Dear Colleagues,
Spring Break is just around the corner! I am encouraged that many of you have created an account on the Go2Knowledge platform at www.go2knowledge.com/hood with Innovative Educators. Remember, we have access to all on-demand and live webinar content until May 1st. If you need help creating your account, please reach out to Jeff Welsh. We have two more faculty and staff discussions scheduled. Please do try and view the webinar before the discussion, but if you don’t have the time, we would still love to see you at the table with your colleagues—sharing and learning from one another.
- March 2 in Whitaker Room 220 (1-2 pm) to discuss “Active Learning: How to Improve Critical Thinking, Motivation and Engagement” with co-facilitators Drs. Michelle Gricus and Jill Tysse.
- April 7 in Whitaker Room 220 (3-4:00 pm) to discuss “Conducting Difficult Conversations with Students: How Faculty and Staff can Change a Negative into a Positive” with co-facilitators Drs. Cathy Breneman and Jessica McManus.
Finally, as you may have noticed, I have been including a lot of articles about ChatGPT, which is an advanced, online artificial chatbot. Thank you to Dean April Boulton for bringing this to my attention at a Provost Council meeting in late 2022. To discuss ChatGPT’s impact on higher education, the CTL will host a “Lunch and Learn” titled “The Impacts of Artificial Intelligence from Admissions to Assignments: Opportunity or Challenge?” with Dean April Boulton, Dr. David Gurzick, and Kathryn Ryberg of the Library Learning Commons on May 4th from 12-1 pm. Lunch will be provided. All faculty and staff are welcome to attend.
Sincerely,
Paige Eager
"On the same day last spring when I was invited to join a roundtable addressing the problem of “invisible labor” in academia, my department was preparing to host a new hire. Owing to the pandemic restrictions of early 2022, the new hire hadn’t been able to come for a campus visit, so this was her first visit to Baruch College since agreeing to join us. The English department chair was slated to escort our new hire from a work-in-progress talk scheduled for that day to their next engagement, a casual meet-and-greet with the new hire’s soon-to-be colleagues. Then plans changed." Click here to learn more about the conversations regarding equity in higher education when it comes to being more cognizant of non-promotable tasks or the invisible labor that is often taken on by women and/or faculty of color.
"Every year I have mixed feelings about returning to my office in January. I’ve turned in grades and organized piles of notes into labeled files. Classes that consumed me for three months are packed away like holiday decorations. My energy is returning. But one piece of unfinished business lingers: I have to read my fall course evaluations. For three decades, I’ve read my own evaluations plus those of other faculty members in the writing program that I direct. I offer my colleagues solid advice: look for patterns of strengths and weaknesses; recognize identity-based judgments that are concerning in their own right but not really about teaching; don’t agonize over idiosyncratic comments, like my own favorite—“great teacher but she wears the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen.” Click here to think about how you process your own course evaluations whether you are a new faculty member or a more seasoned one.
"A large portion of academics will at some point in their career send submissions of their work to academic journals, and for those on the tenure track, being successful at publishing may be the most important factor that determines whether they receive promotion and tenure. Yet few will have any knowledge of the thought processes that editors go through when deciding whether to accept or reject a manuscript or to ask the author to revise and resubmit it. Thus, as an academic who has served for over six years as an editor of a major scholarly journal in my field, I’d like to share the following advice that you should keep in mind when approaching and working with an academic journal." Click here to read about publishing in academia.
"ChatGPT has been around for less than three months, and professors are already sharing stories about students who have used the language-generating tool to cheat on exams or assignments. Many faculty members are debating what ChatGPT might mean for the future of teaching and academic integrity. The artificial intelligence tool quickly caught momentum after being released by OpenAI in November, gaining an estimated 100 million monthly active users within two months of its launch." Click here to read about instructors in higher education are addressing this issue.
"Some instructors seek to craft assignments that guide students in surpassing what AI can do. Others see that as a fool’s errand—one that lends too much agency to the software. Is an ice cream sandwich a sandwich? How about a sushi roll, chicken wrap, or sloppy joe? These were some of the prompts included in a classification and model-building assignment in the fall 2022 Knowledge-Based AI course that David Joyner taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology." Click here to keep reading.
"On Jan. 27, an hour’s worth of graphic video showing the brutal beating of 29-year-old father Tyre Nichols was released to the public. Anticipating the outpouring of righteous grief and anguish Black communities would experience in the wake of this video’s release, cities shut down and soldiered up. The mayor of Chicago pleaded with people to stay home. A nearby mall instituted a 3 p.m. curfew for youth and packed the halls with heavily armed police throughout the weekend. Videos of Humvees and other riot police gear in cities across the United States proliferated online. The protests have been peaceful." Click here to learn how to make room and space for real-world events in your classrooms even when the subject matter of your course seems far removed from the news headlines.
The Center for Teaching & Learning
Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD, USA
Phone: (301) 663-3131
