Writing about getting to the Funnery

Learning about AI through teaching about it

Note: Last summer, I wrote about a course I was about to teach in Get me to the Funnery. Teaching it gave me lots to write about, but I haven’t…yet. Fortunately, there was a writer embedded in the course and his piece just came out. It is about a lot more than my class, but it is also about that.

---

My colleague Trey Popp did something I wish more writers would do. He talked to dozens of college students about how they think about AI, and wrote about it. Some of them were taking a class with me called How AI is changing higher education and others of them were taking classes on AI with other teachers at my university. Still others were just standing in line, waiting to get a free water bottle from Google.

My favorite moments in the piece are when Trey describes students using an old educational technology—the one called books—to help us understand these new transformer-based machines. I assigned actual books—not digital texts—the kind made out of ink and pulped wood. As the piece shows, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (2025) by John Warner and AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (2024) by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor make for some interesting discussions.

One of the things Trey’s essay does well is show the wide range of teachers using AI tools as context for the students working to understand the technology. We tend to write from the singular perspective of our own teaching—at least I do. The broader range of student experiences is far more important for how students approach their decisions about how to use AI.

Here’s the first paragraph:

On September 15, 2025, a dozen freshmen from the College of Arts and Sciences gathered in the Neural and Behavioral Sciences Building for the second meeting of a first-year seminar offered through Penn’s undergraduate program in Science, Technology & Society. By a consensus they’d reached the week before, the students piled their silenced cellphones in the back of the room before casually sorting themselves around three circular tables. Laptops remained tucked in their bags as they produced pens and pencils to take notes by hand. At the head of the classroom, Rob Nelson drew a long line across a wall-mounted markerboard. At one end he wrote the year 300,000 BC. Near the other end he wrote 2022.

Read the rest: Hyper Text by Trey Popp from The Pennsylvania Gazette.

For more on my teaching with and about AI

---