June 20, 2025 • 52 mins
Artificial intelligence isn't coming for higher ed. It’s already here. In this episode of the Student Success Podcast, I sat down with Brent Warner, a faculty member at Irvine Valley College, to unpack the practical implications of AI for college faculty and students. This wasn't a “robots will replace us” conversation. It was an honest, grounded look at what educators should consider right now.
Here are five key takeaway and some action steps to consider:
1. Get Curious About How Students Are Already Using AI
Action Step:
Start class conversations about AI use. Ask students how they’ve encountered tools like ChatGPT. Create surveys or quick classroom polls to understand their experiences and motivations. This opens up a nonjudgmental space to build shared awareness and clarify expectations.
2. Carve Out Time to Experiment Without Pressure
Action Step:
Schedule “AI sandbox” time during department meetings or professional development sessions. Use this time to explore tools together, ask questions, and brainstorm how AI might enhance—not replace—teaching. Encourage colleagues to try one small use case, like generating a sample quiz or brainstorming discussion prompts. (Check out the list of resources below that Brent discussed).
3. Redesign Assignments to Promote Higher-Order Thinking
Action Step:
Identify which assignments can be completed entirely by AI (e.g., generic essays) and revise them to emphasize critical thinking, personal reflection, or real-world application. Consider integrating process-focused checkpoints, like annotated drafts or video reflections, that showcase student thinking along the way.
4. Use AI as a Planning Tool, Not a Final Product
Action Step:
Leverage AI to support your own workflow. Try using it to generate draft lesson plans, rubrics, or sample prompts. Review and revise with your own expertise. This not only saves time in the long run, but models responsible use for students.
5. Stay Equity-Focused in AI Integration
Action Step:
Survey your students on their access to technology and include free or low-barrier alternatives when assigning work. Discuss ethical use of AI and share guidance on navigating bias and misinformation. Include clear policies in your syllabus but most importantly, invite dialogue, not fear.
Final Thought:
You don’t need to overhaul your course overnight. But small, intentional shifts can build your confidence, and create a more transparent, equitable environment for students navigating AI.
Key Chapter Makers
00:00: Introduction
03:10: Why Faculty Shouldn’t Panic About AI
07:35: Students Are Already Using AI
13:00: AI in the Classroom
19:00: Rethinking Assignments
25:15: Transparency with Students
37:00: Conversations and the Learning Process
42:20: Be Curious, Be Reflective, Be Human
For the full transcript and detailed show notes, visit the episode page.
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Student Success Podcast Homepage:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Al (00:01):
Welcome to the Student Success Podcast.
If you work in higher ed andwant to learn ways to support
students, check out today'sepisode.
Brent (00:09):
[Quote teaser] So we talk about it directly at the class
and then again, trying to betransparent and helpful with
them I think does a lot tomitigate the fears around it.
And so what I've found actuallyhappens quite often in my class
is students will come up to meand they're like I did this part
with AI, is that cool?
Yeah.
(00:30):
Or I'll say probably it wouldbe better for you to think this
through on your own and thenwork it through, and they're
like, oh, okay.
So I had one student actually afew weeks ago and she's like
I'm really struggling to findthe line of where acceptable use
for me versus where I'm notlearning, and I said that's an
awesome thing that you just saidto me, because that already
(00:52):
shows that you're consideringwhat matters and what doesn't
matter in your learning process,right, so so being able to go
through that.
Am I working to help studentslearn or am I working to, you
know, bust them on doingsomething wrong?
And you know I mean we all knowthat the reasons for cheating
have very little to do with,like, I want to be a cheater.
(01:13):
It's much more related to thestresses that they have and the
you know, personal issuesthey've got going on.
So are we finding ways to openup those real human
conversations with them wherethey feel like they can talk to
us about it?
Al (01:28):
Welcome to the Student Success Podcast, Brent.
Brent (01:33):
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
Al (01:33):
So,
Brent (01:36):
Yeah, my name is Brent Warner.
I'm a professor of English as aSecond Language at Irvine
Valley College.
I know a couple of mycolleagues have been on the show
before, so I'm excited andnervous to be next to them.
They're great people.
You had Professor Kaminsky on,as well as a few other people.
So, anyways, I teach at IrvineValley College.
(01:58):
I have spent a long timeworking in using technology for
language learning, using tech tosupport students, so I'm kind
of like a you know, a little bitof a techie nerd, along with
the language learning side ofthings and so obviously that
kind of tied in and got crazywith the artificial intelligence
(02:19):
conversations over the lastcouple of years.
And then I also do a couple ofpodcasts around similar things,
so like technology and languagelearning, technology in higher
ed, and I'm happy to share linkswith you for that stuff later.
But I'm just excited to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Al (02:38):
Oh, I'm so excited to have you here, Brent.
I've been following you onsocial media for a while, and I
have a very close relationshipwith Irvine Valley and it's just
so nice to have you here.
And what I wanted to focus ontoday because I've noticed a lot
of your posts have been aroundwhat you've been learning about
AI artificial intelligence waswondering if we can learn from
(03:01):
you kind of some baselineknowledge about AI and then,
further down the road, we cantake it to a conversation around
AI in teaching and learning,because there's a lot of camps
that are kind of forming out ofthis and I would like to kind of
get your thoughts on that.
And it's ever evolving, right,it's just exponential.
(03:24):
So thus far, what have youlearned?
Would love to get your insights.
Brent (03:30):
Yeah, so I guess I'll start with it's impossible to
keep up with the AI stuff.
So if you're listening andyou're like, oh, I'm feeling
like I'm falling behind, I don'tknow anybody who's like, I'm on
top of it, you know, like Imean even the, the biggest names
and things are like I you know,we can only do a few things.
(03:50):
You know you only take care of afew things, so don't worry if
you're if you're falling behindor if you feel like you don't
know what's going on.
Um, but kind of, as you said,Al, there are a lot of different
takes on the AI thing.
Right, a lot of people don'tlike it, a lot of people are
gung-ho with it.
I think I get a little nervousbecause I think I present myself
(04:11):
as gung-ho all the time, but Ialso have a lot of very
legitimate concerns and I dooccasionally share those things
too.
So it's like, hey, this isgnarly, this is scary.
What happens if you knowirresponsible people get control
of the information, and youknow like I worry about things.
Like you know, people aremoving towards using AI for
(04:32):
searches instead of you knowGoogle and human made things,
and so there's concerns on thoselevels.
There are also really amazingopportunities for students to
work with artificialintelligence, to challenge their
learning and theirunderstanding of concepts and
how they're thinking about theways that they're interacting.
(04:52):
And I think the biggest thingthat I kind of want to share,
conceptually, that I think isworth sharing and knowing about
overall with AI, is that, likeall tools, you kind of get out
of it what you put into it,right.
And so you're going to see thatthere are people who have
(05:13):
limited interaction with it andsay that it's a limited tool and
go well, okay, but how muchhave you done this?
How have you tried this thing?
And then it's like oh, I didn'tknow you could do that, or I
didn't know that you could kindof customize it to do this other
thing, and so you kind of haveto be flexible in exploring
these things and then alsorealize that we are in such
(05:36):
early days with all of this.
I think that's the other partthat is tricky, because we all
want to say, well, we want theanswer, we want to know what
we're doing and how to deal withit.
And it's like, well, we can'tdeal with.
I mean, we can deal with it asmuch as we know, but these
things are changing so quicklythat it's a little bit unfair to
students, it's unfair to otherfaculty members to make solid
(05:56):
decisions right now about whatwe're gonna be doing for the
next several years.
We really have to be ready topivot all the time.
Al (06:03):
Having to make decisions about AI, especially the
classroom.
What do you recommend or whatdo you see evolving as a way for
us to have more clarity aroundit, some realistic, thoughtful
boundaries around it?
Do you see, for example, is itbest for each department to have
(06:27):
kind of its own little AI workgroup or campus-wide work group?
How do you see this so that iteventually lands in a syllabus,
it eventually lands in how wehave our students use AI.
Brent (06:46):
Yeah, so I'm one of the co-chairs of our AI task force
on campus, and so that is aquestion we're dealing with all
the time.
I think one of the problemswith it is that we don't want to
dictate to people what theymust do in any situation.
It's not my job to tell youwhat you do as a professor I'm
(07:09):
speaking only to professors atthe moment or faculty but it's
also to empower people, nomatter what they think, hey, I
love it.
Hey, I hate this stuff.
How do I deal with it?
Because, regardless of what wethink, as a teacher whatever
(07:30):
side or however in the middleyou are on it your students are
going to be landing in all sortsof different places as well,
right.
And so we're not just able tosay this is absolutely what it's
going to be, because you couldsay you're blocking AI and your
students just go okay, well,I'll just go use one that you
don't see me using, right.
Or you could say I love AI, andyou might have a student I just
met with several studentsrecently who said we want to
know every time our teachers areusing AI and we don't like it
(07:54):
in our classes, right.
And so we're saying, okay, well, we're getting these different
perspectives and being so again,it's hard to make decisions in
ways that are so specific toanyone's needs that I think
we're all going to have to kindof make these choices kind of
from the ground up and so butalso to be open-minded enough to
(08:18):
say, hey, what I did thissemester might not be the final
answer.
Maybe I'm going to trysomething different next
semester and if I don't like it,maybe I'll play with it again
and see what the possibilitiesare next time around, and if I
do like it, maybe I'll start tosee what problems are coming.
So I know I'm kind of coveringthe whole spectrum of like every
possibility of answer, butreally the truth is you need to
(08:40):
work with your students on these, and so for me, the biggest
part is being really transparent.
If I want to explore thesethings, I definitely am talking
to my students and telling themhey, this is when I'm using AI,
this is what I'm using it for.
Let's talk about responsible use, and I think a lot of teachers
are still kind of unfortunately,not broaching the conversation
(09:02):
with their students and they'rejust kind of letting it go with
the assumption that studentsunderstand the differences
between using it appropriatelyand not.
But if the teachers don't knowthat, I think it's a struggle
for this.
I mean, it's definitely astruggle for students to know
that, and so we are allresponsible right now for kind
(09:24):
of know that.
And so we are all responsibleright now for kind of guiding
that conversation and helpingstudents figure out what that
means.
Possible in 10 years that, asstudents have come through from
you know much longer experienceof having used them by the time
they get to college.
Then, okay, we kind ofunderstand these concepts.
But I tell my students rightnow I'm like you guys are the
guinea pigs, like the guineapigs, and that's a hard thing
(09:47):
and a hard place for you guys tobe.
So let's work together andfigure out what it means.
Al (09:51):
So back to this AI task force for a moment.
Then, are you seeing in thistask force, over time, maybe
developing not a top-down, andthis is what you have to do, but
at least a set of guidelines?
You said, responsible use,right that there's some faculty
are not having conversations, sodo you see a task force helping
(10:12):
to develop something as aresource for faculty to work
with?
Brent (10:18):
Yeah, so we're, we're building a best practices guide.
