Notices by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (kathhayhoe@climatejustice.rocks)

The 2023-2024 academic year will be the first full year where students have unlimited access to ChatGPT and other LLMs.

While it's easy to short-circuit AI use in the classroom or by requiring that they show their work on written assignments, it's harder to prevent its use, or use it effectively, in online assignments.

So I want to know: what's your best idea for an ONLINE assignment that either:
(1) teaches them to use it effectively, or
(2) asks them for something they can't easily produce with an LLM?

I'll go first!

For category #1, I ask them to have AI write a paragraph about a topic we studied in the module, and then have them fact-check each sentence with the assigned class readings. I also ask them to add one thing they learned about the topic that AI missed.

For category #2, since the pandemic I've added journaling to all my classes. I ask students to reflect on the content of that module using examples from their lives, their thoughts, or their lived experience. It's easy to tell if their response isn't personalized, meaning that they used AI to write it (not just improve it, which I am fine with).

What do YOU suggest?

On Monday, I wrote an essay about climate and biodiversity for Scientific American. I tracked proportional engagement, calculated as (likes + shares + comments)/followers, over six social media platforms.

The winner? MASTODON, by a landslide.

Second place? INSTAGRAM. It's harder to share posts on IG, but lot of people like things there!

The loser? FACEBOOK, also by a landslide.*

* On Facebook, I've been shadow-banned since August 2018 when they listed clean energy and climate as "socially sensitive topics" so my page there stopped growing 6 years ago and now only about 1% of my followers there ever see my posts if the mention climate. It's actually too bad, because that's the platform where I reach the most conservative audiences through their connections to friends and family. So even though it's dead last, I still persist.

** For example, I had a post on FB a few weeks ago that didn't mention climate or clean energy. Its engagement levels were 3.7% which would put it just below Instagram.

At a classical concert the other day, my dad started talking with the man beside him, who said he was a journalist. When my dad introduced himself, the man said the name “Hayhoe” was familiar to him, because of “the notorious climate activist Katharine Hayhoe.” 😁

My dad, a science educator, then asked, "so what evidence WOULD convince you that climate change is real and serious?" He had no good answer--and I wouldn't expect him to, because climate denial isn't about facts. It's about looking for plausible excuses to stonewall climate solutions.

In my experience, 99.9% of climate denial is solution aversion. But because most of us prefer to perceive ourselves as good people, and saying "sure, this is a real problem that's affecting real people especially the poor and vulnerable but I don't want to fix it" isn't good, we seize on any excuse (it's not real! it's not human-caused! those scientists are cooking the data for profit! CO2 greens the planet! We can adapt! It's too late anyways!) to justify our desire for inaction.

For more, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkMIjbDtdo0