The idea of the intangibility of that mental state in estimating the time is of the greatest importance. Why is it intangible? Isn’t it because we refuse to count what is tangible about our state as part of the specific state which we are postulating?

Wittgenstein, PI§608

Many of the writers I work with think of writing as a very intangible process. A good way of seeing this is when they tell me that it took them “a whole week” (or several weeks!) to write something. They don’t distinguish the tangible from the intangible parts of the process, so they count their reading and thinking and worrying about their writing as part of the time they spent “writing”. But writing, properly speaking, is what actually happens on the page. When I ask you how long it took you to write a paragraph, I’m asking you how many minutes you spent writing it. When I ask you how you did it? I don’t want to hear about all the reading and thinking and considering-how-others-did-it that you did. I want to know how you composed in the moment.

“I’ve glimpsed into our future and all I can say is…go back.”
Diane Court

Lately, I’ve been finding myself comparing ChatGPT to PowerPoint in my discussions with students and colleagues about artificial intelligence in higher education. PowerPoint has undeniably had a profound impact on teaching and learning at universities. In particular, it has changed the nature of lecturing and the attention implicit in “attending” a lecture. My view is that the effect has been, on balance, a negative one, validating the concerns of its critics, who have been speaking out since it was introduced.

PowerPoint shifted the attentions of both students and teachers from each other to the slides, and it gave the false impression that an “official” record of the lecture existed in the slide deck. (Today, some lecturers even skip slides and tell students they can read them later on their own.) Many students defer the effort of understanding what was said in the lecture — the process of learning — to that magical period later in the semester known as a “studying for exams” when the presentations they have downloaded (instead of making their own notes) will supposedly make perfect sense to them. The slides do not support lectures, they essentially replace them.

All of this criticism is obvious and has a familiar retort: PowerPoint is a good thing when used correctly. PowerPoint isn’t bad; bad PowerPoint is bad. My response to this is simply that we’ve had thirty years to learn how to use it well and, while in the right hands (and in front of the right eyes) it can, yes, do impressive things, it is very, very rarely in the right hands (and very often slides past glazed eyes). Its overall effect on university lecturing has been a negative one, exacerbating the worst tendencies of mass higher education rather than helping us to maintain our standards in the face of them. Again, these criticisms are obvious and very old and you’re no doubt already bored by them.

I bring it up in conversation to say why I’m not very hopeful that we’ll learn how to “leverage” AI in higher education. Even my fellow writing instructors and librarians seem eager to “embrace” this new technology. I’ve heard it said that it will make English “the hottest programming language on Earth”. The enthusiasm for this technology is overwhelming. I fear it will be deployed widely before it is applied wisely. In a few years, there I’ll be, quaintly lecturing without slides and teaching students to write their own sentences and paragraphs. Chalk and talk; pen and paper. A grumpy old man.

I told you so.

For the third year in a row, I’m running my series of informal talks about the Art of Learning here at CBS. It starts today. It’s a great chance for me to hear what I’m currently thinking about the state of knowledge in higher education. As usual, the plan is to begin with the art of knowing things, and then move on to reading, thinking, writing, listening, talking and enjoying things. There’s a final talk at the end about how to retain what we learn and maintain the ability to learn (and relearn) still more things.

This year, there’s a shadow hanging over me, of course. Students are asking themselves whether their time over the next five years is best spent developing their natural talents or learning how to use an artificial intelligence. As I said already at the end of last year’s series, I fear we’re approaching a dystopian future in which getting an education really just means fine tuning (and perhaps learning how to prompt) a bespoke AI, an artificially intelligent assistant (or outright alter ego) customized to your particular discipline.

For now, I’m sticking to my guns. Students should learn how to use their minds and bodies, shaping their senses and their motives ever more precisely to engage with an increasingly digital environment. They should not leave their thinking to machines any more than they should leave their feelings to them. Norman Mailer once said that technology is always offering more power and less pleasure. I understand the temptation. I’m going to spend some of my talks offering some arguments for resisting it.

A university education is already a very artificial thing. But, as with art, the point is to use this formal setting to explore the gifts you were born with, to find out what your body can do, as Spinoza put it, not just, pace Deleuze and Guattari, to plug it into a bunch of machines.

The better draughtsman has more ‘on his mind’ concerning his subject; and by embodying his knowledge and understanding in each purposeful line or passage of his drawing, achieves with apparent — even with real — ease an expression of form, character, action — whatever may be his immediate object — that the novice, lacking such equipment and relying on his vision alone, finds beyond his power.

Oliver SEnior

I mentioned the other day that I try to draw a hand every morning. This morning I decided to focus on just the thumb. Yesterday, I had tried to do my index finger. It’s a good exercise, especially because I’m also trying to capture the three-dimensionality of what I’m drawing, its volume. It’s actually thrilling to see what a few lines in the right places do to the image of a hand, how trained we are to see depth and weight when it is indicated in a drawing.

I say “trained” advisedly. As with writing, a drawing has to “read” according to all sorts of conventions. We read a lot “into” a drawing; the viewer does a lot of the work for the artist. We might say that the artists skill shows in how well the viewer is “set up” to see the object as intended. All of this is useful to me as a writer to notice.

Try working on the parts of your writing in isolation from the whole. Work on the paragraph not the paper, the sentence not the paragraph. You can even sometimes give yourself a moment or two to work on the word not the sentence, what it means and how it is spelled, or, to follow this out to its extreme, to work on the individual letters. Try to notice how the larger effects are built up from simple gestures. In the end, you’re just marking up a page.

Academic writers should write for intellectual equals, i.e., people they respect. You can look them in the eye and tell them what you think. You also want to know what they think on the subject you’re writing about. Probably the most important thing is that you enjoy their company while you’re writing. It makes the work more pleasant.