On November 29th, 2023, the Hub and the Foundations Program together hosted a campus talk given by Dave Cormier, Digital Learning Specialist at the University of Windsor’s Office of Open Learning. Many thanks are due to Patrick Beauchesene, Director of the Foundations Program, and Autumm Caines, Lead Instructional Designer at the Hub, for their efforts organizing Dave’s visit. As the title of Dave’s talk “A Conversation around GenAI: The Opportunity to Grow” suggests, the talk was carefully prepared and designed to facilitate a robust conversation, rather than to present “answers” or “strategies” about GenAI in the classroom. (You can find the slides from Dave’s presentation here.)
Fittingly, the talk took place 364 days after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and while it does not summarize every development over that year, this conversation is a rich snapshot of how far the conversation has come in one year, and how much still remains to explore and understand.
Dave’s talk proposes that ChatGPT is the latest in a series of technological advances that have moved the world from an environment of information scarcity to an environment of information abundance. The challenge we face as educators comes when we realize which of our teaching and assessment strategies still assume that information is scarce for students. For many of us, embracing this new reality feels frustrating and infinitely harder than what we’ve come to anticipate, and that frustration remains a theme in Dave’s conversation with Dearborn faculty teaching in the Foundations program.
Dave also shares from his research on students’ expectations about college, and how their K-12 education, broadly speaking, has trained them to expect that 1. every question already has an answer and 2. the answer is known to the teacher. Any part of our undertaking in higher education that suggests that there are in fact questions without answers, is fighting against the expertise that students have developed about playing “the game of school.”
The talk ends with Dave’s suggestions that we respond to this moment with “21st century literacies.” The first of these is humility, a theme he explores in his most recent blog post. The second is connected to information literacy as we know it, but focuses on trust: why and how we, as experts, have come to trust certain sources and scholars, and not others. Exploring that with students requires the third literacy Dave proposes, which is a deep dive into our values as scholars and educators. Finally, Dave proposes that if there is a solution, it will emerge from individuals, programs, and communities coming together, sharing with one another, and developing relationships that will shape how we engage in a world defined by a landscape of information abundance.
Watched the talk and still want more? Great! Dave’s book has just been released by John Hopkins University Press: Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community Is the Curriculum (2024). Here is the blog post referenced in Patrick’s introduction about no longer assigning essays. Instructional Designers at the Hub are always happy to work with you about ideas or concerns raised by this conversation and others: those who teach at UM Dearborn can book an appointment with us about GenAI here.