But the problem is we startedbuilding it with, with the big
team, and you know we ended upwith like 50 or 60 pages of
stuff and it's like, well, thisis way too much.
There's no way anyone's goingto read this.
So how do we shrink it down totwo pages, right, and and, in a
(10:40):
good, beautiful design thatpeople will actually look at,
right?
So when you actually get thetext, it's probably more like
one page, maybe one and a half,right?
And so we know that peoplearen't going to look and read an
entire manual of things, but ifwe can kind of give them guides
to say like, hey, this issomething that seems to be
useful that people respond to,well, these are ways that you
can open up the conversationwith your students, and that's
(11:05):
not to say it's making decisionson it, but it's about saying,
hey, let's understand what we'reexpecting for these things.
I'm sure you've seen, thingslike the AI assessment scale,
like, hey, don't use any, use alittle bit, use more and fully
use it as part of your process.
Right, there's, you know,different approaches to opening
(11:26):
these conversations.
Um, that's not the only one,right?
Um, other people are sayingwell, now that I recognize how
my students are interacting withit, I'm having them, share with
me what they're expecting, whatthey're wanting and what
they're actually learning from.
But I was also reading today aninteresting article by Ethan
(11:47):
Malik and he was talking about.
You know, a lot of us arecreating these illusions of
learning.
Students might be using AI andthinking that they're learning,
but actually they've been usingit as a crutch, and so, even
though they feel like they'relearning, when they're tested
afterwards they're notnecessarily showing what they've
understood.
It does go the other way ifthey're trained and understand
(12:11):
the processes, then they'reactually learning more and
getting better grades onassessments, and so it's a
question of, like all things, isthere a pedagogy behind it?
Is there an understanding onhow we're implementing these
things?
These studies are still comingin, and so we kind of have to
kind of be aware of the changingtides and the shifts and try
(12:32):
our best to apply these thingsas we're working with our
students through it.
It is a lot but, but, but itcan be fun, right?
Because I think when you'reworking with your students
together.
Through the process, it becomesa much more shared conversation
instead of just the burden ofall responsibility is on you
alone, which is heavy.
Al (12:54):
And Brent, how are you using AI?
How are you leveraging it foryour pedagogy?
If you wouldn't mind sharing.
Brent (13:03):
Yeah.
So I use it a couple ways.
One in my class I have.
So the very first assignment wedo in my class, in my academic
writing class for academicwriting for multilingual
learners, students write a paperor a first day diagnostic type
of exam and I use it to give AIfeedback.
(13:24):
I say, I'm not even looking atit, let's just look at the
feedback that you're gettingfrom AI.
And so they immediately knowit's AI and they start scanning
through it and I try to set upthe prompt for AI to give
feedback on them in a way thatstudents would understand.
So it'll be like hey, give theminformation about this and this
, but I'm not trying to say makeit good or make it bad, but
then the students can startlooking and immediately they're
(13:46):
picking out things that the AIis giving to them and they're
like, oh, hold on a second.
This is kind of weird, rightLike this.
You know, I know that.
You know I use the example allthe time.
I know that I'm supposed tocapitalize proper nouns, but it
didn't tell me anything aboutthe proper nouns and I realized
that I did it here.
Oh, it's missing things.
What does that mean for you?
What does that mean for yourlearning, if you're trying to
(14:07):
use these things later on, right?
So it's not me coming down andsaying you're bad for using this
or anything like that.
It's more of an openopportunity for them to discover
what comes out of AI, and sothat's the first level of things
.
Later on, when we do writingassignments, I just started a
new process where I have it givea feedback at the top of a
(14:29):
document.
So, very specifically, I'musing Brisk.
You click on brisk and it cancreate this feedback based on
your rubric, and so what it doesin my rubric currently I have
five different categories thatare, you know, gradable, and so
then I say, hey, use thesecategories, use this rubric to
(14:50):
create feedback that thestudents can use as talking
points so that when they go intothe language lab to get help
from a professor we have we'relucky to have that kind of
system on our campus, but thenmy students can go in and they
can say hey, here's a checklistof 20 things, you know, four
(15:10):
things from every all fivecategories, and I think I want
to talk about this one from thiscategory.
I want to talk about this onefrom this category.
So now they're able to go intothe lab with a predetermined
idea of what they're trying toget done, because they've
already been given a little bitof feedback before they go and
talk to the professor in the lab, whereas before and this has
(15:33):
been a problem for us, you know,at our school, at least for as
long as I've been working therewhich is the students come in
and they go check my paper, Isit okay?
Right, and it's like well,these, you know, totally
decontextualized, stripped freequestions, and it's not their
fault.
They don't know what to ask,right, they don't.
(15:54):
They don't know what to seeabout their work.
And so now that they're justbeing given little bumps, they
can say, oh okay, well, now Iget a chance to start the
conversation or start the ideasbefore I go in, and it may be
right, it might not be right,but at least I'm able to start
talking to the professor aboutthose things.
So you're starting off with alittle bit of an AI kick and
(16:15):
then bringing it back into thehuman side of things for them.
That's one thing.
Another thing that I do is I'musing PlayLab, but there are
some of these tools, likeBoodleBox or whatever, that you
can build the bots on the backend.
So these are the agents, theycall them, or the GPTs.
They've got 100 different names.
It's really annoying, but youcan basically go.
(16:39):
You can build the prompts onthe back end, so then the
students interact with whateveryou've asked it to do.
So I'm doing things like this.
I do games for my students.
So, for example, in my classbecause grammar is an issue and
you know some of my students arestill trying to master grammar
forms I have games where I setit up.
(17:01):
So one of the games that I haveis Shohei Otani's secret spy
adventure type of thing, and soit tells a story of Shohei Otani
moonlighting as a spy and he'strying to do all these things,
and what it does is it gives youa paragraph, a short paragraph,
and it gives the students threeverbs in the dictionary form of
(17:24):
the verb, and their job is tothen convert it into the past
tense, right, and then it looksat what they did and it says
okay, you accurately did it.
Then the story will continue.
If they don't accurately do it,then Shohei fails on that
little part of the mission andis not able to continue to save
the world or whatever else it isthat he's doing.
(17:45):
And so if you kind of turnthese things into games or
learning opportunities, that'skind of like, choose your own
adventure-ish style, right whereit's like, okay, I'm moving
through these steps and then,and then my successes lead to
more success, possibly my, myfailures lead to whatever.
But they're not even reallythinking about the grammar stuff
so much.
I mean, they're doing it andthey're kind of going through,
(18:05):
but it opens up funopportunities for exploring,
where they're saying, hey, thisstory is kind of cool, I get to
see what happens, and not somuch.
Okay, I'm just doing a workshopand a worksheet type of thing
and checking off things on alist and writing the same word
next to it, with no, thetraditional paper versions that
(18:26):
can't interact back with thestudents, and so you can get
some real opportunities to makethis a lot of fun for them.
And you know it's still lowstakes.
It's like did you do it?
What did you find?
You can kind of review thingswith them.
They're not always 100%accurate, so I wouldn't do it
for testing at this point, butfor interactions for the
students and for them.
(18:46):
And I just did a very informalsurvey with my class and they're
like let's do more of thesethings.
These are fun for us, theyengage us right, and you can
make all sorts of differentcustomizations endlessly, kind
of to the limit of yourimagination.
Al (19:03):
And what program was that, Brent, that you used to do these
customizations?
Brent (19:08):
PlayLab, playlabai, and the reason that I use that is
because it is FERPA compliant,meaning that the data is not
being trained on.
So whatever the students writein there and I still don't want
them giving their privateinformation but I will say like,
hey, this at least we know fromthem they're locking down the
(19:31):
information.
So anything that you say is notbeing trained on.
You're getting the benefits ofthe AI stuff, but you kind of
stay away from the potentiallydangerous and scary stuff.
Al (19:42):
Ah, oh, that's so cool you're finding a way to embrace,
and I would imagine that takesa lot of work at first, a lot of
time and effort to put thistogether, create the prompts,
but in the long run it saves youtime actually.
Brent (19:59):
Yeah, so then once you start building these things and
PlayLab is cool too, because youcan click a button and remix
ones, and so it'll basicallymake a copy, and then you can go
into the back end and say, oh,I want to change this.
It used to be a past tenseactivity and now I'm going to
change it to.
You know a noun clauses orsubject verb agreements Again,
(20:21):
speaking from my language world.
But regardless of what subjectyou're teaching, you can do
these kinds of things and reallycustomize them and say like,
okay, how am I going to bring mystudents' understanding of the
world with the content that I'mtrying to teach?
And there's a lot of ways toexplore.
I think we're really juststarting to scratch the surface
(20:42):
on what people are going to dowith it.
Al (20:43):
So I'm imagining myself I'm a student in your class and I'm
understanding that, Oh okay, Iget to use AI.
He has structured it in acertain way.
Do you have any language thatdeals with, and you know, this
has been the issue from the verybeginning about how students
(21:04):
may use AI for cheating.
And then there's all theseso-called AI detectors, and how
do you deal with that?
What kind of language do youuse for students on that?
Brent (21:13):
So we talk about it directly at the class and then
again, trying to be transparentand helpful with them, I think
does a lot to mitigate the fearsaround it.
And so what I've found actuallyhappens quite often in my
classes.
Students will come up to me andthey're like I did this part
with AI, Is that cool?
And I'm like yeah, or.
(21:35):
Or I'll say probably it wouldbe better for you to think this
through on your on your own andthen work it through.
And they're like, oh, okay.
So I had one student actually afew weeks ago and she's like I'm
really struggling to find thatthe line of like where
acceptable use for me versuswhere I'm not learning and I
said that's an awesome thingthat you just said to me,
because that already shows thatyou're considering what matters
(21:58):
and what doesn't matter in yourlearning process, right, so
being able to go through thatand have them reflect on their
own learning and the value of it, rather than having a bot do
something, so I'll talk aboutthose types of things, right?
Like, hey, if you went to agolf course and you had a robot
hitting the golf balls for you,are you going to say that you
(22:19):
drove it?
Sorry, I'm not a golfer so I'mnot sure what a good number is,
but, like you know, are yougoing to say that you drove the
ball 200 yards or whatever elseit is right.
And so then they're like, oh,hold on a second.
What does that mean then for mylearning, right?
And so opening theconversations up like that, in a
more informal way, instead ofputting hard, strict limits on
(22:40):
it with, in the syllabus, youknow, you can have your syllabus
language, of course, but it'sit doesn't matter.
Like the syllabus is not athing that students care about,
right, they care about therelationship that they're
building with their teacher andthat what they're building with
their learning.
And so if, whatever you have inthe syllabus, you can say, hey,
let's set this up, but ifyou're not talking with them and
(23:01):
showing them the ways throughit, then I don't think that it's
particularly valuable, exceptjust to have a record of what
you've done.
So, or what you've said thatyou're going to, what rules you
said that you're going toenforce I guess that's probably
a better way to say it.
And again, you know, do I wantto be a police on this?
This?
