Today 10/7 and tomorrow 10/8, Dr. Heather Dalmage of the Sociology program at RU will be leading info sessions at RU’s Chicago Campus about a short-term study abroad trip for undergraduate and graduate students to South Africa in May 2025. This course, Global Race, is cross-listed as JMS 329, SOC 329, and ORGD 480.
Students can enroll in this sociology course for the Spring 2025 semester, complete course work in Chicago during the semester, and then travel with Profs. Dalmage and Anne-Marie Cusac to South Africa from May 11 – May 23. Interested students should come to one of these information sessions this week!
Faculty Learning Fridays @RooseveltU are back for the Fall 2024 semester! Sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, the Learning Commons, and the Library, Faculty Learning Fridays is a monthly informal workshop series for RU instructors to explore challenges, insights, and practical strategies related to teaching, learning, mentorship, and more, drawing on the expertise of our RU community.
All instructors—full-time, part-time, and staff—are invited, and workshop topics and leaders rotate from month to month. A central goal of this series is to help instructors develop and implement effective practices in their work with students, in an interactive, participatory, and structured workshop format.
Friday, September 6, 9:00-10:00am Topic: Dis/ability Inclusion: Reflecting on Dr. Charnessa Warren’s 2024 Faculty Conference presentation Led by: Ellen O’Brien, Director of Student Learning and Access, RU Learning Commons; Nicole Yoon, Disability Services Specialist; and Natasha Robinson, Deputy Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Coordinator
Friday, October 4, 9:00-10:00am Topic: Copyright, Fair Use, and Access to Scholarly Material Led by: Robin Hofstetter, Director of Libraries
Friday, November 1, 9:00-10:00am Topic: What’s New in Title IX Led by: Natasha Robinson, Deputy Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Coordinator
Friday, December 6, 9:00-10:00am Topic: An Update from RU’s AI Working Group Led by: Michael Blancato, Director of Undergraduate Writing, and RU AI Working Group members
Mind and body are such fundamental concepts that we often take them for granted, but recent events have served as a reminder of how central they are to the American Dream. For example, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade served as a stark example about the body itself as a site of political contestation. Roosevelt University is uniquely suited to explore this theme. As an educational institution, one of the University’s central missions is promoting and celebrating the life of the mind.
The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt is centrally focused on education that brings together mind and body in music, theater, and dance. In addition, as a participant in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and potentially Division II of the National Association of Collegiate Athletics (NCAA), the University is home to more than two dozen sports teams that encourage students to hone their physical development.
As I entered the final week of my summer online gen ed seminar at RooseveltU called “Humans & Nature,” I wrote the following note to my students in our Writing Workshop discussion forum. Their final assignment was to compose a Creative Nature Essay of approximately five pages in which they reflect on their personal connection (or lack thereof) to the natural world and discuss at least two of our required readings. The instructions for the assignment are appended below.
On the subject of possibly giving in to the temptation to use ChatGPT4 or any other AI-based tool to draft or edit your Creative Nature Essay, your nature outing reflections, or any and all posts to our discussion forums in Blackboard . . .
First, and I can’t say this strongly enough: don’t do it!
The writing you do for this key assignment in our class, from the brainstorming to the drafting to the revision to the final editing stage, must be your own. I say this for many reasons, but most importantly these:
I don’t care what a chatbot thinks about nature, humanity, and our course readings. I want to know what you think about it. The only way you can do that is through your own thoughts and words, not a AI robot’s.
Using AI to assist your writing might seem efficient and fast, and thus far easier (sorta kinda) than doing your own hard work. But I’m not interested in reading things that are efficient and easy and quick. The only way you can grapple with what you know and think is to go through the difficult and, yes, sometimes painful process of writing, reflecting, reconsidering, and rewriting. That’s how we learn and grow.
AI-generated text might use a lot of big words and be structured in a superficially logical way and thus sound knowledgeable, but it’s usually boring, predictable, and highly mechanical. It lacks soul and feeling. It’s often embarrassingly cliché. It’s pretty much devoid of humor or wit. In short — it’s not good writing.In fact, it often sucks, as I found out recently when I asked ChatGPT to write an urban nature poem set on Chicago’s South Side.The result was indeed poetry — but of the doggerel variety.
Most profs can spot this kind of seemingly-good-but-actually-bad writing a mile away, because we’re read thousands upon thousands of papers, emails, blog posts, and discussion board entries by college students over years (in my case, decades) of teaching, and I have a very good sense of the normal range of writing ability in undergraduates.
Last but not least: using AI to write a discussion board post, a term paper, a creative essay, a song, a love letter, etc. is technically and quite obviously plagiarism, and thus academically dishonest.
