Writing

For now, AI is more hype than substance.

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There’s Human Intelligence, and Artificial kind. I wasn’t taken up by the recent bluster about AI which arrived in 2022 all dressed up, but wearing flipflops. Somehow there was a mismatch between its promise and what it delivers.

I did give it a try, however. Just like I once wandered into ‘Second Life’ slightly skeptical. Is this real, I wondered. Are we there yet?

1. AI ART – THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT WITH WEIRD, FUZZY SKIN

I had checked out the app called Starryai (which I wrote about in a Substack newsletter.) So, for my second attempt, I called up the algorithms on Dall.E to see if this fancy pants tool could design a magazine cover. Like WIRED.

The prompt that I typed, into Dall.E, was: “WIRED magazine cover with Dall.E.”

Could it ‘design’ a cover of tech magazine, using itself (Dall.E) in the title? Was it capable of reflecting on itself?

I was margially impressed. Marginally. In other words, not terribly. Sure, the graphics were overly arty as WIRED occasionally tries to be. Dall.E gets the look right, but the details are so bloody amateurish, even clumsy. It doesn’t seem to handle white space, or understand how to mimic a masthead. The fonts are a joke!

2. AI WRITING – NOTHING TO WRITE HOME ABOUT

I teach creative writing in all my classes. Naturally I’ve been intrigued, and even alarmed by how the talk about how AI could write like a human. Many people are hailing this as the death-knell for flesh-and-bone writers, journalists etc. Some tear their hair out about plagiarism in schools.

 The Nieman Lab is a bit more circumspect:

“While ChatGPT won’t win any journalism awards (at least for now), it can certainly automate much of the long tail of content on the internet.” — Nieman Lab, Predictions for Journalism in 2023

I checked out an application on the ChatGPT platform known as OpenAI that some people have told me can write fairly convincing content. I was suspicious. I had read a piece by a marketing writer, Mitch Joel about this. To check how smart this AI could be I typed in this snarky prompt: “Is Mitch Joel right about AI platforms.”

I wanted to see if this ghost in the machine was savvy enough to pick up his argument and reference it. As I guessed, it didn’t live up to my expectations. In fact, the software apologized for its inability to do more than explain what Mitch does for a living, and went on to explain how these are still early days! (Brownie points OpenAI for admitting you don’t know what you don’t know.) While it got the paragraphs and punctuation nicely. The second ‘graph was a doozy. Like a lazy copywriter churning out some garbage just to fill a layout to impress a client.

The website sets our expectations, in fact, saying things like, “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.” Hmm!

Having said that, others are raving about AI content generators like Jasper. It’s supposed to be a boon for copywriters, social media posts and SEO content.

HERE’S MY TAKE ON AI. Content creators of the world —authors, journalists, copywriters, podcasters —shouldn’t feel threatened. For now. Good copywriters don’t sit at a desk stringing clichés to adjectives. They walk the factory floor, sit through plans board meetings, and argue with brand managers before the concept emerges. Translated: They produce content, rather than regurgitate it. Translated again: The fruits of AI are tempting but aren’t ready to pluck. Even for students. Low-hanging fruit – tempting but bland. Sometimes filled with bugs.

ChatGPT says it is addressing this. It’s like saying Samuel Bankman-Fried has declared he is making sure there aren’t any more crypto scams.

Are we concerned? As teachers, yes. Plagiarism is something no school takes lightly, if only because we want students to discover the value of originality, and creativity. It’s what will benefit them in any career. How about you?

History is unavoidable these days in the classroom.

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How I paused my lesson plan to address the war.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Last week, I paused my lesson plan for a moment to address the war. My high school students (in a Writing & Publishing elective) had discussed a recent book, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis. “Does this current crisis with the invasion of Ukraine seem like the next world war?” I asked them. I felt it was bizarre to go on with life, editing videos and writing stories as if this wasn’t happening. War is not always someone else’s problem, I added. In a globally connected world, especially in a world with hyper-connected media, it’s not something just happening ‘over there.’

Which led me to lean on a set of documents from Brown University’s Choices program. It’s got excellent discussion topics, and handouts like this for teaching with the news. I had them read the backgrounder, and analyze political cartoons for labels, symbolism analogy, irony, exaggeration and stereotyping. When you’re writing for the digital world today, you have to take into account the many facets of media — from Tik-Tok, and memes, to cartoons, which have served editorial purposes for as long as newspapers have been around.

