A conversation with Chris Weidenbach, an English professor at Laney College in Oakland, California, and the longtime chair of the English department. We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching, learning and using “AI.” Our conversation started with Chris’s lifelong engagement with human rights advocacy and expanding access and equity in his multicultural urban institution. Chris was an early adopter of using WP websites to expand student access to resources and offering different digital technologies, some barriers to entry for students and their hesitancy with many tools and the introduction of “AI.” We discussed professional development and support for faculty, some of their resistance, and creating an AI policy and its application. We finished with ways faculty can offer assignments beyond just requiring text responses and the many ways students can learn.

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

A conversation with Joe Lambert, an innovator of telling stories using digital technologies, educator, and co-founder of StoryCenter.org (originally the Center for Digital Storytelling), about his work in these unsettled times. We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching, learning and using “AI.” Joe reflects on his work designing ASU’s 100 Year EdTech Project and other futures work, past and present. Much of our conversation was about adapting or resisting the new political climate both in higher education and the general culture.

Joe and his team have brought digital storytelling to nearly 100 countries in circumstances ranging from universities to war torn refugee camps and their traumatized survivors. After more than four decades, this summer he’s looking forward to not seeing his boss in the mirror as he plans the next phase of his life.

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

A conversation with Dr. Chris Gilliard, Co-Director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, about his approach to writing, privacy, and “artificial intelligence.” We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching and learning, and Chris starts by explaining his stance as an “AI abolitionist.” He shares his critiques of the many aspects of “AI”: their creation, use, and the culture that produces these digital tools. Chris asserts that ideology is built into digital technology, and he quotes Rob Horning: “GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.” Chris goes on to observe: “Some of the worst people in the world want us to use these tools.” Chris taught rhetoric and composition in community colleges for decades, but left to pursue other opportunities before the explosion of “AI” in academia. This has allowed him to be an absolutist: he hasn’t used LLMs or ”AI” at all. Chris insists that writing must be embodied and cannot be generated by algorithms. He is currently writing “Luxury Surveillance,” defined as “consensual surveillance that users pay for directly, and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits that they are likely to celebrate” on the Critical Internet Studies Institute website. In our conversation, Chris summarized it as “Ankle monitors and Apple watches are essentially the same thing.”

Resources

The Critical Internet Studies Institute https://www.criticalinternet.org/

Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities; The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing; More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI; All by John Warner https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-warner/more-than-words/9781541605503/

Defining AI by Ali Alkhatib 06 December 2024 https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

Rob Horning AI - GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge. https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia https://robhorning.substack.com/p/artificial-intentionality

David Golumbia https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

Brian Merchant https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Facebook Has a Genocide Problem by Alex Shephard March 15, 2018 https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem

Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University by Emily J. Levine https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo22804958.html

Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media