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was based on the novel of the same title by Arthur C. Clarke. The film is slowly paced, even ponderous, but complex and and somewhat inscrutable; consequently, people usually love it (me) or hate it (the rest of my family). Notably, pretty much everyone agrees that the best character in the movie is an AI-powered supercomputer, who (which?) is truly one of the great villians in movie history: HAL 9000, the all-powerful guidance computer system aboard the interstellar spacecraft “Jupiter.”
HAL was developed by computer scientists at the University of Illinois in 1992 and represents state of the art computational speed and acumen circa 2001, or so the story goes. As the quintessential embodiment of Artificial Intelligence, HAL carries on deep conversations with the human crew members of the spaceship, which is on a secret and important mission (about which we don’t know hardly anything).
A key plot point of the story is that HAL goes haywire: it becomes concerned that the human crew leaders falsely suspect it of malfunction, and thus are jeopardizing completion of the ship’s mission. So HAL, since it controls everything on the ship, goes on a killing spree, eliminating the crew one by one. Eventually the mission leader, Dave, is the only one left. Iin this scene, he’s outside the main ship in a small “pod,” trying to dock with the main ship and return safely.
2001 was a prescient story about, among many other things, the profound and often unforeseen dangers of technology and, more specifically, the possibility that AI could pose a danger to those who created it, by dint of its acquiring various aspects of human intelligence and, by extension, behavior.
In the decades since 2001 was released in 1968, computer technology and AI research has increased exponentially and at shocking speed. 2022/23 will go down in history as an important milestone in the development of this technology, which up until recently had advanced in comparative fits and starts. Right now, in real time, we’re witnessing an explosion of AI search tools, chatbots, and more — with global tech giants racing each other to advance and market the newest development. All this has had profound consequences for untold aspects of social and economic life, including education.
AI-generated writing is in the process of shaking up the entire education establishment, as students grapple with when to use / not use these powerful tools, and faculty strive to figure out how to account for them in their assignment design. Policies and procedures for using and/or prohibiting AI writing are going to evolve over the next several months and years, as the use of such tech tools grows.
Honestly, I have no idea where this is going to go — but I hope I don’t end up like the professor equivalent of Dave in 2001, begging HAL to let him back on to the ship and then realizing he’s really “up a creek,” as my grandma would say.
Right now, for SUST 101, we’re hewing closely to the title of our course: Humans & Nature. May all of your text for this class be human-generated, warts and all.
Questions and comments are welcome in this thread. Meanwhile, I encourage you to carefully review the Academic Honesty statement in our SUST 101 syllabus: SUST 101 Assignments 2023Sum.pdf
Prof B*
*I certify that 100% of the text above was human generated by me, Michael A. Bryson, a flesh-and-blood person, on 26 June 2023 and slightly updated on 14 Aug 2023. I am not a bot, but a flawed human being who makes various kinds of mistakes and unforced errors on a daily basis, as my wife and daughters would freely attest.
Hey there, RU students! Looking for an Ideas of Social Justice course to take this summer to make progress on your CORE gen ed requirements? Here’s a great option: a 5-week fully online seminar, SUST 101 Humans & Nature, taught by Prof. Mike Bryson of the Sustainability Studies Program at Roosevelt from 5/30 to 7/10.
SUST students explore Northerly Island, March 2023
To register for this class: please visit RU’s Registration page for info and contact your academic advisor for your summer (and fall!) registration code(s). You can find the name of your advisor in Degree Works.
SUST 101 (CRN 31950) features interactive online discussions on Bb and three self-directed “nature outings,” wherever you are, that give you a great excuse to get outside and enjoy summertime while earning credit for this unique learning experience. For more information on that, just email Prof B (mbryson@roosevelt.edu).
Detailed info for those who want to learn more:
This summer 2023 section of SUST 101 Humans & Nature takes place fully online on a compressed five-week calendar from 5/30 to 7/10. We’ll be using the virtual learning environment of Blackboard (hereafter referred to as “Bb,” for short). The key thing to understand about online courses, like this one, is that they’re interactive — just as my on-campus students read assignments, write papers, construct arguments, do research, and come to class to engage in lively discussion, so too will you share ideas and interact in virtual time. Bb gives us the web-based tools to do just that.
For the vast majority of our interaction, we’ll use threaded discussion forums, which are asynchronous (i.e., not in real time) means of communicating, to exchange ideas and materials on a weekly basis. Reading and posting to the discussion board is like coming to class, except that you can do it any time of day throughout a given week.
Learning Objectives
Students who complete SUST 101 successfully should be able to:
Understand how different individuals, whether political theorists, philosophers, artists, activists, scientists, and/or writers, have characterized the relationship between themselves and nature (and, more broadly, between the human species and the non-human environment)
Appreciate the complexity of the physical and biological world, and understand the various impacts humans have upon local and global ecosystems
Draw connections between their own life experiences as they evaluate and expand upon their understandings of the texts of this course
Articulate ways in which the course themes embody or illuminate ideas of social and environmental justice
Demonstrate skills in foundational academic skills: close analysis of texts, idea-centered dialogue, and essay writing
Become a better communicator by honing one’s writing and discussion skills, using words powerfully and strategically, and gaining confidence in the mastery of these skills
SUST Program Learning Objectives addressed in SUST 101:
Understand the relationships among social justice, environmental justice, and corporate social responsibility; and analyze sustainability issues in light of this ethical framework.