(23:25):
No, every teacher kind of hasthat same anxiety is like am I
working to help students learnor am I working to uh, you know,
bust them on doing somethingwrong?
And you know, I mean we allknow that the reasons for
cheating have very little to dowith, like, I want to be a
cheater.
It's much more related to thestresses that they have and the
you know personal issues they'vegot going on.
So are we finding ways to openup those real human
(23:47):
conversations with them wherethey feel like they can talk to
us about it, versus and I'lltell you, this has taken me a
long time.
Like I used to just be like ayou know hard, like, oh, you
didn't do it, you're done.
So I've kind of had to build myown softening over the years
too, and so it's not just like ayou know hippy-dippy, like we
(24:07):
all love each other and that'sall good, right, it takes me
time.
But then I'm saying like, well,what's actually the best thing
for my students, what's reallygoing to help my students?
And this is moving away fromthe AI thing but like, that
human connection with them iswhat then makes it easy for me
to start having theconversations around what
(24:28):
they're doing.
That is appropriate or notappropriate on certain levels.
Al (24:29):
Yeah, you know, fundamentally, regardless of a
policy, a technology, whateverit is, it always goes back to
that basic human to humanconnection.
To have that as the foundation,is key to all of these
(24:51):
innovations, right?
So you're using AI in so manycool ways for teaching and
learning.
I'm sure you've heardcolleagues use AI for like, what
are some of the things whereyou're like, oh my gosh, that's
cool, I got to you know, lookinto that soon.
Brent (25:07):
Oh my gosh.
So these things happen all thetime, you know.
I mean, I think some of theinteresting things are these new
tools that are starting to comeout that help students along
with their writing processes,like the actual full on and you
know, they get get they getlittle responses as they're
going.
And some of these things are,you know, made by um, these
(25:28):
companies out there that arebuilding all sorts of things, uh
, and so I can't remember thename of it, but I just listened
to um, I think it was.
Uh, who was it?
Maybe Anna Mills?
Uh, on the Opposite of Cheatingpodcast.
I'm not sure if you've listenedto that one yet, but anyways, I
think it was her.
(25:49):
Anyways, sorry if I'm wrong whenthey're listening, but
basically the idea, hey, thereare these tools out there that
are really using studentswriting and analyzing it as
they're going, but not givingthem answers, but also kind of,
you know, I kind of think ofthese things as like bumper
bowling, right, where it's like,hey, just, let's just move a
little bit this way to get backon track, let's move a little
(26:11):
bit that way to get back ontrack.
And so I think that if we startseeing AI use from these
companies that is actually meantto help students grow.
We're going to see a lot ofreally positive things.
If we start seeing so many ofthese companies which are just
like these cheap wraparoundservices on top of you know,
(26:32):
these are the wrappers, right,it's just like hey, basically
it's chat GPT, but it's got adifferent name and it's you know
, going to write your essay foryou.
Well, you know, like your essayfor you.
Well, mmm, you know like whatvalue is that right, and and so
I'm excited to see when, when wesee like ethical, student
focused companies building out,I am excited, but I think
(26:54):
they're still in early stages.
I think a lot of the huckstersearlier, and so we're gonna do
some time sorting those out.
But regardless, I do havestudents that are playing with
or, sorry, colleagues who areplaying with things that like
hey, what level of translationfor a really more beginner level
students might they need?
(27:14):
Or we're building out some ofthese things for some of our
student centers, where studentscan get help from bots that are
letting them get the basicinformation that might have
taken too long or been dug, youknow, buried deep somewhere in
the website and so we say, well,use this website as a resource
and then when students askquestions, just answer them
(27:36):
immediately.
So we're playing around withsome of those possibilities on
campus as well.
Besides, you know, classroomuse, but looking at other ways
to support students, and youknow we've seen it so many times
where they're like, hey, I needhelp late at night and there's
nobody on campus and there'snobody, you know, on the library
desk.
What do I do?
(27:56):
Can I get something better thanthe kind of old fashioned logic
tree chat, and so we're tryingto build some of those
conversations as well.
Al (28:06):
Ethically focused companies.
Yeah, not too many of thosearound, I think.
Brent (28:17):
I know and this is the part that kills me so like, so
this is what ends up happeningis that where we find these
little, basically colleges,right, like a small college
department, that's like, hey,we're going to build this thing
out, but then they don't haveenough funding for it or
whatever else happens?
And so it's always this kind ofback and forth where it's like,
(28:38):
hey, as soon as I findsomething that's made by
professors or college teachersor whatever else it is, then I'm
like, okay, let's explore that.
And a lot of times they'llstart off with making it free
and they're not necessarily, youknow, aiming towards making a
bunch of money, and so that is,that's something that I try to
(28:59):
look for, but that, you know, alot of the companies, as you're
saying, they're like kind ofhide it or they put it behind
all these fancy numbers, and soyou again, as always, you kind
of have to be diligent in yoursearch.
And then I really like this idearecently that a few people have
been talking about, which iswhen you're reaching out to
these companies, you're saying,well, what are you doing to
(29:21):
support students?
Right, like you're making moneyon students, and now we're
seeing not to get too far intothe crazy world that we're
living in, but like we're seeing, students losing support all
across the country and acrossthe world how are you, as a
company, supporting thosestudents that you are now making
money off of right, and are wewilling to ask those questions
(29:43):
of these companies andcorporations and see what
they're willing to do?
Because if they're makingmillions and millions on these
tools, what's the payback right?
How does it go on both sides?
Al (29:55):
Right, you know the last what, five or six years there's
been a lot of talk, a lot ofdiscussion on reimagining
grading.
I'm sure you're very familiarwith the whole, you can call it
ungrading or all these differentkinds of ways to just talking
(30:16):
about how do we rethink it and Iwas wondering, from a grading
standpoint, what are yourthoughts on that and AI?
Brent (30:25):
Yeah.
So I think this is anotherthing that helps me get buy in
from my students, which is I dothe ungrading thing or limited
grading, and so basically thevast majority of my assignments,
are pass, no pass.
Right, you got the work, yougot the minimum requirements for
(30:47):
it or you didn't.
And so the way that works isthat my students have unlimited
times to resubmit their work, aslong as they get it back to me
within a week of my feedback.
Then they can get anothersubmission and another
submission all the way to theend of the semester, and so for
the most times, most studentswill get it in two or three
times, right?
They're like, okay, now I seewhat's going on.
(31:08):
But to me, I treat that as theopportunity for, like, we talk
about it, like the shootingbaskets, right, you're like, hey
, you don't just shoot onebasket and miss and say I didn't
get it right, you keep onshooting and you keep on
practicing over and over andover again.
And you don't also say, hey, Imade it once.
Obviously I'm a pro basketballplayer at this point.
Well, that's not true either,right, and so, so it's about
(31:30):
that saying like, hey, show thatyou got the skills and then
we'll move to the next spot overand try that again.
So this is my process, uh, forthe majority of my assignments
with my students, and so whenwe're doing AI related stuff too
, that all fits in right.
So it's like, hey, show me thatyou're practicing with these
things, show me that you'reinteracting with it.
What are you learning from it?
(31:51):
Let's take a look at yourreflection on it.
Did you really you know, wasyour interaction with AI useful
for you in this conversation ornot?
Because, again, my goal is tohave them show their learning
process overall, um, and whenthey're, whether it's AI or not,
right, but they're, they'regoing through those types of
(32:11):
things.
And so my whole approachbecause of that is a little bit
different maybe than the waysome other teachers might be
dealing with things, but it doesallow me the freedom to say,
well, let's experiment with thisthing and see what happens,
right, and so we work it throughthat way.
I do have friends who are doingthings like hey, I'm getting AI
(32:34):
to give suggestions on where therubric on this assignment might
be, and then I'm using that asmy starting point to alleviate
the mental burden that comeswith tons and tons of grading,
whether that's rubric grading ornot.
I think those it's very cool,it's very interesting.
(32:54):
It has some problematic areas,of course, right, and we say,
well, how much do we trust thisand how much are we double
verifying all of these, thesethings?
And so you have to kind of havea teacher who is dedicated to
figuring those things out asthey're going through.
Um, I'm not very comfortablewith you know, just like click a
button and AI will grade foryou.
That's not where I am, um, but Ido like the idea of saying,
(33:18):
well, what are the redundanciesin work or the things that are
not really bringing value backto the students, and how can I
use AI to reimagine the way thatI'm approaching those things?
And again, I don't have all theanswers, I'm just starting, I
just experiment, and so I thinkyou know, all the things you've
seen me post are like hey, I'mtesting this thing out.
(33:40):
I try to be very practical withwhat I share, and it's not like
right now we're talking alittle bit heady, but I think
most of the stuff that I shareis like this is exactly what I
did, this is what, this is how Itried it, this is what the
result was, and you know, try itfor yourself and see if it
works the same way.
Al (33:57):
Yeah, I love that your approach is to students to show
the learning process, and Ithink where a lot of faculty
struggle with this is time andcapacity.
When I was a re-entry student, Iwent to community college.
I was very lucky that I found apretty I mean, he was a pretty
(34:19):
fantastic math instructor.
I believe he actually had aK-12 background, and when we had
the quizzes I found it it was,I was just astonished at this,
because it was so different fromhow I grew up.
He said I don't care if you getthe answer right or wrong, but
(34:40):
he would spend so much timebecause he wanted to see us do
the whole problem and he wouldgive us points on our process
and how we learned that and yes,we get a bonus if we got it
right but he wanted to see ourlearning and so I could imagine,
(35:01):
but it will take some time totrust it to save time using AI,
yes, and so before AI though,Brent, how did you find the time
, or did you find that it wasn'tactually a very large
percentage of students who wereturning in the rewrites, and
that's what made it manageable?
(35:21):
I'm just wondering how you'reable to manage that.
Brent (35:24):
For my writing class, for example.
My students write in GoogleDocs and so we have it's all
inside of Canvas with the GoogleLTI thing, right.
But we go into the Google Docsand the students do their
writing process, and so I say,okay, you have to write every
single letter of every singleword inside of the Google Docs,
from the beginning to the end.
There are tools out there.
(35:45):
Unfortunately, they're startingto charge more and more but
there's a new one which iscalled Process Feedback, which
kind of scans through it andgives an analysis of the writing
process and you can kind ofwatch a video of the students
writing process.
If you need to do that, um,there, I've talked about this
for a long time.
There was a tool called DraftBack, which is also good, um,
(36:07):
but they just started chargingan annual subscription fee and
so I'm like, anyways, um, but,uh, so one, you can use that as
a way to talk to students abouthow they write.
It's not just about catchingthem right and saying like, oh,
okay, you're doing these thingsright, but it's like hey, what
are you doing in your writingprocess?
I see that you're often writingat 3am.
Do you think that's the mostproductive writing time for you
(36:28):
or whatever else it is.
So that's one part where youcan have real conversations
about what they're doing.
