Of verbs and collective intelligence
Last Saturday, my Department of Communication colleagues and I met for lunch—not to debrief or decompress, but to put our heads together and work on revisions to our undergraduate program.
It’s a practice we’ve followed for years, whether we’re applying for accreditation or reviewing our courses. We meet over coffee or pizza, brainstorm edits, and debate the changes.
Our task this round was to fill up a table that breaks down our program’s learning outcomes into performance indicators. It is a torturous task: we have to use the appropriate verbs that describe the abilities we want our students to develop. Construct or conceptualize? Appraise or evaluate? Select or identify?
Some university departments suggested that we use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate our work and save time. We always refuse: AI would be antithetical to the nature of our profession, and we would contradict the very values we want to instill in our students. We’ve also found that an external tool can only spit out words. It cannot speak to our identity.
Our identity is collaboration. We engage with each other’s expertise and know each other’s strengths. We discover who is good at creating frames to organize information, and who is good at making sense of masses of data. We know who can explain a complicated concept through writing and who can turn it into a diagram.
When tedious pedagogical nuancing is needed, we put our heads together. Our brains run at full power. Keyboards clack as we craft sentences. The talking does not stop, and jokes pepper the conversation. This is how we rescue happiness from what is an essentially joyless task.
I try to make my students engage in the same in-person, hands-on, collaborative work in all my classes. My students have to do something, whether to talk to each other or choreograph a song, pick up a pencil to draw designs or a pen to write longhand.
For instance, my creativity classes open with five minutes of freehand writing, where students must keep on writing with no regard for grammar, punctuation, or flow. It’s an exercise designed to flush one’s imagination of distractions and inner critics.
Freed of their mental cobwebs, my students must draw three designs in five minutes using a specific prompt. In class proper, they must participate in brainstorming and discussion. They have to identify pain points in everyday life, strategize how to interview specific people, create things together, critique something systematically. No gadgets allowed.
My students always start off afraid. This semester, we began with a variety of protests: I can’t say anything long enough for five minutes! I won’t finish even one design! It’s too much pressure to do anything!
Lately, however, I’ve had to remind my students to stop writing because their time was already up. Some have produced as many as seven designs. My groups have acted out movie scenes or marketed strange inventions in mere minutes. Some students are still hesitant and pay their inner perfectionist too much attention, but more students are going through what my previous cohorts have undergone: a slow realization that the only way to get something on paper is to get anything on paper. The only way to be creative is to actually create.
We, the instructors, can see the value of pushing our students to make things, because we, too, have endured the trial and error of producing something. We know what it’s like to wrestle with concepts, disentangle complicated ideas, and put together stories. None of these happen effectively when they happen instantly.
In the case of pedagogy, we often need cooperation alongside the hands-on work. We train and expect the same from students. We want them to be good at expressing themselves, of course, but we also want them to put their ideas through the sieve of collective intelligence, the way that writers, researchers, and producers do.
One of our younger faculty told me a story: he spends his weekends helping older folk converse in English, often taking an hour to engage them in a back-and-forth that he hopes will make them more confident when they interact with their less inhibited peers.
Recently, he taught a client about figures of speech, beginning with similes. After some examples, she contributed by saying that he, her teacher, “is smart, just like AI.”
My friend gently corrected her: he knew that she liked the convenience of AI, so he told her how AI isn’t actually smart. It regurgitates information quickly, can hallucinate information while making it sound real, and depletes water and electricity resources in the process.
Last Saturday, we took two hours to complete the task. Had we used AI on our document, we could have taken those two hours to do research, check papers, or run errands; but we also had the chance to reassess our courses, understand each other’s blind spots, and, in my case, reflect and write my column.
No time is wasted on intellectual effort. Water and electricity are wasted, however, in surrendering one’s potential to a machine.
—————-