Apply knowledge about sustainability to areas of personal, educational, and/or professional interest through applied research, community service, environmental activism, project management, or related activities.
Required Textbook
The selections in our textbook comprise the bulk of our assigned readings for this semester. It is available in print from the RU bookstore as well as a free e-book from the RU library. Make a note of the ISBN # so you get the correct edition when ordering. Additional reading selections will be available to you on our course Blackboard (Bb) site.
Deming, Alison, and Lauret Savoy, eds. The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. 2011. Milkweed Editions. Paper. ISBN 9781571313195.
Requirements and Key Assignments
This class is five weeks in duration (running from 6/1 through 7/5) and has a distinct weekly rhythm. Required readings will include selections from our assigned textbook, supplemented by assorted websites related to each week’s topic, student-selected readings and videos, and/or other documents (usually pdfs) available in the Readings section of our Bb site. Key course requirements include:
Class Participation: regular and engaged participation during our weekly online discussions of assigned readings
Discussion Leadership: an assigned week during which you select and lead discussion on one selection from our anthology (this is on top of your regular class participation for that week)
Nature Outings: three self-directed nature excursions (30 minutes or more) in which you observe and experience nature in whatever context is appealing and available to you, then post your reflections about it on the DB
Creative Nature Essay: a 4-5 page paper that creatively engages and explores your relationship with the natural world, as well as critically reflects upon two of our course readings
Please join us at 2pm CST in the Fainman Lounge in RU’s historic Auditorium Building for an encore performance of the original devised play, “Without Water,” conceived and written by the first-year BFA Acting Class of 2026 and directed by Prof. Elise Kauzlaric in the CCPA’s Theatre Conservatory. The performance will be bracketed by commentary on the role of water in the urban environment by students in Prof. Mike Bryson’s SUST 360 Writing Urban Nature honors seminar, followed by an interactive discussion among the two groups of students and the audience.
Mike Bryson, Professor of Sustainability Studies at Roosevelt University, joins Green Sense WBBM radio host / postcaster Robert Colangelo again to share his thoughts on what role the arts and humanities play in changing hearts and minds about climate change, water conservation, and sustainability. We discuss the current economic conditions and the job market for students working in the field of sustainability.
Listen to the full episode on your preferred streaming platform by visiting the Green Sense website
RU Green members and current students of Prof. Mike Bryson are also invited to attend the final dress rehearsal / free performance of this winter’s Freshman Spotlight show by the Acting program in the CCPA Theatre Conservatory after the RU Green meeting. Showtime is 7:30pm and runs 55min, in the Miller Studio Theatre, AUD 980. The theme of this year’s all-original, “devised theatre” show is water.
For more info, email Prof. Bryson (mbryson@roosevelt.edu). To attend: you should arrive at the AUD 9th floor, Wabash Side, between 7:10 and 7:25pm, and say you’re one of Mike Bryson’s students. Doors will close promptly at 7:30pm.
Just finished up five days of exploring the urban and suburban environment of the Chicago region with my intrepid squad of @RooseveltU students in our one-week-intensive Sustainability Studies 360 course, Writing Urban Nature. Here they are at the North Park Village Nature Center on Chicago’s NW Side, one of the many sites we visited this week in Chicago, Schaumburg, and Will County.
From Chicago’s lakefront to its North Side parklands and trails; from South Branch of the Chicago River to the wetlands and woodlands of the NW suburbs; from heritage farms to prairie restoration sites — we visited a wide diversity of places in which to analyze the ever-shifting relations between the natural and built environments in this place that has come to be called “Chicago Wilderness.”
Pictured from L to R here are Austyn (oboe major), Tom (psychology), Alicia (sustainability studies), Grace (wildlife biology), and Denise (biology). Notably, Grace joined our group as a student-at-large from Western State CO University, enrolling in this environmental humanities class via the Resilience Studies Consortium of US colleges and universities. The students now are working on creative non-fiction essays as part of our Writing Urban Nature online project, est. 2015.
SUST 360-01 Writing Urban Nature — CRN 31243 / Pre-req: ENG 102 with a grade of C- or better
Meets May 21-25 from 9:30am to 5pm at RU’s Chicago Campus. Required pre-session on May 9 from 4-6pm, room TBA — videoconferencing also will be provided through Zoom for the pre-session. Some additional work online required. Final writing assignment due June 1st.