The second thing is, as soon asthey've turned in their first
draft, you have them switchtheir writing from editing mode,
which is your normal writing,to suggesting mode, which is
essentially track changes onmicrosoft word in google doc.
It's called suggesting mode.
(36:49):
So then the students go in andthey start deleting words or
adding in vocabulary or changingthe phrasing or rearranging
whatever.
But all of that stuff getsshown inside of google docs, and
so you it starts getting messyvery quickly because there's
like you know lines throughwords and you know new words put
in, but on the side, on thecomments, it tells you, hey,
(37:11):
this is what happened, and you,as the teacher, can then go
through and click on the checkmark and say, yes, I like this
change, or I can go rightunderneath it and talk to the
student about why that changeisn't necessarily a strong thing
to do.
And so then now we're workingon a fully immersive and
interactive document.
This is not even AI stuff, thisis just, you know, google Docs,
(37:34):
but you're now kind of doing aback and forth on a live
document where they're startingto see their whole process and I
can see what they're doing, andso it's like okay, now I see
why you made this change.
I suggested that you did this,but you know you chose to do it
or you chose not to do it.
Let's talk about what you did.
(37:54):
So again, you can see thatwhole writing process, go on
with the students through thisum, and it definitely takes.
I mean, I'm not, you know, likenot to say that.
You know you're going to zipthrough all of these things, but
and I do have some benefits ofhaving you know somewhat smaller
classes so I'm not like doingyou know 200 students or you
(38:14):
know 300 students or anythinglike that.
I don't know exactly how Iwould adjust.
I think AI comes into part ofit.
So Brisk, for example, does havea focused feedback option which
is kind of meant to do the samething, where it actually runs
through the document and givesyou feedback on sections.
It's not as precise as I wouldlike, because I will highlight a
(38:38):
single period and make acomment on like hey, let's talk
about why you put this periodinside the quotation marks
instead of after the parentheses, as on your citation or
whatever else it is, um, butbrisk will like highlight a
whole line or, you know, kind oftalk about broader concepts, um
.
So as these things get better,I think it will be more possible
for, you know, teachers withlarger classes.
(39:01):
But I do hope that classes likewriting are not too large,
because that's not reallyserving students very well
either.
Al (39:06):
Google Docs, all right.
Brent (39:11):
Yeah, so use Google Docs is my answer.
Al (39:13):
Can you imagine doing all this by hand back in the day?
Oh my gosh.
Brent (39:19):
Oh yeah, well, I mean, it's like, know, like, and
people did that, right.
It's like you'll write yourlittle notes on it and you say
you know wrong word or whateverelse it is, but then you can't
write back on top of that overand over again, right?
And so now the cool thing isstudents click a button, it's
back in my hands now, I canimmediately work with it, and so
that process does work prettywell.
Al (39:40):
So you're in what we would call the humanities.
Have you happen to see anythingcool of what your colleagues
in, let's say, in STEM have usedAI?
By any chance?
Brent (39:55):
A little bit there.
We have people in STEM and inmath who are exploring things
and trying to figure things out,but they are still well again
with the tools that aregenerally available.
They're finding that, like AI,you know, does create unreliable
(40:18):
information.
You know math, it still doesweird things with like two plus
two equals five, don't, you know, right, you know?
I mean not it was that badearly on.
It's still problematic and thereare, there are ones, but I'm
not as familiar with the mathand STEM outputs.
I know there are some peoplewho are trying to figure what
places they want to use them for, but I'm not a hundred percent
(40:41):
sure you know how that world isgoing.
On the other hand, we're seeingall this stuff in the actual
science communities wherethey're using AI for, like you
know, trying to help solvediseases and you know, like
doing all these, you know, hey,breakthroughs on cancer research
and all these amazing things.
So I would be very surprised ifwe don't see soon a pretty big
(41:05):
shift into people going wait asecond.
Actually, if we're able toreally solve medical problems,
for example, let's take a reallook at what this means, for you
know ways that we can teach andlearn as well.
Al (41:18):
I read a research paper of how AI was actually more
accurate in diagnosis thandoctors, which fascinated me.
What a cool tool.
As we kind of start windingdown here a little bit, I was
wondering about how do you useAI personally or for fun?
(41:38):
We talked a lot aboutprofessionally, for the
classroom.
Is there any ways that you usethat personally?
Brent (41:47):
Yeah, a little bit.
I do some.
I do for fun.
I do image generation.
I was a very bad Photoshopper.
Not very bad, sorry, I was anintermediate Photoshopper.
I guess I used to love makinglittle fun jokes and things like
that, and so now I'll do thingslike instead of doing my own
photoshop, I'll build out imagesthat are fun.
(42:09):
You know the just silly, sillythings, of course, right, um,
and there is some use that I useit for.
Uh, you know, every once in awhile, novelty use, right, like,
hey, what should I cook today?
I've got this in my fridge orwhatever else.
It is those those kinds of funthings.
Um, and a little bit of thingslike planning out.
You know I'm, hey, I'm gonna beflying to Japan, you know, in
(42:32):
the in the summer, give me someideas of places that I haven't
been to or whatever else itmight be.
But the truth is, I've gotskepticism around some of these
things as well, and so, while Iwill play with them, I'm not a
super hardcore user for myprivate life.
I'm trying to get like, hey,tech is my working life thing
(42:56):
and I'm moving more towards likespending time in nature.
But there are some cool things,like taking a picture of a
flower and saying, hey, what isthis flower?
And it gives you all theinformation on that flower.
So I love those kinds of things, um, I was told recently we're
not supposed to say thisexpression anymore.
(43:16):
I'm not sure, but touch grass,right like hey, get out there,
just get connected to the world,breathe some fresh air, right,
like all those types of things.
So, yeah, so I do like it, butI am slowing myself down and
trying to be less of a techie inmy private life.
Al (43:35):
Yeah, I think I saw you posted a marzipan cake of you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I tried itand it didn't work out.
Brent (43:47):
Did you upload your own photo for that, or or did you
just?
Did you prompt the whole thing?
Al (43:50):
No, I uploaded and said create a Marzipan.
Uh, it was no comparison toyours, man, yours was really
cool.
Brent (43:59):
Yeah, that one turned out really well and I was like,
okay, and that was the first runat it, so doing things like
that are totally fun and sillyand you know whatever.
But um, but yeah, so that one,I uploaded it my my kind of
profile photo that I have onLinkedIn or whatever, and, um,
and it did a really good job ofactually making it look like me
(44:21):
looking like an edible cake.
It's ridiculous.
But you know, the other thinghere too, Al, that I do want to
point out is like we have tohave some fun with this stuff.
We can't take it all tooseriously all the time.
Like I totally get the concerns,and you know whether that's
environmental or ethicalconcerns and all those things,
(44:43):
and it's like what an amazingthing to just be able to play
with some of these things andhave a little bit of fun.
Um, you know, every once in awhile I'll do things like let's
try and make a comic and seewhat the comic looks like.
Um, you know, back when I wasyounger, I used to do, uh, you
know zines I was into like theyou know the punk rock scene and
all that.
So so it's like kind ofbringing back some of my own
just personal value.
Creativity be really, you know,a lot of fun and then, and you
(45:09):
share these things with yourfriends and have a little levity
in life too is important, so Ido recommend it.
Al (45:17):
Yeah, no, I've prompted to do a lot of funny things.
I asked it to do a song aboutthe committee structure at
colleges.
It's hilarious, and I've donewithin the family just really
hilarious songs and prompts andwe would send to each other and
(45:39):
doing it in other languages.
It's great fun.
Now speaking of because I Irecall that you were in Japan
for a year, do you have anyinsights of how they use AI
there?
Brent (45:52):
Yeah, so it's a little bit weird one.
Japan went all in.
They're just like useeverything, there's no
restrictions for anything, andso it was like it was a very
weird approach, uh, especiallyfor Japanese, who are very
rule-based, you know, in a lotof ways, but in daily life, I
had friends with kids and allthese things and the
(46:14):
conversations were not there,right.
They weren't worried about kidsusing it.
And it may be they'll, you know, again, it'll might catch up in
a year or whatever else it is,but they, it wasn't a concern,
it wasn't a thing that they'relike, oh, they're gonna be
cheating or whatever elsethey're gonna be doing with
these things.
It was just like a nonconversation.
And when I would bring up AI,people just look at me like,
(46:37):
uh-huh, okay, well, let's gocheck out this other.
You know, whatever we're doinghere, right, and so it was like
not a lot of people.
You know professors, when Iwent to universities, they were
definitely talking with me aboutit, but, like the average
Japanese family and the averageJapanese person on the street
was not particularly interested,although there were definitely
(46:59):
magazines and I saw books andall sorts of things out there.
So the conversation ishappening in some places, but it
didn't feel like the massiveswarm of conversation like it is
in the States.
Al (47:09):
Yeah, and I would imagine, because you teach students from
so many different cultures, thathas a particular way of how
they look at AK as well in yourclassroom, right?
One of the last things I wantedto ask you about is, imagine
there's a a formal mentoringprogram at Irvine Valley and you
(47:32):
are a mentor to 15 incomingfaculty, to 15 incoming faculty
in your department.
What would be your top three?
Well, it doesn't have to bethree, whatever number you want,
Brent.
What would be the top tipsguidelines, whatever you want to
call them for their use in AI?
(47:53):
These are first time teachersknowing that they would have
used AI as students.
So what would you, as a mentor?
What kind of guidance would yougive them?
What tips would you give themas they enter the classroom
Brent (48:11):
That's a great question.
So I think the first thing is Ialways say treat your classroom
like a laboratory.
That's for you and for yourstudents, right, if we're really
doing the best that we can forour students, we can't say that
we know all the answers or howthings are always going to turn
(48:34):
out, always going to turn out,and part of the learning process
is failure.
Right, things don't always work.
We all have lessons that waslike oh, I thought this was
going to be amazing and itdidn't work out, right.
I think a lot of people, andespecially younger teachers, may
be coming in, feel like apressure to get things right all
the time and it's like, well, Iwould have wasted two hours if
I did this wrong.
Right, and so, whatever,whether it's AI or not, it's
(48:56):
like, hey, give yourself thegrace to be a teacher.
If you are working to supportyour students, you will have
more wins than failures over theprocess of things.
Right, so it's okay toexperiment with these things and
see what works and see whatdoesn't.
Two, involve your students inthe learning process.
(49:16):
This is what this currentgeneration is looking for and
(49:53):
this is what they value in theirlearning process, trying to
understand that and then alsobeing willing to push back on it
, because I think the otherthing that happens is, hey,
let's all do what, what thestudents want to get done, and
make sure that we're working andsupporting their needs.
But we also know, asprofessionals, actually this
works, actually this is whathappens in the learning process.
(50:16):
And so really being willing toapply those things and say like,
hey, it's not just that it's myhistory, but that there is a
long, research, of study andusing actual research and real
information, that then we cansay let's apply these ideas out
to things, and so theexperiments are great if they're
(50:39):
founded in research-basedpractices.
Al (50:43):
So do you have any other parting words of wisdom, Brent?
