Professor Laurie Miller

02/22/2025

Good advice for fact-checking

Nowadays, everyone needs to learn how to do their own fact-checking and content moderation. Just because something is repeated thousands of times does not mean it is true.

02/22/2025

While I agree that our new tech will return us to a "pre-literate" state (which Plato would approve of -- see Kate Disten's "To write, or not to write? (Or: what Plato didn't know)" on the Psychology Today website) and am more welcoming of this than perhaps other writing faculty, I know that as we forge into this new media we also must be vigilant about where ideas and content originate from (and are used by AI systems), especially in regard to bias and purpose. In other words, we must insure we THINK about the origins and intentions of what we consume and not simply react to it.

Technology is changing our world — and how we communicate — at an astonishing rate. So much so that entrepreneur Victor Riparbelli predicts that artificial intelligence will drive audio and video to replace text as our primary form of communication by the end of this decade. He imagines a world ...

02/13/2025

While I am not writing a book anytime soon and you may not be either, the tools presented in this article are of interest to anyone writing in our current digital era.

If you're a budding writer, an advanced author, or somewhere in between, you know that the right tools can help you stay organized and on track to complete that article, memoir, or manuscript.

02/11/2025

Good information about bird flu as it expands its reach across the US. Glad my institution is helping provide evidence-based information.

Infectious disease expert Amria Roess answers pressing questions about avian influenza cases reported across the U.S., in light of the first reported human death in Louisiana

02/06/2025

Revisiting philosopher's ideas you read in the past is always a good idea as their ideas can strike you anew in your new reality. Here's a good read about Hannah Arendt's ideas in the context of our current times. Be sure to read through to the end, but here's a significant few sentences from the middle of Professor Stonebridge's article: "Loneliness was a symptom of totalitarian regimes, she said, and with it came incapacity to think for oneself. Loneliness gripped people, fear gripped people. So thoughtlessness, she said, was part of a totalitarian regime."

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the most influential political theorists and philosophers of the 20th Century. Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA explores three of Arendt's key concepts – totalitarianism, statelessness and the banality of evil – to explain the importance of her thinking for ...

02/02/2025

Ever since the question "Can you have a thought without language?" was posed to me in a 100 level philosophy class during my sophomore year at Cal Poly, I've been a bit obsessed with the connection between the thought and language. If you share this interest/obsession, here's a good article to read: https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4857/ (Image generated with Freepik.com AI.)

10/18/2024

I have been asked by many colleagues about my dissertation, and it's hard for me to sum it up quickly.

Imagine my happiness when I learned about NotebookLM, a free web-based AI service (from Google, so it uses Gemini -- https://notebooklm.google/) that helps you draw insights from documents (and links & recordings) that you upload. The insights it draws come ONLY from these sources.

One of the coolest tools it offers is the creation of a customized audio summary, in the form a podcast between two interlocutors, that sound pretty dang human. So for those who would like to listen to a short podcast that introduces the concepts in my dissertation, here you go:

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b0d75909-77bd-4b19-9728-f8a3f03b7ec2/audio

10/17/2024

Did you know that humans process speech and song differently? Did you know that singing is a universal human trait? Curious to know why humans across cultures sing? Read or listen to this podcast -- but if you listen you will get some special musical treats.https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/does-singing-have-an-evolutionary-purpose/

08/28/2024

I totally agree with the need to integrate A.I. generative chat bots (LLMs) into writing instruction. As a student I lived through the math pedagogy revolution and its embracing of calculators and PCs, so as an instructor, I can live through this next revolution in composition pedagogy.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/ai-and-the-case-for-project-based-teaching

08/12/2024

Sketchplanations offers good advice for using for visual design. Humans have always been focused on visual cues, and in our current "fast media" era, it is important to design course materials that lean on visual cues for conveying meaning quickly. https://sketchplanations.com/gestalt-principles

07/26/2024

Deep thinking takes effort ... and that is okay. I know I experienced the pain of this recently.

I spent two weeks thinking, and reading, and thinking, and reading, and thinking about a topic I thought I understood. In the end, my explanation pretty much matched the investigated one I first wrote, but now I know I know it. Sometimes this process makes "putting in the work" does not matter, but it does because now I can not only paddle on the surface of my knowledge, but I can also explain to others what in down in the depths and why and why not they would want to take a deep dive into it or not.
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/a-respect-for-intellectual-messiness

07/24/2024

A short article that helps explain why the term "professional" can have racist undertones. Another voice for the importance of teaching college writing using a linguistic justice stance. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards #

07/18/2024

Random cartoon that made me chuckle. It's good to get in at least a few chuckles every day. https://www.gocomics.com/theargylesweater/2019/01/11

07/12/2024

If only I could believe you Claude.

06/25/2024

Soon I'll be giving a presentation including background on Activity Theory, and I did not know how to pronounce Leont’ev in Russian, and ended up finding this helpful YouTube collection of names in a number of languages recorded by native speakers that gave me the information I need.

Instructors looking at class rosters with names they are sue how to pronounce, might find this playlist useful (it is limited but it is a start).

https://www.youtube.com//playlists

06/20/2024

I have been using Translinguo from Anju Gupta and enjoying it. Here is a list of other GTP "apps" to try: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/surprisingly-useful-chatgpt-apps

05/31/2024

"Convergence" - the merging of humans and machines in our current era is rapidly evolving. Some predictions say that by 2040 the convergence of humans and A.I. will happen. This Pew Research Center report from 2018 gives details. (BTW, think how much your interaction with A.I. in the form of chatbots, AR, and VR has changed since 2018!)

(Note: if you are wearing glasses or contacts while reading this, you are already experiencing convergence, granted a convergence that took root in the 1800s -- think about it).

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will.

05/17/2024

A quick read that clearly explains linguistic justice, why AI is not linguistically just, and why humans still need to generate their own texts. The last part is a good argument for writing to understand and give voice to one own, unique ideas.

This is from the University of Michigan's Sweetland Center for Writing. It is one page in their current site on teaching writing & GenAI (https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/instructors/guides-to-teaching-writing.html)

Linguistic justice is an anti-racist approach to language and communication (Baker-Bell, 2020; CCCC, 2020). Over the last several years, scholars whose work focuses on linguistic justice, raciolinguistics, and translingualism in literacy education have called for increased attention to how the acade...