working with international scholars. So there’s a lot of possibilities. Perhaps a coil courses in our future, and that’s another SUNY resource; it’s a collaborative online international learning environment. I think that’s something that we would love to do with an international scholar, so we’ll see if that happens some day. A lot of ideas, got a lot going on, but we’ll see.

John: You got a nice track record of being really productive with us.

Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us and spending time and giving us lots of things to think about.

John: Yeah, you’re doing some wonderful work.

Trudi:Thank you.

Tom: Thank you so much, we really enjoyed this.

Trudi: Yeah.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.