Brent (50:48):
No, I think it's just be respectful of where people are
with the need of, or the thefears and excitement around AI.
Right, I, as much as I can, Ialways worry that people feel
like I'm pushing an agenda onone side or another, and I
really my biggest goal is thatpeople just open their mind to
(51:12):
what possibilities there are,and that could be positive or
negative, and so I think that,as we're talking to other people
, it's very tempting to push ourthoughts on them.
This is in all things, butaround the AI conversation, like
how do we be respectful of eachother, how do we open up these
conversations, even when wedisagree?
(51:34):
And keep moving forward for thebetterment of our students?
If you keep that question infront of mind, I think you'll
build good relationships withyour colleagues, I think you'll
build good relationships withyour students and hopefully,
you'll see more successes as youkeep moving down the line.
Al (51:50):
Beautiful.
So thank you for participatingin the Student Success Podcast
Brent.
Brent (51:56):
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you askingme and I hope that at least one
thing that I oh that's my otherthing is try to learn one thing
right when you get a learningsession, you don't need to take
away a hundred things.
If you got one thing out of it,that's a good use of time.
So I hope that there was oneuseful thing inside of there.
Al (52:14):
Oh, I'm sure there is.
Thank you.
Welcome to the Student Success Podcast.
If you work in higher ed andwant to learn ways to support
students, check out today'sepisode.
Brent (00:09):
[Quote teaser] So we talk about it directly at the class
and then again, trying to betransparent and helpful with
them I think does a lot tomitigate the fears around it.
And so what I've found actuallyhappens quite often in my class
is students will come up to meand they're like I did this part
with AI, is that cool?
Yeah.
(00:30):
Or I'll say probably it wouldbe better for you to think this
through on your own and thenwork it through, and they're
like, oh, okay.
So I had one student actually afew weeks ago and she's like
I'm really struggling to findthe line of where acceptable use
for me versus where I'm notlearning, and I said that's an
awesome thing that you just saidto me, because that already
(00:52):
shows that you're consideringwhat matters and what doesn't
matter in your learning process,right, so so being able to go
through that.
Am I working to help studentslearn or am I working to, you
know, bust them on doingsomething wrong?
And you know I mean we all knowthat the reasons for cheating
have very little to do with,like, I want to be a cheater.
(01:13):
It's much more related to thestresses that they have and the
you know, personal issuesthey've got going on.
So are we finding ways to openup those real human
conversations with them wherethey feel like they can talk to
us about it?
Al (01:28):
Welcome to the Student Success Podcast, Brent.
Brent (01:33):
Thank you.
Glad to be here.
Al (01:33):
So,
Brent (01:36):
Yeah, my name is Brent Warner.
I'm a professor of English as aSecond Language at Irvine
Valley College.
I know a couple of mycolleagues have been on the show
before, so I'm excited andnervous to be next to them.
They're great people.
You had Professor Kaminsky on,as well as a few other people.
So, anyways, I teach at IrvineValley College.
(01:58):
I have spent a long timeworking in using technology for
language learning, using tech tosupport students, so I'm kind
of like a you know, a little bitof a techie nerd, along with
the language learning side ofthings and so obviously that
kind of tied in and got crazywith the artificial intelligence
(02:19):
conversations over the lastcouple of years.
And then I also do a couple ofpodcasts around similar things,
so like technology and languagelearning, technology in higher
ed, and I'm happy to share linkswith you for that stuff later.
But I'm just excited to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Al (02:38):
Oh, I'm so excited to have you here, Brent.
I've been following you onsocial media for a while, and I
have a very close relationshipwith Irvine Valley and it's just
so nice to have you here.
And what I wanted to focus ontoday because I've noticed a lot
of your posts have been aroundwhat you've been learning about
AI artificial intelligence waswondering if we can learn from
(03:01):
you kind of some baselineknowledge about AI and then,
further down the road, we cantake it to a conversation around
AI in teaching and learning,because there's a lot of camps
that are kind of forming out ofthis and I would like to kind of
get your thoughts on that.
And it's ever evolving, right,it's just exponential.
(03:24):
So thus far, what have youlearned?
Would love to get your insights.
Brent (03:30):
Yeah, so I guess I'll start with it's impossible to
keep up with the AI stuff.
So if you're listening andyou're like, oh, I'm feeling
like I'm falling behind, I don'tknow anybody who's like, I'm on
top of it, you know, like Imean even the, the biggest names
and things are like I you know,we can only do a few things.
(03:50):
You know you only take care of afew things, so don't worry if
you're if you're falling behindor if you feel like you don't
know what's going on.
Um, but kind of, as you said,Al, there are a lot of different
takes on the AI thing.
Right, a lot of people don'tlike it, a lot of people are
gung-ho with it.
I think I get a little nervousbecause I think I present myself
(04:11):
as gung-ho all the time, but Ialso have a lot of very
legitimate concerns and I dooccasionally share those things
too.
So it's like, hey, this isgnarly, this is scary.
What happens if you knowirresponsible people get control
of the information, and youknow like I worry about things.
Like you know, people aremoving towards using AI for
(04:32):
searches instead of you knowGoogle and human made things,
and so there's concerns on thoselevels.
There are also really amazingopportunities for students to
work with artificialintelligence, to challenge their
learning and theirunderstanding of concepts and
how they're thinking about theways that they're interacting.
(04:52):
And I think the biggest thingthat I kind of want to share,
conceptually, that I think isworth sharing and knowing about
overall with AI, is that, likeall tools, you kind of get out
of it what you put into it,right.
And so you're going to see thatthere are people who have
(05:13):
limited interaction with it andsay that it's a limited tool and
go well, okay, but how muchhave you done this?
How have you tried this thing?
And then it's like oh, I didn'tknow you could do that, or I
didn't know that you could kindof customize it to do this other
thing, and so you kind of haveto be flexible in exploring
these things and then alsorealize that we are in such
(05:36):
early days with all of this.
I think that's the other partthat is tricky, because we all
want to say, well, we want theanswer, we want to know what
we're doing and how to deal withit.
And it's like, well, we can'tdeal with.
I mean, we can deal with it asmuch as we know, but these
things are changing so quicklythat it's a little bit unfair to
students, it's unfair to otherfaculty members to make solid
(05:56):
decisions right now about whatwe're gonna be doing for the
next several years.
We really have to be ready topivot all the time.
Al (06:03):
Having to make decisions about AI, especially the
classroom.
What do you recommend or whatdo you see evolving as a way for
us to have more clarity aroundit, some realistic, thoughtful
boundaries around it?
Do you see, for example, is itbest for each department to have
(06:27):
kind of its own little AI workgroup or campus-wide work group?
How do you see this so that iteventually lands in a syllabus,
it eventually lands in how wehave our students use AI.
Brent (06:46):
Yeah, so I'm one of the co-chairs of our AI task force
on campus, and so that is aquestion we're dealing with all
the time.
I think one of the problemswith it is that we don't want to
dictate to people what theymust do in any situation.
It's not my job to tell youwhat you do as a professor I'm
(07:09):
speaking only to professors atthe moment or faculty but it's
also to empower people, nomatter what they think, hey, I
love it.
Hey, I hate this stuff.
How do I deal with it?
Because, regardless of what wethink, as a teacher whatever
(07:30):
side or however in the middleyou are on it your students are
going to be landing in all sortsof different places as well,
right.
And so we're not just able tosay this is absolutely what it's
going to be, because you couldsay you're blocking AI and your
students just go okay, well,I'll just go use one that you
don't see me using, right.
Or you could say I love AI, andyou might have a student I just
met with several studentsrecently who said we want to
know every time our teachers areusing AI and we don't like it
(07:54):
in our classes, right.
And so we're saying, okay, well, we're getting these different
perspectives and being so again,it's hard to make decisions in
ways that are so specific toanyone's needs that I think
we're all going to have to kindof make these choices kind of
from the ground up and so butalso to be open-minded enough to
(08:18):
say, hey, what I did thissemester might not be the final
answer.
Maybe I'm going to trysomething different next
semester and if I don't like it,maybe I'll play with it again
and see what the possibilitiesare next time around, and if I
do like it, maybe I'll start tosee what problems are coming.
So I know I'm kind of coveringthe whole spectrum of like every
possibility of answer, butreally the truth is you need to
(08:40):
work with your students on these, and so for me, the biggest
part is being really transparent.
If I want to explore thesethings, I definitely am talking
to my students and telling themhey, this is when I'm using AI,
this is what I'm using it for.
Let's talk about responsible use, and I think a lot of teachers
are still kind of unfortunately,not broaching the conversation
(09:02):
with their students and they'rejust kind of letting it go with
the assumption that studentsunderstand the differences
between using it appropriatelyand not.
But if the teachers don't knowthat, I think it's a struggle
for this.
I mean, it's definitely astruggle for students to know
that, and so we are allresponsible right now for kind
(09:24):
of know that.
And so we are all responsibleright now for kind of guiding
that conversation and helpingstudents figure out what that
means.
Possible in 10 years that, asstudents have come through from
you know much longer experienceof having used them by the time
they get to college.
Then, okay, we kind ofunderstand these concepts.
But I tell my students rightnow I'm like you guys are the
guinea pigs, like the guineapigs, and that's a hard thing
(09:47):
and a hard place for you guys tobe.
So let's work together andfigure out what it means.
Al (09:51):
So back to this AI task force for a moment.
Then, are you seeing in thistask force, over time, maybe
developing not a top-down, andthis is what you have to do, but
at least a set of guidelines?
You said, responsible use,right that there's some faculty
are not having conversations, sodo you see a task force helping
(10:12):
to develop something as aresource for faculty to work
with?
Brent (10:18):
Yeah, so we're, we're building a best practices guide.
But the problem is we startedbuilding it with, with the big
team, and you know we ended upwith like 50 or 60 pages of
stuff and it's like, well, thisis way too much.
There's no way anyone's goingto read this.
So how do we shrink it down totwo pages, right, and and, in a
(10:40):
good, beautiful design thatpeople will actually look at,
right?
So when you actually get thetext, it's probably more like
one page, maybe one and a half,right?
And so we know that peoplearen't going to look and read an
entire manual of things, but ifwe can kind of give them guides
to say like, hey, this issomething that seems to be
useful that people respond to,well, these are ways that you
can open up the conversationwith your students, and that's
(11:05):
not to say it's making decisionson it, but it's about saying,
hey, let's understand what we'reexpecting for these things.
I'm sure you've seen, thingslike the AI assessment scale,
like, hey, don't use any, use alittle bit, use more and fully
use it as part of your process.
Right, there's, you know,different approaches to opening
(11:26):
these conversations.
Um, that's not the only one,right?
Um, other people are sayingwell, now that I recognize how
my students are interacting withit, I'm having them, share with
me what they're expecting, whatthey're wanting and what
they're actually learning from.
But I was also reading today aninteresting article by Ethan
(11:47):
Malik and he was talking about.
You know, a lot of us arecreating these illusions of
learning.
