My latest: Luddite pedagogy, in the CHE

This morning I have an “advice” essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Luddite Pedagogy: It’s OK to Ignore AI in Your Teaching.” From the middle of the piece:

Although I’ve had, over the years, a handful of mild objections to my classroom tech principles, my students rarely if ever complain. They don’t negotiate or beg for relief. A few years back, they even voted me Teacher of the Year. Far from coming at me with pitchforks, in fact, a majority of my students thank me for my “strict” rules. Why? Because they’re well aware of the effects the ambient techno-pedagogical infrastructure produces in them.

Take an online grade sheet. It’s perpetually accessible and constantly changing, with every update generating an automatic notification to a student’s phone. That doesn’t relieve anxiety — it exacerbates it. As for the classroom itself, my students know and hate that they can’t concentrate in a typical screen-populated course. They are distracted by their own phone or laptop, and even when they find the will to turn it off, their eyes drift to a classmate’s device.

Put it this way: If we set out to design an environment that would undermine educational success — to interfere with listening, thinking, and conversing, and disrupt sustained focus and rapt attention — we would invent the contemporary college classroom. Why must we accept it as given?

Click here to read the whole thing.

I first described “Luddite pedagogy” here on the blog back in 2018. I see now that Audrey Watters (my ed-tech-critic hero) used the same phrase in 2020, drawing on a 2014 essay by Torn Halves. Haven’t read either yet, but hoping to get to them soon.