All posts tagged: Professors

Nottingham professors to lead university teacher trainers’ body

Nottingham professors to lead university teacher trainers’ body

Published by skeptic

UCET chair Stefanie Sullivan, and fellow Nottingham University professor Jo McIntrye will jointly take over role UCET chair Stefanie Sullivan, and fellow Nottingham University professor Jo McIntrye will jointly take over role More from this theme Recent articles Two professors of education will lead the representative body for university teacher training departments when its current head stands down, it has announced. James Noble-Rogers, who has headed the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers for 22 years, announced last year he would retire this April. The executive director position will be taken over jointly by current UCET chair Stefanie Sullivan and Jo McIntyre, a fellow professor of education at Nottingham University. Noble-Rogers said: “This is an excellent appointment. I have worked closely with both Stef and Jo, and I know that they are the perfect choice to lead UCET into a new era.” James Noble Rogers Sullivan and McIntyre said they were “delighted and honoured” by their new roles, which they will start on April 13. “University teacher education providers in the UK do a …

Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think

Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Professors are fighting an uphill battle against the intrusion of AI into education, and it’s forcing them to rethink how they instruct their students, many of whom have already become hopelessly dependent on the tech. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one told The Guardian in a new piece that interviewed more than a dozen professors in the humanities. “I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” Dora Zhang, a literature professor at UC Berkeley said. “What is it doing to us as a species?” Alas, students looking for an easy “A” may not be interested in philosophical inquiries on how AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with the world and with each other — and indeed, according to a burgeoning body of research, how our brains work. One canary in the coal mine comes from a Carnegie Mellon …

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature for reviewing manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil. The issue was first flagged by Verena Krebs, a medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor. On Sunday, Krebs shared a screenshot showing the “Expert Review” tool allowing users to pick historian David Abulafia as one of the available “experts” to check their paper. If Abulafia objected to his inclusion here, we’ll probably never know, since he died in January. The news sparked a flurry of fiery responses across academic circles.   “Grammarly is now offering ‘expert review’ of your work by living and dead academics,” Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor in the history of science and medicine at the University of Birmingham, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Without anyone’s explicit permission it’s creating little LLMs based on their scraped work and using their names and reputation.” “I have seen …

College students and professors are making their own AI rules : NPR

College students and professors are making their own AI rules : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

For English professor Dan Cryer, using generative artificial intelligence to write a college essay is like bringing a forklift to the gym. “If all we needed was the weights moved, then that would be great,” says Cryer, who teaches at Johnson County Community College outside Kansas City, Kansas. “But we need the muscles developed, and students going through the process of writing are developing those muscles.” Cryer says AI has also added a new type of labor for professors like him: trying to determine whether a student’s work is their own. He says that problem is compounded by the fact that his community college, like many other higher education institutions around the U.S., provides students access to AI tools. He says the advent of these tools has created a new burden for students too: finding the line between responsible and irresponsible AI use. “It’s not fair to them,” Cryer says. More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, generative AI has become a part of everyday life, and professors and students are still figuring out how …

Notre Dame professor’s appointment pits academic freedom against bishops’ authority

Notre Dame professor’s appointment pits academic freedom against bishops’ authority

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — What began as a faculty leadership appointment at the University of Notre Dame this winter has become a focal point in a broader negotiation between episcopal authority and institutional autonomy in Catholic higher education. Earlier this year, Susan Ostermann, an associate professor of political science at the flagship Catholic university, was appointed to lead the Keough School of Global Affairs’ Liu Institute of Asia and Asian Studies, beginning July 1. No one doubts Ostermann’s credentials. Trained at University of California-Berkeley and Stanford Law School (she is also an attorney), she has written on regulatory enforcement, particularly in South Asia, and the effects of state power on vulnerable populations. The controversy instead centers on about a dozen public essays she wrote in recent years with sociologist Tamara Kay, in which the co-authors argue that contemporary abortion politics in the United States cannot be understood apart from longer histories of racial hierarchy, immigration anxiety and demographic change. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade, they published an …

C’mon, Professors, Assign the Hard Reading

C’mon, Professors, Assign the Hard Reading

Published by Daniella Wilson

At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year. I’ve seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them? When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last …

Do Spiders Dream of Arachnology Professors?

Do Spiders Dream of Arachnology Professors?

Published by Jenni Sidey

This edited version of the article below first appeared in New English Review. Have you ever wondered if insomniac spiders, trying to sleep, count imaginary arachnology professors jumping over college classroom desks? Silly questions aside, it’s not something that constantly occupies my mind. Anyhow, the other night as I rested in bed reading a book, I noticed a spider on the ceiling above where I lay. I wondered was it awake or asleep. This sight occurs every seven or eight weeks, and if my ceiling was made out of steel and I had a flame-throwing drone, I’d incinerate the creepy-crawly immediately because they give me the creeps. But instead, I usually get out of bed and, without killing the tiny creature, gently place the head of a sweeping brush under it in order to usher it out safely onto the window ledge. Insects also give me the shivers, even though they’re different to spiders (spiders belong to the class arachnida, insects to the class insecta). And, on a micro level, the thoughts of one scaling down its …