Students might be using AI andthinking that they're learning,
but actually they've been usingit as a crutch, and so, even
though they feel like they'relearning, when they're tested
afterwards they're notnecessarily showing what they've
understood.
It does go the other way ifthey're trained and understand
(12:11):
the processes, then they'reactually learning more and
getting better grades onassessments, and so it's a
question of, like all things, isthere a pedagogy behind it?
Is there an understanding onhow we're implementing these
things?
These studies are still comingin, and so we kind of have to
kind of be aware of the changingtides and the shifts and try
(12:32):
our best to apply these thingsas we're working with our
students through it.
It is a lot but, but, but itcan be fun, right?
Because I think when you'reworking with your students
together.
Through the process, it becomesa much more shared conversation
instead of just the burden ofall responsibility is on you
alone, which is heavy.
Al (12:54):
And Brent, how are you using AI?
How are you leveraging it foryour pedagogy?
If you wouldn't mind sharing.
Brent (13:03):
Yeah.
So I use it a couple ways.
One in my class I have.
So the very first assignment wedo in my class, in my academic
writing class for academicwriting for multilingual
learners, students write a paperor a first day diagnostic type
of exam and I use it to give AIfeedback.
(13:24):
I say, I'm not even looking atit, let's just look at the
feedback that you're gettingfrom AI.
And so they immediately knowit's AI and they start scanning
through it and I try to set upthe prompt for AI to give
feedback on them in a way thatstudents would understand.
So it'll be like hey, give theminformation about this and this
, but I'm not trying to say makeit good or make it bad, but
then the students can startlooking and immediately they're
(13:46):
picking out things that the AIis giving to them and they're
like, oh, hold on a second.
This is kind of weird, rightLike this.
You know, I know that.
You know I use the example allthe time.
I know that I'm supposed tocapitalize proper nouns, but it
didn't tell me anything aboutthe proper nouns and I realized
that I did it here.
Oh, it's missing things.
What does that mean for you?
What does that mean for yourlearning, if you're trying to
(14:07):
use these things later on, right?
So it's not me coming down andsaying you're bad for using this
or anything like that.
It's more of an openopportunity for them to discover
what comes out of AI, and sothat's the first level of things
.
Later on, when we do writingassignments, I just started a
new process where I have it givea feedback at the top of a
(14:29):
document.
So, very specifically, I'musing Brisk.
You click on brisk and it cancreate this feedback based on
your rubric, and so what it doesin my rubric currently I have
five different categories thatare, you know, gradable, and so
then I say, hey, use thesecategories, use this rubric to
(14:50):
create feedback that thestudents can use as talking
points so that when they go intothe language lab to get help
from a professor we have we'relucky to have that kind of
system on our campus, but thenmy students can go in and they
can say hey, here's a checklistof 20 things, you know, four
(15:10):
things from every all fivecategories, and I think I want
to talk about this one from thiscategory.
I want to talk about this onefrom this category.
So now they're able to go intothe lab with a predetermined
idea of what they're trying toget done, because they've
already been given a little bitof feedback before they go and
talk to the professor in the lab, whereas before and this has
(15:33):
been a problem for us, you know,at our school, at least for as
long as I've been working therewhich is the students come in
and they go check my paper, Isit okay?
Right, and it's like well,these, you know, totally
decontextualized, stripped freequestions, and it's not their
fault.
They don't know what to ask,right, they don't.
(15:54):
They don't know what to seeabout their work.
And so now that they're justbeing given little bumps, they
can say, oh okay, well, now Iget a chance to start the
conversation or start the ideasbefore I go in, and it may be
right, it might not be right,but at least I'm able to start
talking to the professor aboutthose things.
So you're starting off with alittle bit of an AI kick and
(16:15):
then bringing it back into thehuman side of things for them.
That's one thing.
Another thing that I do is I'musing PlayLab, but there are
some of these tools, likeBoodleBox or whatever, that you
can build the bots on the backend.
So these are the agents, theycall them, or the GPTs.
They've got 100 different names.
It's really annoying, but youcan basically go.
(16:39):
You can build the prompts onthe back end, so then the
students interact with whateveryou've asked it to do.
So I'm doing things like this.
I do games for my students.
So, for example, in my classbecause grammar is an issue and
you know some of my students arestill trying to master grammar
forms I have games where I setit up.
(17:01):
So one of the games that I haveis Shohei Otani's secret spy
adventure type of thing, and soit tells a story of Shohei Otani
moonlighting as a spy and he'strying to do all these things,
and what it does is it gives youa paragraph, a short paragraph,
and it gives the students threeverbs in the dictionary form of
(17:24):
the verb, and their job is tothen convert it into the past
tense, right, and then it looksat what they did and it says
okay, you accurately did it.
Then the story will continue.
If they don't accurately do it,then Shohei fails on that
little part of the mission andis not able to continue to save
the world or whatever else it isthat he's doing.
(17:45):
And so if you kind of turnthese things into games or
learning opportunities, that'skind of like, choose your own
adventure-ish style, right whereit's like, okay, I'm moving
through these steps and then,and then my successes lead to
more success, possibly my, myfailures lead to whatever.
But they're not even reallythinking about the grammar stuff
so much.
I mean, they're doing it andthey're kind of going through,
(18:05):
but it opens up funopportunities for exploring,
where they're saying, hey, thisstory is kind of cool, I get to
see what happens, and not somuch.
Okay, I'm just doing a workshopand a worksheet type of thing
and checking off things on alist and writing the same word
next to it, with no, thetraditional paper versions that
(18:26):
can't interact back with thestudents, and so you can get
some real opportunities to makethis a lot of fun for them.
And you know it's still lowstakes.
It's like did you do it?
What did you find?
You can kind of review thingswith them.
They're not always 100%accurate, so I wouldn't do it
for testing at this point, butfor interactions for the
students and for them.
(18:46):
And I just did a very informalsurvey with my class and they're
like let's do more of thesethings.
These are fun for us, theyengage us right, and you can
make all sorts of differentcustomizations endlessly, kind
of to the limit of yourimagination.
Al (19:03):
And what program was that, Brent, that you used to do these
customizations?
Brent (19:08):
PlayLab, playlabai, and the reason that I use that is
because it is FERPA compliant,meaning that the data is not
being trained on.
So whatever the students writein there and I still don't want
them giving their privateinformation but I will say like,
hey, this at least we know fromthem they're locking down the
(19:31):
information.
So anything that you say is notbeing trained on.
You're getting the benefits ofthe AI stuff, but you kind of
stay away from the potentiallydangerous and scary stuff.
Al (19:42):
Ah, oh, that's so cool you're finding a way to embrace,
and I would imagine that takesa lot of work at first, a lot of
time and effort to put thistogether, create the prompts,
but in the long run it saves youtime actually.
Brent (19:59):
Yeah, so then once you start building these things and
PlayLab is cool too, because youcan click a button and remix
ones, and so it'll basicallymake a copy, and then you can go
into the back end and say, oh,I want to change this.
It used to be a past tenseactivity and now I'm going to
change it to.
You know a noun clauses orsubject verb agreements Again,
(20:21):
speaking from my language world.
But regardless of what subjectyou're teaching, you can do
these kinds of things and reallycustomize them and say like,
okay, how am I going to bring mystudents' understanding of the
world with the content that I'mtrying to teach?
And there's a lot of ways toexplore.
I think we're really juststarting to scratch the surface
(20:42):
on what people are going to dowith it.
Al (20:43):
So I'm imagining myself I'm a student in your class and I'm
understanding that, Oh okay, Iget to use AI.
He has structured it in acertain way.
Do you have any language thatdeals with, and you know, this
has been the issue from the verybeginning about how students
(21:04):
may use AI for cheating.
And then there's all theseso-called AI detectors, and how
do you deal with that?
What kind of language do youuse for students on that?
Brent (21:13):
So we talk about it directly at the class and then
again, trying to be transparentand helpful with them, I think
does a lot to mitigate the fearsaround it.
And so what I've found actuallyhappens quite often in my
classes.
Students will come up to me andthey're like I did this part
with AI, Is that cool?
And I'm like yeah, or.
(21:35):
Or I'll say probably it wouldbe better for you to think this
through on your on your own andthen work it through.
And they're like, oh, okay.
So I had one student actually afew weeks ago and she's like I'm
really struggling to find thatthe line of like where
acceptable use for me versuswhere I'm not learning and I
said that's an awesome thingthat you just said to me,
because that already shows thatyou're considering what matters
(21:58):
and what doesn't matter in yourlearning process, right, so
being able to go through thatand have them reflect on their
own learning and the value of it, rather than having a bot do
something, so I'll talk aboutthose types of things, right?
Like, hey, if you went to agolf course and you had a robot
hitting the golf balls for you,are you going to say that you
(22:19):
drove it?
Sorry, I'm not a golfer so I'mnot sure what a good number is,
but, like you know, are yougoing to say that you drove the
ball 200 yards or whatever elseit is right.
And so then they're like, oh,hold on a second.
What does that mean then for mylearning, right?
And so opening theconversations up like that, in a
more informal way, instead ofputting hard, strict limits on
(22:40):
it with, in the syllabus, youknow, you can have your syllabus
language, of course, but it'sit doesn't matter.
Like the syllabus is not athing that students care about,
right, they care about therelationship that they're
building with their teacher andthat what they're building with
their learning.
And so if, whatever you have inthe syllabus, you can say, hey,
let's set this up, but ifyou're not talking with them and
(23:01):
showing them the ways throughit, then I don't think that it's
particularly valuable, exceptjust to have a record of what
you've done.
So, or what you've said thatyou're going to, what rules you
said that you're going toenforce I guess that's probably
a better way to say it.
And again, you know, do I wantto be a police on this?
This?
(23:25):
No, every teacher kind of hasthat same anxiety is like am I
working to help students learnor am I working to uh, you know,
bust them on doing somethingwrong?
And you know, I mean we allknow that the reasons for
cheating have very little to dowith, like, I want to be a
cheater.
It's much more related to thestresses that they have and the
you know personal issues they'vegot going on.
So are we finding ways to openup those real human
(23:47):
conversations with them wherethey feel like they can talk to
us about it, versus and I'lltell you, this has taken me a
long time.
Like I used to just be like ayou know hard, like, oh, you
didn't do it, you're done.
So I've kind of had to build myown softening over the years
too, and so it's not just like ayou know hippy-dippy, like we
(24:07):
all love each other and that'sall good, right, it takes me
time.
But then I'm saying like, well,what's actually the best thing
for my students, what's reallygoing to help my students?
And this is moving away fromthe AI thing but like, that
human connection with them iswhat then makes it easy for me
to start having theconversations around what
(24:28):
they're doing.
That is appropriate or notappropriate on certain levels.
Al (24:29):
Yeah, you know, fundamentally, regardless of a
policy, a technology, whateverit is, it always goes back to
that basic human to humanconnection.
To have that as the foundation,is key to all of these
(24:51):
innovations, right?