Courtesy, US San Diego: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb65537764/zoom/0

Political cartoons have a long legacy. There was Dr. Seuss, whose work included anti-fascist cartoons about Hitler and the rise of Nazism. There were those by Jerry Costello (‘Feeling the pinch’), and those like Punch cartoonist, Fougasse (‘Careless talk costs lives’) who worked for the British ministry of information. Cartoonists, like writers are also journalists of a different caliber. The writer has a rectangle called a column. The cartoonist has a rectangle called a strip. Both must pack meaning into them.

Analyzing history through texts and events requires critical thinking. My colleague who teachers history class described how he was tremendously proud of how his students handled the discussion of the war in Ukraine. I’ll cite his description from a commentary he wrote in a school newsletter last week.

“Something marvelous happened in my classroom last week. Something that I have been waiting for my students to do the entire year. My traditional history class is going over American Imperialism right now, and the subject came up of when Americans should intervene in the affairs of another country. The class was saying what they believed I wanted to hear, namely “Mr. Klicker, this is a horrible thing that is happening, but that doesn’t mean we throw American lives away”. It was good, but their hearts weren’t in it. They were just saying words without any conviction behind them. So I decided to have a little fun. I was going to ‘poke the bear’ and see what I came up with.

“Well by THAT logic, class, I guess you would have stood by and let Hitler and the rest of the Nazis conquer Europe and complete the Holocaust!”

Normally, they just sit their in shock at the fact that I accused of being Nazis, or perhaps they’ll roll their eyes if they’re feeling especially sarcastic. But miraculously, for the first time all year, I heard the words I’ve been waiting to hear:

“Mr. Klicker!” one girl said, rolling both her head and her eyes at me, “You know that’s not true! You always do this and I’m tired of sitting here and taking it! This is way more complicated than that!”

He goes on to say that in a history class, it is far more important that he teaches them to stand up for their beliefs (even when they are attacked) instead of making sure they memorize all of the names and dates. He recognizes that critical thinking is a difficult thing to do — made even more difficult when called to disagree with a person you are supposed to admire and respect. “We have forgotten how to debate,” he says, “to stand up for ourselves and have conviction in our beliefs even when everyone else is telling us to stand down.”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

There are plenty of resources for fostering civil discourse in the class room. In times like this, no matter what the subject matter, we have to address the moment in which the lesson is taught. I’ll leave you with two resources. These are guaranteed to start a great discussion in class:

1. People, including children, are singing inside bomb shelters to raise morale. Worth watching this. Why are these images of war so radially different to what might be on cable news, or on social media?

2. A story of an Ukrainian vlogger, Volodymyr Zolkin, who takes it upon himself to call up, randomly, people in Russia, and provide them with a different type of news. Read about it here, in the New Yorker.

Unexpected Lessons. When my class turned into a ‘newsroom.’

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Today, no sooner I got to school, I saw an email to staff about a coffee truck stopping by. A fundraiser for the school’s Cheer team. Not your common or garden food truck (a converted horse trailer) Exchange Coffee is a company with an interesting origin story.

So as my students came to class — my Writing and Publishing class –I nixed the day’s assignment on my lesson plan and asked them if they like to work as an impromptu news team. Grab a camera and some mics I told them. Someone needed to prep for the story, to look up some background information of the owners of Exchange Coffee. Another began to write down possible questions on a small white board while two others tested the audio, and if the clip-on mic units were charged. Clip-on mics aren’t the best for impromptu stories, so one student, adapted our ‘dummy’ mic to the Hotec clip-on, so that it communicated back to the camera. We rushed downstairs. I asked the owners (who also make and serve the coffee) if it was OK to do a story about them.

Once that was cleared, I got the students to shoot some B-roll. A school bus rolling in. A weird half moon was rising as the sun came over the Queen Creek horizon. An engine roared –possibly a train or a noisy aircraft from the nearby Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport. Sound engineer? Check. Camera person? Check. Reporter? Check.

As we began to roll, Don Meyer, an English teacher unexpectedly wheeled into frame, in full biking gear. Perfect! (I’ve featured Mr. Meyer on a podcast and blog post so I was confident this ‘customer’ would agree to being in the story.) The story was suddenly growing more legs. The ‘reporter’ began describing the scene, and got a interview with the owner/barista.

The audio quality turned out better than we expected. More than that, our reporter sounded like a reporter, despte just having 5 minutes of planning the story. The camera person got her right shots. Fifteen minutes to the bell, we switched off the tech and headed back to class to review the work.

NOW COMES THE LEARNING PART. I will play back the recording, and over the next few days and have the students critique their work. Could they have done anything different? What about lighting? What about camera angles? What if this was an ‘incident’? How would they handle it? Could they have interviewed customers? Could they have got a different camera angle – say from inside the truck?

