I just made my first substantive Substack post. You can check it out here.
Then and Now
Dear Readers,
I love you!
I have nurtured this blog for over a decade. My posts have been erratic, and a bit uneven, but I’ve gotten great pleasure out of sharing my ideas here, and have been moved and improved by your generous engagement. I genuinely thank you.
Times change, and I have decided to move my musings over to Substack. I will continue to maintain this blog, but my plan is to use Substack for future posts. I hope to post there biweekly. This new platform should prompt me to write more regularly, and better, and to engage new readers. We will see.
So I’m not really going anywhere. I encourage you to subscribe to my Substack here. As with the blog, it is completely free. Sometime over the next week I’ll send out my first piece, which will simply introduce me and the Substack, and we’ll really start rolling after that. Please join me for the ride.
Michael
I am teaching my class “Happiness and Pursuit of the Good Life” for the second time at Brown, and it is hard to believe that we are moving into the final weeks. I hope to have more to say about my experience teaching this class, but for now there is a nice write up in the Brown Alumni Magazine about the course. You can read it here:
https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2024-04-05/the-good-life
by admin
Conversations about AI in the classroom have been raging this year. Among teachers, it has mainly been a conversation tinged with fear: how do I keep my students from using it to cheat? How do I detect it? Should I even bother to assign essays and take-home exams?
These are all valid concerns that get to the heart of the goals and methods of traditional teaching. If our goal is to help students improve their writing, student use of AI to write papers will clearly frustrate it. If we want to teach students to think critically and learn to make coherent and compelling arguments, is the essay the best or only way to do it? Dealing with AI requires rethinking what professors do in the classroom, and that is hard work.
But the horse is out of the barn now and just as the spread of the calculator changed education in mathematics, so too AI will most likely grow to transform how and what we write. How, exactly, I don’t know but fear and avoidance do not seem to me to be successful ways of confronting this challenge.
So, inspired by a talk I recently heard by my colleague Steven Lubar, I decided to plunge into the world of AI and pedagogy by designing an assignment for my students. I’ve worked through these steps myself and have been fascinated by the results. I’ll probably have more to say after my students complete the assignment, but in the meantime I thought I would share it, should it be helpful to others.
AI and Writing
This assignment helps you to explore how you might profitably, and not profitably, use AI to improve your writing.
The writing style of most AI tools is serviceable but flat and I don’t recommend it for the actual writing of most papers. In this exercise, I want you to think about AI as a friend or teacher, helping you to develop your thoughts and then edit your paper. In brief, you’re going to have a conversation with an AI tool and then write about it. Here are the steps:
Bring your laptops to class. We’ll spend the first part of the class reading and commenting on each other’s papers privately, and then have a group discussion.
Coda
I asked ChatGPT whether it thought the assignment would be pedagogically effective. Its response:
This assignment seems to be designed with pedagogical effectiveness in mind, as it combines several elements that could enhance students’ understanding of both the text and the capabilities and limitations of AI tools in aiding writing and analysis. Here’s an assessment of its effectiveness:
- Critical Thinking and Engagement: By asking students to read a primary text carefully and write a summary before engaging with AI, the assignment encourages critical engagement with the material. Students are prompted to think deeply about the text’s content and structure, which is crucial for academic writing.
- Hands-On Experience with AI Tools: Students get practical experience using AI tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. This hands-on experience can demystify AI technology and help students understand its potential applications and limitations.
- Comparative Analysis: By comparing their own summaries with those generated by AI, students can gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of AI-generated content. This encourages critical thinking about the quality and reliability of AI-generated text compared to human-generated text.
- Conversation with AI: Engaging in a continuing conversation with AI about specific points in the text fosters deeper engagement and critical thinking. It encourages students to challenge AI-generated content, question sources, and compare viewpoints, which are essential skills for academic writing and research.
- Reflective Paper Writing: The final reflective paper prompts students to articulate their experiences and insights gained from using AI tools. This encourages metacognition and reflection on the benefits and limitations of AI in the context of writing and textual analysis.
- Peer Review and Group Discussion: Peer review and group discussion provide opportunities for students to receive feedback on their writing and engage in collaborative learning. This fosters a supportive learning environment and encourages students to critically evaluate and learn from each other’s work.
Overall, this assignment appears to be well-designed to promote critical thinking, engagement with course material, practical skills in using AI tools, and reflective writing. However, it’s essential to ensure that students have access to the necessary resources and support to effectively carry out each step of the assignment. Additionally, providing guidance on how to critically evaluate AI-generated content and navigate ethical considerations related to AI use would further enhance the assignment’s effectiveness.
by admin
While teaching my undergraduate course on The Ten Commandments this semester, I came upon the following passage in a sermon that Augustine preached in Carthage in 401:
And you, you despise him who is equal to the Father and one with the Father. You are told to observe the sabbath spiritually, not in the way the Jews observe the sabbath in worldly idleness. They like the free time to spend on their frivolities and extravagances. The Jew would do better doing some useful work on his land instead of joining in faction fights at the stadium. And their women would do better spinning wool on the sabbath than dancing shamelessly all day on their balconies. (Sermons on the Old Testament, 9.4)
The twin accusations at the heart of this passage – that Jewish abstention from work on the Sabbath was lazy and that the Jews observe the law in a fleshly rather than spiritual manner – were common in antiquity. As I am now (hopefully) finishing up my book on lived religion in Late Antiquity, though, the specifics piqued my interest: On the Sabbath, the Jewish men would go to the stadium and the women dance on balconies. How are we to understand such testimony?
In her comments on this passage in her magisterial book, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Paula Fredriksen observes that here, as elsewhere, it is difficult to know whether Augustine is mentioning something true about the local Jewish community or whether he is simply fabricating or repeating slanders (pp. 306-12). He repeats both observations elsewhere in his writing (On Psalms, 32.2; 50.1; 91.2). On the one hand, by depicting Jews as doing things that Christians would have regarded as shameful (especially the women exposing themselves, even properly dressed, to public eyes), the reports perhaps too conveniently support his charge that Jews are carnal, as opposed to the more spiritual Christians. On the other hand, it is reasonable to think that at least some Jewish men did go to watch the fighting at the stadium. (This reminds me of funny piece by Shalom Auslander some years ago about going to a hockey game on the Sabbath.)
The dancing women are more puzzling. At least later, in Morocco, Jewish houses were distinguished by their windows and balconies; Muslims tended to avoid windows in order to maintain privacy. I wonder if there is a hint of that practice from much earlier, complete with a whiff of scandalous behavior. This would not account for the dancing, of course. Could Jewish women have gathered on their balconies on Shabbat and danced, out of joy or in order to pass the time? Why not?