So you're using AI in so manycool ways for teaching and
learning.
I'm sure you've heardcolleagues use AI for like, what
are some of the things whereyou're like, oh my gosh, that's
cool, I got to you know, lookinto that soon.
Brent (25:07):
Oh my gosh.
So these things happen all thetime, you know.
I mean, I think some of theinteresting things are these new
tools that are starting to comeout that help students along
with their writing processes,like the actual full on and you
know, they get get they getlittle responses as they're
going.
And some of these things are,you know, made by um, these
(25:28):
companies out there that arebuilding all sorts of things, uh
, and so I can't remember thename of it, but I just listened
to um, I think it was.
Uh, who was it?
Maybe Anna Mills?
Uh, on the Opposite of Cheatingpodcast.
I'm not sure if you've listenedto that one yet, but anyways, I
think it was her.
(25:49):
Anyways, sorry if I'm wrong whenthey're listening, but
basically the idea, hey, thereare these tools out there that
are really using studentswriting and analyzing it as
they're going, but not givingthem answers, but also kind of,
you know, I kind of think ofthese things as like bumper
bowling, right, where it's like,hey, just, let's just move a
little bit this way to get backon track, let's move a little
(26:11):
bit that way to get back ontrack.
And so I think that if we startseeing AI use from these
companies that is actually meantto help students grow.
We're going to see a lot ofreally positive things.
If we start seeing so many ofthese companies which are just
like these cheap wraparoundservices on top of you know,
(26:32):
these are the wrappers, right,it's just like hey, basically
it's chat GPT, but it's got adifferent name and it's you know
, going to write your essay foryou.
Well, you know, like your essayfor you.
Well, mmm, you know like whatvalue is that right, and and so
I'm excited to see when, when wesee like ethical, student
focused companies building out,I am excited, but I think
(26:54):
they're still in early stages.
I think a lot of the huckstersearlier, and so we're gonna do
some time sorting those out.
But regardless, I do havestudents that are playing with
or, sorry, colleagues who areplaying with things that like
hey, what level of translationfor a really more beginner level
students might they need?
(27:14):
Or we're building out some ofthese things for some of our
student centers, where studentscan get help from bots that are
letting them get the basicinformation that might have
taken too long or been dug, youknow, buried deep somewhere in
the website and so we say, well,use this website as a resource
and then when students askquestions, just answer them
(27:36):
immediately.
So we're playing around withsome of those possibilities on
campus as well.
Besides, you know, classroomuse, but looking at other ways
to support students, and youknow we've seen it so many times
where they're like, hey, I needhelp late at night and there's
nobody on campus and there'snobody, you know, on the library
desk.
What do I do?
(27:56):
Can I get something better thanthe kind of old fashioned logic
tree chat, and so we're tryingto build some of those
conversations as well.
Al (28:06):
Ethically focused companies.
Yeah, not too many of thosearound, I think.
Brent (28:17):
I know and this is the part that kills me so like, so
this is what ends up happeningis that where we find these
little, basically colleges,right, like a small college
department, that's like, hey,we're going to build this thing
out, but then they don't haveenough funding for it or
whatever else happens?
And so it's always this kind ofback and forth where it's like,
(28:38):
hey, as soon as I findsomething that's made by
professors or college teachersor whatever else it is, then I'm
like, okay, let's explore that.
And a lot of times they'llstart off with making it free
and they're not necessarily, youknow, aiming towards making a
bunch of money, and so that is,that's something that I try to
(28:59):
look for, but that, you know, alot of the companies, as you're
saying, they're like kind ofhide it or they put it behind
all these fancy numbers, and soyou again, as always, you kind
of have to be diligent in yoursearch.
And then I really like this idearecently that a few people have
been talking about, which iswhen you're reaching out to
these companies, you're saying,well, what are you doing to
(29:21):
support students?
Right, like you're making moneyon students, and now we're
seeing not to get too far intothe crazy world that we're
living in, but like we're seeing, students losing support all
across the country and acrossthe world how are you, as a
company, supporting thosestudents that you are now making
money off of right, and are wewilling to ask those questions
(29:43):
of these companies andcorporations and see what
they're willing to do?
Because if they're makingmillions and millions on these
tools, what's the payback right?
How does it go on both sides?
Al (29:55):
Right, you know the last what, five or six years there's
been a lot of talk, a lot ofdiscussion on reimagining
grading.
I'm sure you're very familiarwith the whole, you can call it
ungrading or all these differentkinds of ways to just talking
(30:16):
about how do we rethink it and Iwas wondering, from a grading
standpoint, what are yourthoughts on that and AI?
Brent (30:25):
Yeah.
So I think this is anotherthing that helps me get buy in
from my students, which is I dothe ungrading thing or limited
grading, and so basically thevast majority of my assignments,
are pass, no pass.
Right, you got the work, yougot the minimum requirements for
(30:47):
it or you didn't.
And so the way that works isthat my students have unlimited
times to resubmit their work, aslong as they get it back to me
within a week of my feedback.
Then they can get anothersubmission and another
submission all the way to theend of the semester, and so for
the most times, most studentswill get it in two or three
times, right?
They're like, okay, now I seewhat's going on.
(31:08):
But to me, I treat that as theopportunity for, like, we talk
about it, like the shootingbaskets, right, you're like, hey
, you don't just shoot onebasket and miss and say I didn't
get it right, you keep onshooting and you keep on
practicing over and over andover again.
And you don't also say, hey, Imade it once.
Obviously I'm a pro basketballplayer at this point.
Well, that's not true either,right, and so, so it's about
(31:30):
that saying like, hey, show thatyou got the skills and then
we'll move to the next spot overand try that again.
So this is my process, uh, forthe majority of my assignments
with my students, and so whenwe're doing AI related stuff too
, that all fits in right.
So it's like, hey, show me thatyou're practicing with these
things, show me that you'reinteracting with it.
What are you learning from it?
(31:51):
Let's take a look at yourreflection on it.
Did you really you know, wasyour interaction with AI useful
for you in this conversation ornot?
Because, again, my goal is tohave them show their learning
process overall, um, and whenthey're, whether it's AI or not,
right, but they're, they'regoing through those types of
(32:11):
things.
And so my whole approachbecause of that is a little bit
different maybe than the waysome other teachers might be
dealing with things, but it doesallow me the freedom to say,
well, let's experiment with thisthing and see what happens,
right, and so we work it throughthat way.
I do have friends who are doingthings like hey, I'm getting AI
(32:34):
to give suggestions on where therubric on this assignment might
be, and then I'm using that asmy starting point to alleviate
the mental burden that comeswith tons and tons of grading,
whether that's rubric grading ornot.
I think those it's very cool,it's very interesting.
(32:54):
It has some problematic areas,of course, right, and we say,
well, how much do we trust thisand how much are we double
verifying all of these, thesethings?
And so you have to kind of havea teacher who is dedicated to
figuring those things out asthey're going through.
Um, I'm not very comfortablewith you know, just like click a
button and AI will grade foryou.
That's not where I am, um, but Ido like the idea of saying,
(33:18):
well, what are the redundanciesin work or the things that are
not really bringing value backto the students, and how can I
use AI to reimagine the way thatI'm approaching those things?
And again, I don't have all theanswers, I'm just starting, I
just experiment, and so I thinkyou know, all the things you've
seen me post are like hey, I'mtesting this thing out.
(33:40):
I try to be very practical withwhat I share, and it's not like
right now we're talking alittle bit heady, but I think
most of the stuff that I shareis like this is exactly what I
did, this is what, this is how Itried it, this is what the
result was, and you know, try itfor yourself and see if it
works the same way.
Al (33:57):
Yeah, I love that your approach is to students to show
the learning process, and Ithink where a lot of faculty
struggle with this is time andcapacity.
When I was a re-entry student, Iwent to community college.
I was very lucky that I found apretty I mean, he was a pretty
(34:19):
fantastic math instructor.
I believe he actually had aK-12 background, and when we had
the quizzes I found it it was,I was just astonished at this,
because it was so different fromhow I grew up.
He said I don't care if you getthe answer right or wrong, but
(34:40):
he would spend so much timebecause he wanted to see us do
the whole problem and he wouldgive us points on our process
and how we learned that and yes,we get a bonus if we got it
right but he wanted to see ourlearning and so I could imagine,
(35:01):
but it will take some time totrust it to save time using AI,
yes, and so before AI though,Brent, how did you find the time
, or did you find that it wasn'tactually a very large
percentage of students who wereturning in the rewrites, and
that's what made it manageable?
(35:21):
I'm just wondering how you'reable to manage that.
Brent (35:24):
For my writing class, for example.
My students write in GoogleDocs and so we have it's all
inside of Canvas with the GoogleLTI thing, right.
But we go into the Google Docsand the students do their
writing process, and so I say,okay, you have to write every
single letter of every singleword inside of the Google Docs,
from the beginning to the end.
There are tools out there.
(35:45):
Unfortunately, they're startingto charge more and more but
there's a new one which iscalled Process Feedback, which
kind of scans through it andgives an analysis of the writing
process and you can kind ofwatch a video of the students
writing process.
If you need to do that, um,there, I've talked about this
for a long time.
There was a tool called DraftBack, which is also good, um,
(36:07):
but they just started chargingan annual subscription fee and
so I'm like, anyways, um, but,uh, so one, you can use that as
a way to talk to students abouthow they write.
It's not just about catchingthem right and saying like, oh,
okay, you're doing these thingsright, but it's like hey, what
are you doing in your writingprocess?
I see that you're often writingat 3am.
Do you think that's the mostproductive writing time for you
(36:28):
or whatever else it is.
So that's one part where youcan have real conversations
about what they're doing.
The second thing is, as soon asthey've turned in their first
draft, you have them switchtheir writing from editing mode,
which is your normal writing,to suggesting mode, which is
essentially track changes onmicrosoft word in google doc.
It's called suggesting mode.
(36:49):
So then the students go in andthey start deleting words or
adding in vocabulary or changingthe phrasing or rearranging
whatever.
But all of that stuff getsshown inside of google docs, and
so you it starts getting messyvery quickly because there's
like you know lines throughwords and you know new words put
in, but on the side, on thecomments, it tells you, hey,
(37:11):
this is what happened, and you,as the teacher, can then go
through and click on the checkmark and say, yes, I like this
change, or I can go rightunderneath it and talk to the
student about why that changeisn't necessarily a strong thing
to do.
And so then now we're workingon a fully immersive and
interactive document.
This is not even AI stuff, thisis just, you know, google Docs,
(37:34):
but you're now kind of doing aback and forth on a live
document where they're startingto see their whole process and I
can see what they're doing, andso it's like okay, now I see
why you made this change.
I suggested that you did this,but you know you chose to do it
or you chose not to do it.
Let's talk about what you did.
(37:54):
So again, you can see thatwhole writing process, go on
with the students through thisum, and it definitely takes.
I mean, I'm not, you know, likenot to say that.