Publishing in a digital world is tricky business. It’s never static. Stories, like lesson plans are always in flux. The best lessons are learned on the job. We are often poised at the top of the Bloom’s taxonomy pyramid, ‘creating original work,’ investigating, revising, reconstructing knowledge in the moment. Sometimes a coffee truck hijacks the lesson plan. You adapt and run with it.

Tomorrow I have invited an author, Jessica McCann, talk to the class about the writing craft, about fiction, and picking out details for a story. Does a video story or podcast have something in common with a novel? We’ll ask!

NEXT WEEK, my students will be working on podcasts. Who knows where this –and what unplanned events – will take my class. Stay tuned. Didn’t I mention – my class starts at 6:30 am? I might need more coffee!

Writing and publishing 100 Books in 5 weeks. How did they do that?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

When students sign up for a computer class, I tell them it’s a trick — they really signed up for a communications class that happen to have computers.

Inside pages of ‘Ciphers’ published in December 2021. More here.

In the last week of Fall semester my seventh grade students wrote and produced more than a hundred eBooks. A week before finals, many of them were burning the midnight oil proofing their chapters and fixing the ‘widows’ and orphans’ rather than cramming. They uploaded their final product as a PDF to Flipsnack, hit the ‘publish’ button and saw what five weeks of their creative writing project looked like.

Let me throw in some context about this assignment. Each semester my students take on a capstone project for which they have to prove that they understand document formatting. And by that I mean layout, design, fonts, margins, line spacing and all those nitty gritty features found on the ribbon of the most common applications they use — Google docs, Microsoft Word, Google Slides and PowerPoint.

I give them a few guidelines, and a 24-page template for the eBook created in Google Slides. Yes, Google Slides! An odd choice indeed for page layout. Having experimented with Microsoft Word and Google Docs several semesters ago, I discovered that PowerPoint or Slides are more flexible when it comes to formatting. Text boxes, drop-caps and margin control for instance work well.

There is considerable writing to be done, but the goal is to combine creative skills and mechanical tasks: To let students become storytellers, while making the text appeal to the eye. All this while doing the heavy lifting of research, copy editing, and design. They are shown how to design their book’s front and back cover in Canva, and import the PNG files. As for that back cover, I get them to create their own logo, insert a real barcode, and solicit two or more book reviews from their peers — reviews they place on the back cover. They must also write a blurb for the book (something a publisher or PR firm would do) and a short bio of themselves. The back-cover itself is one week’s worth of work! Authors may only use royalty-free images from sites that are in the Creative Commons. That means no Google Images.

They came up with their own book titles. And they were free to choose any genre, any subject. Many opted for fiction, but you’ll be surprised at the variety of non-fiction this year. I’ll get to the titles in a bit.

I’m sure you’re thinking — this is asking a lot of a 7th grader! And for anyone wondering why publish an eBook in a computer class, let me put it this way. Yes, my students are required to learn touch-typing and improve their speed and accuracy. We do this each week. But toward the end of the semester I tell them (half in jest) that they were tricked into believing they signed up for a computer class — when in fact they walked into a Communications class that happened to have computers. Not the other way around. The rationale, I tell them, is that the only purpose of ‘learning’ computers is to help them communicate better. Whether it is learning to code, making stunning presentations, designing a book cover, manipulating images in Photoshop, designing a website, or writing term papers or professional reports, the goal is always communication. The only reason you produce work for an audience — your teacher, a customer, an organization — is to communicate an idea. An eBook pulls together several of these core skills.

At the outset, when I tell students the book involves five chapters I hear a few groans. But very soon, I begin to see their story growing, the sentences inch-worming across a paragraph. The question I am always asked is if it’s OK to add a chapter or an extra page or two. Funny how they want that bar raised!

Apart from the usual Zombie Invasion, Horror, and a few about dragons and cute animals, I noticed an explosion in creativity this year. (Something I wrote about in an article on Medium, titled, “Start a Little Library, Side Effects Will Vary.”) I put it down to COVID, unleashing a fresh batch of creative juices. Consider these, handpicked to give you a sense of the diversity.

  • One book is set in an ‘Escape Room’ with some creative plot twists.
  • Another trippy alien mystery, ‘The Last Drop’ is scary. (it’s not about blood)
  • Like something intriguing? There’s a book titled, Ciphers with a techy, creative bent.
  • One on Beautiful Artwork is a truly aesthetic layout.
  • Interstellar is about space, but is not about that movie. It deals with the thermosphere and Braneworld Theory. (I had to look that term up!)
  • I was surprised to see a story on the ‘Witch Trials’ — with surprise angle. The author recounts the story of one of her ancestors caught up in the trials in Salem! How often do you get historical fiction with a personal angle to it?
  • A delightful book set in London is based on the urban legend of one ‘Spring-heeled Jack.’

