A rundown of what happened in October
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| Hey everyone! October's drawing to a close; I don't know about y'all, but we're preparing for trick-or-treating tonight with a Pokemon-themed family costume. This October has been notable with the launch of a new Generative AI course on edX and a new article published. Let's dive in! |
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| New MOOC on
Foundations of Generative AI |
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Earlier this month, we launched a new MOOC on Foundations of Generative AI on edX. The course is notable for two reasons: first, it's a look at generative AI targeted at those with limited prior computing experience (although likely still interesting to those with more), and second, it leans strongly into leveraging AI for developing the course. The videos of me are actually an AI avatar (created by Heygen by changing the movement of my lips to match newly-entered content), and we used DALL-E to generate many of the images in the course. I wrote a bit about the experience creating the course on LinkedIn as well! You can read more about what the course entails on the course landing page. |
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| That Foundations of Generative AI course also attracted a bit of press coverage. If you want to read more about what we've said about the course, check out these articles: I was also invited to weigh in on the use of digital proctoring in a piece for 11Alive, which you can watch here! |
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| Article at ACM CompEd 2025 |
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This past week, Brittney Exline presented work that she co-authored along with Melanie Duffin, Brittany Harbison, Chrissa da Gomez, and me at the 2026 ACM CompEd conference in Gaborone in Botswana! The paper, titled "Using Sentiment Analysis to Investigate Peer Feedback by Native and Non-Native English Speakers", explores the relationship between native language and experience in peer review.
The full paper can be found on the ACM web site here.
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| Every month I post a little recap to Facebook of the books I read during that month; my plan here is to pick my favorite each month and feature it here, as well as listing the others I read (and will admit to having read). But this month it's impossible to pick just one: I read three of what have rapidly become some of my favorite books of all time:
- The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. I inserted a reference to it in the aforementioned Foundations of Generative AI course. It's not just a great book about alignment, but also about the history of deep learning and its relationship with human learning.
- Playground by Richard Powers. This was a bizarrely good complement to The Alignment Problem, a fictional take on the way these technologies developed and where they might go from here. Read the physical book, not the audiobook, though; there's a wrinkle that's only available in print that changes the entire book.
- I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin. Pargin is one of my favorite authors; he balances crude humor with insightful social commentary extremely well. In this book he captures the way social media discourse evolves and impacts the real world. Plus, I would argue this book has one of the best plot twists I've ever read, although some people might not really call it a twist.
I also read The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson and Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, both of which were really good (though I wish I'd realized The Sunlit Man was a more direct sequel to something I haven't actually read yet).
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Full Disclosure: As with on my blog, I use Amazon referral links in this section. That's mostly just a lightweight way to track and see if anyone's even clicking through. If you buy something through one of these links, I may get a bit of money back and achieve my dream of one day being able to buy the nicer set of kitchen scissors that Amazon sells instead of the bargain variety. |
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