You know you're going to zipthrough all of these things, but
and I do have some benefits ofhaving you know somewhat smaller
classes so I'm not like doingyou know 200 students or you
(38:14):
know 300 students or anythinglike that.
I don't know exactly how Iwould adjust.
I think AI comes into part ofit.
So Brisk, for example, does havea focused feedback option which
is kind of meant to do the samething, where it actually runs
through the document and givesyou feedback on sections.
It's not as precise as I wouldlike, because I will highlight a
(38:38):
single period and make acomment on like hey, let's talk
about why you put this periodinside the quotation marks
instead of after the parentheses, as on your citation or
whatever else it is, um, butbrisk will like highlight a
whole line or, you know, kind oftalk about broader concepts, um
.
So as these things get better,I think it will be more possible
for, you know, teachers withlarger classes.
(39:01):
But I do hope that classes likewriting are not too large,
because that's not reallyserving students very well
either.
Al (39:06):
Google Docs, all right.
Brent (39:11):
Yeah, so use Google Docs is my answer.
Al (39:13):
Can you imagine doing all this by hand back in the day?
Oh my gosh.
Brent (39:19):
Oh yeah, well, I mean, it's like, know, like, and
people did that, right.
It's like you'll write yourlittle notes on it and you say
you know wrong word or whateverelse it is, but then you can't
write back on top of that overand over again, right?
And so now the cool thing isstudents click a button, it's
back in my hands now, I canimmediately work with it, and so
that process does work prettywell.
Al (39:40):
So you're in what we would call the humanities.
Have you happen to see anythingcool of what your colleagues
in, let's say, in STEM have usedAI?
By any chance?
Brent (39:55):
A little bit there.
We have people in STEM and inmath who are exploring things
and trying to figure things out,but they are still well again
with the tools that aregenerally available.
They're finding that, like AI,you know, does create unreliable
(40:18):
information.
You know math, it still doesweird things with like two plus
two equals five, don't, you know, right, you know?
I mean not it was that badearly on.
It's still problematic and thereare, there are ones, but I'm
not as familiar with the mathand STEM outputs.
I know there are some peoplewho are trying to figure what
places they want to use them for, but I'm not a hundred percent
(40:41):
sure you know how that world isgoing.
On the other hand, we're seeingall this stuff in the actual
science communities wherethey're using AI for, like you
know, trying to help solvediseases and you know, like
doing all these, you know, hey,breakthroughs on cancer research
and all these amazing things.
So I would be very surprised ifwe don't see soon a pretty big
(41:05):
shift into people going wait asecond.
Actually, if we're able toreally solve medical problems,
for example, let's take a reallook at what this means, for you
know ways that we can teach andlearn as well.
Al (41:18):
I read a research paper of how AI was actually more
accurate in diagnosis thandoctors, which fascinated me.
What a cool tool.
As we kind of start windingdown here a little bit, I was
wondering about how do you useAI personally or for fun?
(41:38):
We talked a lot aboutprofessionally, for the
classroom.
Is there any ways that you usethat personally?
Brent (41:47):
Yeah, a little bit.
I do some.
I do for fun.
I do image generation.
I was a very bad Photoshopper.
Not very bad, sorry, I was anintermediate Photoshopper.
I guess I used to love makinglittle fun jokes and things like
that, and so now I'll do thingslike instead of doing my own
photoshop, I'll build out imagesthat are fun.
(42:09):
You know the just silly, sillythings, of course, right, um,
and there is some use that I useit for.
Uh, you know, every once in awhile, novelty use, right, like,
hey, what should I cook today?
I've got this in my fridge orwhatever else.
It is those those kinds of funthings.
Um, and a little bit of thingslike planning out.
You know I'm, hey, I'm gonna beflying to Japan, you know, in
(42:32):
the in the summer, give me someideas of places that I haven't
been to or whatever else itmight be.
But the truth is, I've gotskepticism around some of these
things as well, and so, while Iwill play with them, I'm not a
super hardcore user for myprivate life.
I'm trying to get like, hey,tech is my working life thing
(42:56):
and I'm moving more towards likespending time in nature.
But there are some cool things,like taking a picture of a
flower and saying, hey, what isthis flower?
And it gives you all theinformation on that flower.
So I love those kinds of things, um, I was told recently we're
not supposed to say thisexpression anymore.
(43:16):
I'm not sure, but touch grass,right like hey, get out there,
just get connected to the world,breathe some fresh air, right,
like all those types of things.
So, yeah, so I do like it, butI am slowing myself down and
trying to be less of a techie inmy private life.
Al (43:35):
Yeah, I think I saw you posted a marzipan cake of you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I tried itand it didn't work out.
Brent (43:47):
Did you upload your own photo for that, or or did you
just?
Did you prompt the whole thing?
Al (43:50):
No, I uploaded and said create a Marzipan.
Uh, it was no comparison toyours, man, yours was really
cool.
Brent (43:59):
Yeah, that one turned out really well and I was like,
okay, and that was the first runat it, so doing things like
that are totally fun and sillyand you know whatever.
But um, but yeah, so that one,I uploaded it my my kind of
profile photo that I have onLinkedIn or whatever, and, um,
and it did a really good job ofactually making it look like me
(44:21):
looking like an edible cake.
It's ridiculous.
But you know, the other thinghere too, Al, that I do want to
point out is like we have tohave some fun with this stuff.
We can't take it all tooseriously all the time.
Like I totally get the concerns,and you know whether that's
environmental or ethicalconcerns and all those things,
(44:43):
and it's like what an amazingthing to just be able to play
with some of these things andhave a little bit of fun.
Um, you know, every once in awhile I'll do things like let's
try and make a comic and seewhat the comic looks like.
Um, you know, back when I wasyounger, I used to do, uh, you
know zines I was into like theyou know the punk rock scene and
all that.
So so it's like kind ofbringing back some of my own
just personal value.
Creativity be really, you know,a lot of fun and then, and you
(45:09):
share these things with yourfriends and have a little levity
in life too is important, so Ido recommend it.
Al (45:17):
Yeah, no, I've prompted to do a lot of funny things.
I asked it to do a song aboutthe committee structure at
colleges.
It's hilarious, and I've donewithin the family just really
hilarious songs and prompts andwe would send to each other and
(45:39):
doing it in other languages.
It's great fun.
Now speaking of because I Irecall that you were in Japan
for a year, do you have anyinsights of how they use AI
there?
Brent (45:52):
Yeah, so it's a little bit weird one.
Japan went all in.
They're just like useeverything, there's no
restrictions for anything, andso it was like it was a very
weird approach, uh, especiallyfor Japanese, who are very
rule-based, you know, in a lotof ways, but in daily life, I
had friends with kids and allthese things and the
(46:14):
conversations were not there,right.
They weren't worried about kidsusing it.
And it may be they'll, you know, again, it'll might catch up in
a year or whatever else it is,but they, it wasn't a concern,
it wasn't a thing that they'relike, oh, they're gonna be
cheating or whatever elsethey're gonna be doing with
these things.
It was just like a nonconversation.
And when I would bring up AI,people just look at me like,
(46:37):
uh-huh, okay, well, let's gocheck out this other.
You know, whatever we're doinghere, right, and so it was like
not a lot of people.
You know professors, when Iwent to universities, they were
definitely talking with me aboutit, but, like the average
Japanese family and the averageJapanese person on the street
was not particularly interested,although there were definitely
(46:59):
magazines and I saw books andall sorts of things out there.
So the conversation ishappening in some places, but it
didn't feel like the massiveswarm of conversation like it is
in the States.
Al (47:09):
Yeah, and I would imagine, because you teach students from
so many different cultures, thathas a particular way of how
they look at AK as well in yourclassroom, right?
One of the last things I wantedto ask you about is, imagine
there's a a formal mentoringprogram at Irvine Valley and you
(47:32):
are a mentor to 15 incomingfaculty, to 15 incoming faculty
in your department.
What would be your top three?
Well, it doesn't have to bethree, whatever number you want,
Brent.
What would be the top tipsguidelines, whatever you want to
call them for their use in AI?
(47:53):
These are first time teachersknowing that they would have
used AI as students.
So what would you, as a mentor?
What kind of guidance would yougive them?
What tips would you give themas they enter the classroom
Brent (48:11):
That's a great question.
So I think the first thing is Ialways say treat your classroom
like a laboratory.
That's for you and for yourstudents, right, if we're really
doing the best that we can forour students, we can't say that
we know all the answers or howthings are always going to turn
(48:34):
out, always going to turn out,and part of the learning process
is failure.
Right, things don't always work.
We all have lessons that waslike oh, I thought this was
going to be amazing and itdidn't work out, right.
I think a lot of people, andespecially younger teachers, may
be coming in, feel like apressure to get things right all
the time and it's like, well, Iwould have wasted two hours if
I did this wrong.
Right, and so, whatever,whether it's AI or not, it's
(48:56):
like, hey, give yourself thegrace to be a teacher.
If you are working to supportyour students, you will have
more wins than failures over theprocess of things.
Right, so it's okay toexperiment with these things and
see what works and see whatdoesn't.
Two, involve your students inthe learning process.
(49:16):
This is what this currentgeneration is looking for and
(49:53):
this is what they value in theirlearning process, trying to
understand that and then alsobeing willing to push back on it
, because I think the otherthing that happens is, hey,
let's all do what, what thestudents want to get done, and
make sure that we're working andsupporting their needs.
But we also know, asprofessionals, actually this
works, actually this is whathappens in the learning process.
(50:16):
And so really being willing toapply those things and say like,
hey, it's not just that it's myhistory, but that there is a
long, research, of study andusing actual research and real
information, that then we cansay let's apply these ideas out
to things, and so theexperiments are great if they're
(50:39):
founded in research-basedpractices.
Al (50:43):
So do you have any other parting words of wisdom, Brent?
Brent (50:48):
No, I think it's just be respectful of where people are
with the need of, or the thefears and excitement around AI.
Right, I, as much as I can, Ialways worry that people feel
like I'm pushing an agenda onone side or another, and I
really my biggest goal is thatpeople just open their mind to
(51:12):
what possibilities there are,and that could be positive or
negative, and so I think that,as we're talking to other people
, it's very tempting to push ourthoughts on them.
This is in all things, butaround the AI conversation, like
how do we be respectful of eachother, how do we open up these
conversations, even when wedisagree?
(51:34):
And keep moving forward for thebetterment of our students?
If you keep that question infront of mind, I think you'll
build good relationships withyour colleagues, I think you'll
build good relationships withyour students and hopefully,
you'll see more successes as youkeep moving down the line.
Al (51:50):
Beautiful.
So thank you for participatingin the Student Success Podcast
Brent.
Brent (51:56):
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you askingme and I hope that at least one
thing that I oh that's my otherthing is try to learn one thing
right when you get a learningsession, you don't need to take
away a hundred things.
If you got one thing out of it,that's a good use of time.
So I hope that there was oneuseful thing inside of there.
Al (52:14):
Oh, I'm sure there is.
Thank you.
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