“[We are] mostly focused on pedagogy, and how we can actually take advantage of…artificial intelligence in education,” said Fleur Eshghi, associate vice president of education technology and research at Fordham and one of the organizers of the event. “[We are] also examining the areas [to figure out]where we can be more creative with artificial intelligence.” 

Faculty Technology Day is a full-day conference that is open to all interested faculty and administrators. 

“This event started actually 24 years ago, with a very small group of faculty getting together in one classroom, and gradually grew to become a major conference,” explained Eshghi, “During the pandemic, we had to stop it, and this is the first year we are reviving this again.” 

Every year, the event organizers pick a topic that they think is most relevant to the cross-section of technology and education. This year, it was AI. 

A major theme throughout the day was that faculty need to be open to change. No one is quite sure yet how AI will change the way things are done, but the speakers emphasized that being flexible, unafraid of the future, and willing to adapt will set every professor up for success no matter what happens.

Poetry, Cybersecurity, and Robots

The event included several notable AI-focused keynote speakers, as well as breakout sessions that were more participatory. These sessions ranged from “Hands-on AI Play Sesh and Poetry Slam,” “Immersing Students in Virtual Reality,” and “Developing an Inclusive Augmented Reality (AR) Project Template” to “AI in Cybersecurity,” “3D Printing and AI,” and, maybe surprisingly, “How Can I Get the Robot to Do My Research?”  

Many of the sessions focused on the AI world’s new darling, ChatGPT.  Faculty members and administrators learned how to ask the chatbot specific questions, and heard about possible uses that they may have for this technology: Maybe you only have three things in the fridge and you need to know what you could make for dinner without buying anything new. Maybe you are going on vacation and would like a list of notable places you should visit. Or maybe you are researching something very niche and would like to know which articles feature your topic. 

A ‘More Efficient Version of What We Have Today’

“It’s just a more efficient version of what we have today,” said Daniel Susskind, Ph.D., a Research Professor in Economics at King’s College London, Senior Research Associate at Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and the morning’s keynote speaker. 

In her opening remarks, Fordham President Tania Tetlow said we may not have all the answers where AI is concerned, but it’s a good thing we’re asking the questions. 

“This is one of the most promising things about Fordham– that you have chosen to come [to this conference]– because we have so much to learn at this moment in humanity’s history,” Tetlow said to the conference participants. “That you are embracing the challenge, and showing up today to leap in with both feet, is an extraordinary thing.”

–by Rebecca Rosen

Student Podcasting

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history, teaches in Fordham’s Medieval Studies program, one of the biggest programs of its kind in the world. His presentation, Podcasting and the History Graduate Classroom, offered ideas on how to make dense topics easier to digest.

While teaching a course on the Crusader states, which Paul described as “an arcane subject, even within the field of medieval history,” he wanted his students to have a way of interpreting these esoteric and difficult ideas to a larger audience.

“My students were gaining knowledge about something that no one else knows about. So the idea was to get comfortable with communicating these difficult ideas… How are we going to be able to explain the skills and the knowledge that this person has gained in some sort of wider context?”

As a solution, Paul came up with the podcasting idea. He tasked his students with creating a seven-to-10 minute podcast, encouraging them to listen to other popular history podcasts to get a feel of what to do. For the assignment, they were required to gather the technology and equipment they needed, write a script, record the podcast, and work with Paul on editing their audio until they were satisfied with the final products, which were then uploaded to SoundCloud and linked to their website, The Crusader States, for anyone to listen to.

Students were graded on how effectively they organized the information in a comprehensible way, which “was challenging to some people, especially people who were in Ph.D. programs, who have identified themselves as an intellectual. And they’re like, ‘I deliberately can’t speak to other people,’ so we break that down and say ‘you have to try.’”

The podcasts received encouraging responses from Paul’s Twitter followers. Listeners bantered back and forth, gave feedback, wrote comments, and even started to look forward to new episodes after the year ended, which Paul jokingly called “season 2” of the podcast series.

Using Polling Techniques for Instant Feedback

Usha Sankar, Ph.D., a lecturer in the biological sciences department who teaches courses like human physiology, was also looking for ways to keep students engaged. She has found polling techniques to be a useful strategy.

Using polling software, Sankar incorporated an interactive strategy into her lectures to keep her classroom energy as dynamic as possible.

There are many polling technologies out there—Sankar uses Poll Everywhere, a live interactive audience participation website used to gather responses. It can be used to create pop quizzes, polls, teaching games, and more. Students access their personal account page on their phones, answer questions directly, and see responses in real time.

Sankar has hosted a medley of quizzes, games, and competitions on her own Poll Everywhere page to test students about what they’ve learned during the lecture. The interactive aspect of the polling strategy allows her students to feel more engaged than if they were just listening to a lecture.

“Polling is a great way to gauge student engagement and understanding of concepts. The best polling methods are those that are intuitive, easy to access, cheap, encourage full participation, and provide detailed reports and feedback,” she said.

She’s also “constantly looking to improve my teaching,” she said, and polling is a great way to get feedback.

Keeping Students Engaged with Creative Pedagogy

Jane Suda, head of reference and information services in the Walsh Library on the Rose Hill campus, was impressed with the presentations she sat in on during the day, and their emphasis on “how you can use different technologies to make important learning points to the students and also make a creative classroom environment that is not your standard ‘write a paper, take a test’ environment,’” she said.

“In essence it’s like taking the classroom, breaking down the walls, and saying OK, now we’re gonna take what you’re learning in this one class, and throw it out into the public, and so we’re all polling, we’re podcasting, we’re creating websites, and so it’s not just what am I doing for the teacher, but what am I doing for the world, and that’s really dynamic. It changes what the classroom is all about.”