As I have found out with each class, a writing project like this has surprise endings. Many students who never considered writing tell me they have become passionate about it.

Check out the podcast about this story, below.

Storytellers with face coverings

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Tony Arkani, a sprightly junior has the gift of biting repartee that cuts through a slab of high school cynicism. Tony, by the way, isn’t his real name. (I mistakenly called him that on the first day of class; he didn’t mind.) His other essential ingredient is a self-deprecating humor which comes handy when he weighs in on issues where he expects push-back: racism, face masks, privacy. Each morning Tony sits propped up against my classroom wall waiting for me to open the door. It’s barely 6:30 am. He’s on a roll. His gangly feet protrude into the hallway, but its his acerbic comments lobbed at barely woken-up teenagers that stop them in their tracks. A few set down their overstuffed backpacks to join the conversation.

Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash

This linguistic flamethrower is just one of the students who signed up for my elective class on Writing and Publishing this year. Other high schools have classes in Tech Writing, or Fiction. The broad scope of W&P resonated with students like Tony, and his classmate in whose veins run bits of Chaucer and Comedy Central, and even New Girl. The work of Atul Gawande, an endocrine surgeon-writer, and Kacey Musgraves, songwriter, resonate with them.

I once told this class I wish I had had such imaginative minds to work with back in the day when I worked in advertising, hunting for creativity. Fast forward thirty years, these are born story-tellers who take to plot and story arcs as effortlessly as they deconstruct memes and imbibe TikToks. It gives me a reason to wake up each morning, knowing there’ll be a fresh batch of creativity to be put in the blender.

To put a time stamp on this, it was a class that began in the middle of COVID when school superintendents were trying to balance students’ well being and academic achievement. Would a return to in-person school trigger a longer shut down? No one has the perfect recipe. But one thing I do know is that these storytellers with face coverings soon proved to us that our kids, despite six feet of separation and rigorous sanitization, were bursting with energy — something I wrote about earlier.

Given this kind of raw material we just might we see a new batch of thought leaders, creative policymakers, poets, screenwriters, scientists, and entrepreneurs. From my perspective at least, they have already shown their hand. One student has a podcast and a YouTube channel. Another, who works part-time at Taco Bell, is working on a George Lucas-ish manuscript — a series of 15 books, with prequels. Seriously! Tony also has a one in the works, too, involving ‘islands’ populated by ‘Orixens,’ ‘Fades,’ and creatures called ‘Voidwalkers.’ They remind me of characters in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. A year ago during the height of school lockdowns he pitched the idea of starting a mythical country he calls New Arkansas. He’s now recruiting ‘citizens’, has written up an elaborate constitution, designed a court of arms, and for an assignment in this class, created a podcast about it. Here, take a listen:

As they wrapped up their final assignment, I heard Tony mumble, “I wish I could retake this elective next year!” To which I responded, “You’d be bored.” I lied. These students who spar with him in the hallways seem to have exorcized the boredom gene that drops in on teenagers.

We shouldn’t let these storytellers out without tapping into these inner dynamos. If we fail them, we risk sacrificing them as underpaid drones in some Amazon-like warehouse. We desperately need the next C.S. Lewis, Erik Larson, and George Orwell.

This story appeared on Medium.com

There’s been massive outbreak of writing.

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Will someone please inform the authorities?

There’s been an outbreak of writing in school. I suspect it’s contagious. Even those language deniers are catching it. They’re huddled in the student union during lunch break breathing in the same particles of plot and narrative. The writers’ disease, also known as storytelling, is spreading.

I’m talking about student writing that I alluded to a few week back. Fiction. Non-fiction. How-To books. The titles blow my mind. From the typical teen horror, to some on technology. There’s one on Dissociative Identity Disorder (If you hadn’t heard of it, it’s mind opening!), one about Photoshop, many on romance, a few on travel and family, and one written entirely in French!

I expanded on this in my Medium post, here.

When a green screen pops up in class

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Sometimes a lesson plan needs to be revised on the fly. This happened today when one of my students brought in a green screen, so they could do trial runs of their TV news scripts in a Writing & Publishing class. I had planned to use a camera on a tripod and have them simulate a studio setting. I happen to have a 60-inch screen on the opposite wall, so with a bit of tweaking, it could be made to look like a backdrop of a scene for a ‘reporter’ to deliver his/her lines.

