Is it time to teach kindergarteners prompt engineering, yet? This New York Times article is about grade school education, but I thought the subhead was telling: “Artificial intelligence companies are urging teachers to prepare students for an ‘A.I. -driven future.’ What that means varies from…

There’s a concept I’ve seen in many papers investigating generative AI (genAI) in education—the human in the loop. It’s important enough that Anthropic, makers of Claude, include it in their usage policy, stating, “When using our products or services to provide advice, recommendations, or in subjective…

There are different origins and interpretations of what liberal education means, but a favorite of mine is the idea that a liberal education liberates. You gain the ability to think critically and to know how to learn, which liberates you to learn other things, enabling you to act in line with your values. Generative AI (GenAI) tools have…

Generative AI offers both potential and limitations for minoritized and disabled students. Recent publications show a clear tension: these tools can expand—making access and participation a reality for some learners who might have been excluded.  At the same time, generative tools have the potential to strengthen the very…

As a Civil War historian, I know the power of sharing primary sources with students to understand causality and intentionality in the past. For example, the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service has argued that few can read Confederate states’ declarations of…

This semester, I’ve been working with two wonderful students doing mentored research projects of their own design. As they’ve been developing their research questions, I am reminded fondly of an exercise I did in a research methods class during grad school.   The professor, Dr. Ellen Goldring,…

As the new school year begins and our weeks are filled with slide edits, planning meetings, and the smell of new notebooks, one theme is dominating the preparation: Artificial Intelligence. I am not an AI expert. I have no tips…

I had to chuckle over this quote in a May New York Times article: “Though they are useful in some situations—like writing term papers, summarizing office documents and generating computer code—their mistakes can cause problems.” I think many of my fellow academics would see…

When I, along with my CEL Scholar colleague Dr. Cora Wigger, describe our CEL project about data literacy and data justice to colleagues, we’re confronted with the same problem: every academic in every discipline defines “data” differently. As a historian…

I am a professor of journalism, and it’s a challenging time to make the case for why journalism still matters. I give my students a couple of reasons: first is the ability to access and make sense of a variety…