This was the finding of Anya Kamenetz, NPR’s lead education blogger and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010). On May 12, Kamenetz gave the keynote speech at this year’s Faculty Technology Day, sponsored by Fordham IT.

It is well known that colleges and universities are facing major challenges, some of which threaten their very existence. Rising cost is one big issue, Kamenetz said, and access to higher education is enormous.

With these issues in play, the debate about the relevance of higher education, especially the role that colleges and universities will play in an increasingly technocratic society, is the issue that “trumps them all,” she said.

Historically, universities existed to transmit prior knowledge to current generations, Kamenetz said. But today’s schools also need to prepare students for the future. What makes this task difficult, though, is that 65 percent of current students will end up in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.

“The question becomes, ‘What are we doing?’” she said. “If we need to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist, then how do we teach them?”

Coming up with an answer to these questions becomes urgent in light of the “race between us and robots,” Kamenetz said, since computers have assumed jobs that humans used to do in the past.

She noted, however, that this “race” isn’t about figuring out how to work better than computers, but rather understanding how to draw on our uniquely human abilities to work well with computer technology.

“The emotional aspects of leadership, teamwork, collaboration, and interpreting knowledge and information to people are something we’ll have to emphasize more and more in this race with computers,” Kamenetz said. “We [may]have a computer program that can read a CT scan, but we need a doctor to sit with a patient and tell them about a poor prognosis.”

Going forward, universities and faculty will remain relevant by fulfilling those “human” roles that computers cannot replace—for instance, providing mentorship, inspiration, and support to students, and helping students to make sense of the plethora of data available in this information age.

“Technology helps us to streamline what we do… But people still need to be in the driver’s seat,” Kamenetz said.

“This forward march of technology is giving us information about the long-term mission of education, which involves things that haven’t changed in a long time,” she continued. “The things we associate with philosophy and the humanities are in fact the most relevant for this generation. This is how our institutions are going to adapt.”

Using terms like “artisanal data harvesting,” the Faculty Technology Day keynote speaker Ben Vershbow, founder of the NYPL Labs, New York Public Library’s in-house tech startup, guided a rapt audience through ways humans and computers can better collaborate. Fordham’s IT sponsored the May 21 event.

Vershbow delivered a mile-high perspective of digital possibilities for an august institution like the NYPL, a message that resonated with Fordham faculty wrestling with similar issues of how to engage a digital audience.

He described the NYPL as a 19th-century institution striving to remain relevant in the 21st century. With a world-class archival map collection that began being digitized in the last decade, the library is seeking to change the static nature of those digital images and make the maps more dynamic and interactive.

Vershbow showed a digital image of 19th-century map of Lower Manhattan that lives online. He then explained how that map can be rectified with contemporary maps using Google Earth through a NYPL-designed website, Map Warper. The 19th-century map sits on top of the contemporary map, and a transparency dial can fade the older map atop the new map.

The result shows how extraordinarily accurate the 19th-century maps were, as the streets resolve almost perfectly with their contemporary cousins.

Such newly combined maps have the potential to be used with other data, for example, the recently released 1940 Census. Maps can then yield much richer information, such as who lived where and what they did for a living.

“We’re trying to drop pins in time,” said Vershbow. “If we open up the data, we can get the community involved.”

As the library operates on limited resources, Vershbow said that Map Warper is “a call to action,” to engage the public on the site to rectify maps for themselves. Once completed, the newly rectified maps are available for all to see, or make corrections if there’s a mistake.

NYPL has gone even further with crowd sourcing in other areas of its digitized collections. Vershbow said the library has a menu collection with approximately 45,000 menus dating back to 1848.  However, as the fonts on the menus vary greatly, optical character recognition software is not be able recognize the all the “funky fonts.”

In response, NYPL has set up a “What’s on the Menu” site and has invited the public to transcribe the menus. Menu items can then be linked to recipe sites like Epicurious.

In much the same way that Wikipedia asks its community to help with quality control, the NYPL calls on the public to check the veracity of its data, he said. This nuanced “artisanal data harvesting” can only be accomplished through human and computer cooperation. The quality control may not be perfect, but the people who delve into the site are a conscientious group. Like other forms of volunteerism, participants uphold certain civic ideals.

With the preservation and digital activation of the older collections underway, an obvious question is beginning to emerge: what about contemporary collections? The letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley have their own hallowed room within the library, but what’s one to do with the Timothy Leary’s floppy discs if the information on them can’t be accessed?

Verhshbow expressed a concern for preserving “tomorrow’s past” which will include not just the emails of Salman Rushdie, but newer writings that will exist on the digital cloud. Media archeology labs are being developed at places like Emory University, but New York City still lacks a significant preservation lab, he said.

He warned of an “information hole” that could develop should the academic communities rely on the promises of technology companies to preserve important information.

Sweeney said that millennials (students born between 1979 and 1994) demand more choices, are short on patience and are much less solitary and individualistic than previous generations.

“Their sense is that they’re busy around the clock, everything they do is based around speed and time,” he said.

Sweeney called millennials natives in the art of quick choices and in multitasking, having grown up with the Internet, instant messaging and video games. Their ability to concentrate is great, and their social networks are their principal way of getting information.

“They learn by doing; they don’t read the directions,” Sweeney said. “They want face-to-face learning with a mentor; the key to getting them to learn in classrooms is to get them engaged.”

Sweeney advocated more peer-to-peer learning methods and more use of intelligence tutors, artificial-intelligence programs that track a student’s individual progress.

The conference, held at the Lincoln Center campus, was sponsored by Instructional Technology Academic Computing, a division of Fordham University’s Department of Information Technology.

– Janet Sassi