Eric Hayot

@ehayot.bsky.social

1589 Followers 861 Following

Teacher (Penn State), writer of books about China and the West, literary worlds, academic style, history of the humanities. New project on the end of aesthetic history. Arsenal fan, occasional Cassandra.

Research on the use of laptops, phones, and tablets in classrooms consistently shows that students who use those technologies—even if they are taking notes or looking at course slides—learn less in class than those who do not. Students who use such technologies also impact the learning of others, since flashing screens create consistent forms of classroom distraction. Best practices on technology use in classroom suggest that it works best when it is used socially—as when students look together at the slides for the lecture or work in groups on a specific project. Research also shows that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who type them onto a computer.

As a result, unless you have a specific accommodation request from SDR that requires the use of this kind of technology or are explicitly directed to use a device for a collaborative classroom activity, you are not allowed to use laptops, tablets, phones, recording devices, smart glasses, or any other screens or screen-adjacent technology in this classroom.

Research on unguided GenAI use in pedagogical contexts consistently shows that students who rely on GenAI to complete assignments miss critical opportunities for foundational skill and critical thinking development. Because the goal of this class is to teach you as much as possible, the unauthorized use of Generative AI or LLMs to complete your assignments is banned in this course. This also extends to the use of smart glasses during class or while completing an in-class assignment.

Use of these technologies is only allowed when you are specifically directed to do so (e.g. in a particular assignment). Unauthorized use of these technologies will be considered a violation of the university’s academic integrity policy. The Department of Comparative Literature also bars instructors from using GenAI to evaluate, grade, or otherwise respond to student work.

The foregoing presupposes that humanistic scholarship is distorted when political considerations are brought to bear in the assessment of scholarship. This in turn presupposes that humanistic inquiry traffics in claims that are true or false independently of their political appeal, and that such claims are to be assessed by reference to the evidence and not by their presumed utility for one or another purpose. There is abundant room for disagreement about the nature of this purported “objectivity,” and in particular about whether the objectivity appropriate to the humanistic disciplines differs in some way from the objectivity at issue in the natural sciences (Wright 1992, Daston and Galison 2007). But for present purposes all we need is a minimal distinction between politically attractive accounts on the one hand and true or well-supported accounts on the other. Anyone who accepts this distinction is in a position to recognize the phenomena described in the last section as seriously damaging to the academic enterprise.

The vast majority of college students aren’t attending Ivy League schools, they’re grinding away at night classes in community colleges across the country. Distance and online learning has been an enormous boon for those students. “If there’s no credibility to that, then you’ve just ruined the investment and the learning goals and the access to meaningful learning that that they can then also use for employment of students who are underprivileged, who can’t come to the classroom, who are working full time and raising families and trying to get an education,” Mills said.

Rather than telling ourselves that we have to “catch up” to some imagined goal of normalized AI use in higher education, Columbia should take advantage of its prominence as a university to propose something better, like classrooms free of screens, oral examinations, and an end to slippery, relativistic standards on AI use from university administrators. Our response to AI is an opportunity to distinguish Columbia as a reservation where minds are developed without the crutch of a chatbot.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class."

A transcript of a text message exchange between me and a spammer. The spammer writes: "Beautiful day! I'm Kelly from PrideStaff, will you be receptive to new employment?" I respond: "would you be receptive to fucking off?" Kelly responds "Sure"; I respond "Great--thank you! have a good day." Kelly: "You too."

We do not encourage you to incorporate AI tools into your evaluation. Also, note that the confidentiality requirements of the ISF might not be fulfilled by most AI platforms. If you choose to do so, your written evaluation is still considered a reflection of YOUR PERSONAL ASSESMENT of the proposal, and we hold YOUR referee report in the highest regard.