Wonderful news!!! Congratulations! Can't wait to read it!
... With the caveat that some AI summaries of text can be unreliable, so students should get some coaching on how to develop their own skimming skills so that they don't rely upon AI generation to provide an inaccurate summary!
Honestly, the student use cases for skimming and finding summaries of readings described here all make perfect sense to me! If you are assigning reading simply as a content delivery mechanism, then it shouldn't matter if students take "shortcuts." www.insidehighered.com/news/student...
Students are turning to YouTube, podcasts and ChatGPT-crafted summaries rather than actually reading their assignments for class. Professors are unsure how to adapt.
Anyway, I don't purport to have the answers; this podcast mostly focuses on K-12 contexts (which is outside my context in higher ed), but I still think it's worth considering that smartphones are increasingly becoming core parts of the academic experience and the context blurring is a problem.
So, there's this funny tension between teachers who want to implement bans while also wanting to incorporate LMSs, online surveillance software, and other tools that make banning a smartphone nearly impossible. Acceptable use cases get fuzzy quickly when edtech is a core part of classrooms.
... some of the paradoxes that are happening in school contexts here. Schools want to ban smartphones, but are also uncritically adopting mountains of edtech that rely critically on students' usage of smartphones. If a school adopts any kind of textbook courseware, you bet a mobile app is essential.
As in, if we just look at smartphone usage and its negative impacts on mental health through the blanket swath of boys' and girls' experiences, you miss this whole important dimension of how, when, & where smartphones get used in diverse contexts. I also think both the book & the podcast missed...
I'm also thinking about how much all of these books completely whitewash teen experiences with smartphones. None of these books have any nuanced mention of race, socio-economic status, or disability (which I wish the podcast critique had addressed more directly). Gender is discussed, but that's it!
Haidt's piggy-backing on decades worth of the same argumentation. Turkle's "Reclaiming Conversation," Twenge's iGen, even Carr's "The Shallows" was something of a predecessor to this whole line of identical argumentation. Repeating the same argument through mostly anecdote doesn't make it true!
Finally listened to this episode and it breaks down why the narrative about smartphones destroying teens' mental health is over-simplified and reductive. Haidt's book joins an incredibly long list of books that reproduce the same, boring thesis, which is important to note because... (1/x)
