In the first week of September, The Hub hosted three “no-prep book club” conversations. We were inspired and relied heavily on the model developed by our colleague Tolu Noah, Ed.D. at Cal State Long Beach, and which she so generously shared in a newsletter from Becky Supiano at the Chronicle for Higher Education. We’ve put all the prompts we used to guide the conversations that we facilitated into a combined handout, in case you find it useful to explore on your own.
The book that we focused on this time was the UM Book Guide – Using GenAI in Classroom Assignments and Activities (which is adapted from 60+ ChatGPT Assignments to Use in Your Classroom Today, Yee, et al, 2023). Kevin Yee and his colleagues at University of Central Florida are providing a lot of leadership in the teaching and learning with AI space, including offering a conference in June (as they have every summer since 2023!) (Full disclosure: Kevin was my assigned mentor at the “Institute for New Faculty Developers” I attended as a new professional in this field, so I have looked up to him for a while now!) So when our colleagues at the Teaching and Technology Collaborative (led by Co-chairs: Angela Marocco at ITS Teaching & Learning and Evan Straub in the Center for Academic Innovation) set to work and made a revised version based on working with UMGPT, we were so grateful to see a resource aimed more narrowly at our teaching and learning community. We’ve shared the guide in individual consultations or other workshops, but wanted to give campus a chance to take a look at it in a group and see what works… but make space for what pieces really don’t.
We were not disappointed in the conversations we had! If you look at the handout, you’ll see that we divided the resource up based around three different themes: Moving students beyond simple information retrieval, learning to communicate with GenAI, and the writing process and Gen AI. That’s because we wanted to take a little time with sections of the book and focus on groups of learning activities that we ask our students to do, in or out of class. Every participant brought something different to our conversations: some found an assignment they could enthusiastically embrace, others found some that could work in a pinch, and many found examples that did not fit with the kind of class they were teaching.
I’ve always been “that kid” who loved a challenge so I have to confess: my favorite conversations were when we encountered someone having an overwhelmingly negative response to an assignment. Not because I like making anyone suffer! But because usually the reason for the extreme dislike revealed a very important observation that sounded a lot like this: “But you can’t have the bot do that work… that’s the whole point of the assignment!!” What excellent clarity we have in these moments of what, exactly, it is we think our students are invited to learn in our classes.
Teaching in 2025 is weird for a lot of reasons, and among them the uncanny outputs of LLMs is ranked pretty high. Faculty (and students..!) are confronted with the question “Well if a bot can do it that easily… what’s the point?” Some have compared the negative responses to this new wave of technology as akin to the development of the pocket calculator and the effect on mental arithmetic or possibly word processing software and the typewriter industry. But at the heart of the matter is something much more complex. While memorized times tables and perfect typing skills were painful parts of my education as a child, I am not confronted with a sense of lack in my own ability to think and understand the world around me because I use tools to do that work for me now. But the unease lurking in our conversations now is the perception that the learning, the thinking that we want our students to internalize and develop independently is undermined by GenAI tools. Where pocket calculators and word processors sped up an individual’s ability to complete a thinking task, the concern we are facing is whether the tools now can, in fact, complete the task “for” us.
Gen AI is like “doing a pushup with a forklift.”
Nick Demello, Stanford University, August 2023
I find myself returning to this metaphor repeatedly in my consultations with faculty. Nick Demello and I attended a live webinar in August of 2023, and his suggestion “It’s like doing a pushup with a forklift” has stuck with me because of it’s ridiculous imagery and the ways one can spin it out into logical consequences. I find myself running through a series of questions when I think about the absurdity of this scene: a forklift in the middle of my neighborhood gym, with someone (a student) balanced on the “fork” with someone else (a teacher) standing beside them with a ruler.
- Does a forklift have the power to lift your upper body off the floor? It certainly does!
- Do you gain any of the benefit of completing a pushup if you move your upper body with a forklift? Hardly.
- Did anyone in the gym ask for there to be a forklift in the middle of the room?! … No.
- Is it there now and being touted by many as “the answer to all of our lifting challenges?” … No comment.
- What is concerning about a forklift in the gym overnight?
- it’s loud!
- If it’s running a combustion engine, it’s smelly and wasting fossil fuels!
- It’s in the way of what we normally are expecting!
- Someone wasted resources putting it somewhere it didn’t belong and it will take further resources to remove it, if we can even get it back out the door.
Now, I’m reluctant to champion metaphors that smack of the ableism and fatphobia that are rampant in discourse about bodies and exercise (not to mention the broader implications for racist and gender based discrimination.) But if we can consider for a moment that 1. our thoughts are indeed contained in our human bodies, fragile as they are, and that 2. we are still at the very beginning of understanding how complex the relationship is between our ability to learn and remember and our entire physiological system, it is worth thinking about whether sports and exercise metaphors are an approachable tool with which to engage our students and ourselves.
Our students understand that the point of going to a gym is not to employ a robot to lift weights for you, it’s to complete the exercises yourself in order for your body to gain the benefit of resistance. It’s not so universally clear to our students that we see our classrooms and assignments as resistance that is necessary to gain strength or flexibility or stamina of thought.
The other element that the fun-house mirror of LLM output asks us to consider our reflection is has to be: Have we been measuring students’ success by how consistently and reliably they can, for example, lift their body precisely six inches off the floor? If we have been – how wrong are they to look for a forklift?
Perhaps there will be a way to limit forklift use in our students to appropriate tasks. But ultimately, if we are trying to encourage students about the value they gain from reps of push ups… We’re going to have to engage with them differently than just measuring how many times they can mechanically repeat the assignment. In this way, the presence of the forklift isn’t changing what’s been true: a pushup done well is a complex interaction of body systems and a good trainer will help focus attention on all of those pieces so that the exercising body increases its performance. That’s true with or without a forklift in the weight room.
But imagine how weird it would be to show up for a regular session at the gym, and work with a trainer who is refusing to talk about the presence of a forklift running in the workout room. If nothing else, it helps to tell our students “Yes – it’s there, but you don’t need it to be successful in my class.”
So what can you share with your students about the value of the exercise they are performing in your classes? What are the cognitive muscles they are developing when they complete the work you assign? And what kind of feedback on that practice can you give them that helps them keep their attention on what they are doing, not what anyone else is doing (whether or not it’s with that noisy forklift.) Resources like the ones we shared in our workshop might be a tool you can use to get clearer with your students about just what the work of your class is meant to be.