And then this happened.

Computer lab at Benjamin Franklin High School

As quickly as it was set up, we dismantled it. But I think it gave students a real world context of what they are actually working on – a story, that is not just an academic exercise but with an audience in mind.

I have to say this is a learning experience for me. [What’s that saying, “He who teaches, learns twice?”] I grew up using what we called a ‘blue screen’ as a chroma-key technique. I practiced this during a training stint in Coventry. My fellow student and I sent up this huge camera that weighed about as much as a microwave, at Coventry cathedral – the bombed out remains from the 1940 German air raids. We then took the ‘film’ to the studio and produced a news show. Now, some 33 years later all it takes is a pop-up screen, and a $300 camera slightly larger than a computer mouse.

This week I’m teaching myself to edit the footage on DaVinci Resolve. It’s not part of the lesson plan, for sure! But who knows. These things are not writ in stone. My elective class that I teach at 6:30 am each week day could evolve. I tell my students this is what a computer and tech lab should be – a place to experiment, to take things apart, and be ready for new ideas that pop-up. It’s one year since COVID made us discover new ways of teaching. It’s a lot of work, but it’s invigorating! Notice how everyone’s wearing a mask. No one’s complaining.

A flurry of writing in schools?

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Is the pandemic a catalyst for creativity?

I’ve been teaching writing for the past three years as one component in my Computer class. I teach technical skills –formatting documents, and creating presentations — while always introducing current, big-picture issues in information and communication technologies, or ICT, and social media. You know, privacy, trolls, AI, disinformation…

BUT 202O DELIVERED A SURPRISE PACKAGE, besides a micro-organism that derailed us: An explosion of student writing. Fiction, mainly. The capstone project for the past three years has been an eBook my 7th graders research, write and produce. I noticed a sudden interest in fiction writing by last December, so I invited this semester’s students to consider a Writer’s Club. This week, the club is beginning to take shape. It’s fitting: Benjamin Franklin was a prolific writer, after all!

In parallel with this, in my other class on Writing and Publishing class for high school students, writing seems to come naturally. Which is why they take this elective, after all. But what surprises me is how much of writing they have already begun. Two students are already working on a book. Reading their assignments makes me wonder where these young authors have been hiding all these years. Has COVID been a catalyst for creativity? Somewhere, in some research department, there’s probably a study going on about how lock-downs and screen-time have driven young people to books again; how young adults are discussing issues not covered by memes and Tik-Tok.

AGAINST THIS BACKDROP, I INVITED JESSICA MCCANN, a Phoenix based author and freelance writer to talk to my class on Monday. Jessica writes historical fiction, and her story of how she researches her character, and crafts her story is inspiring. Her examples are what we writers could identify with such as taking on the mundane work (writing about topics such as ‘garbage’), editing work for a different kind of ‘reader’ (corporate documents), and a brush with law literature. The latter is what serendipitously led to her digging into a court case involving slavery in the late nineteenth century, which led her to a character who figures in one of her books.

Speaking of craft, Jessica talked about the need for a writer to capture and convey the sensory experiences of a scene or a character, whether it is interviewing a celebrity or an anonymous figure in history. [Her books are “A Peculiar Savage Beauty” set in the 1030s Dust Bowl, and “A different Kind of Free” set in the pre-Civil War era. Having always leaned toward Sci-Fi, I’ve never read much in the historical fiction genre. I’m sold now!

My students this week are working on a blog post. In a few weeks they will create and produce a podcast, and then a newspaper. Elsewhere, and anecdotally I hear that interest in journalism is on the rise. Does that mean a return to long-form journalism, and greater value placed on writers across all genres? I hope so.

Evidence that student writing (about chapatis and chickens) isn’t going obsolete

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One of my passions is to help students become better writers. Many teachers will tell you that students are not writing enough. Anecdotally we know that information consumption (coupled with information overload) compounds the problem. Research supports this. Forty percent of college students who took the ACT writing test, lacked college ready skills.

As a computer and tech teacher, I am pleasantly surprised when students ask for scratch paper before they login. It’s not ‘old school’ to jot down ideas; to organize information before it gets into a brochure or PowerPoint. One of my lessons for 5th grade at the end of the school year involves teaching them how to write a radio script, and record it! A script, of course, isn’t like an essay. It gives a student an opportunity to adopt tone of voice that comes naturally. To speak from the heart. To talk about odd, personal, funny things that connect with the listener. Like a letter, I suppose. “Who writes those?” You ask! You’d be surprised how many Thank You letters are queued up to print next week. That’s my evidence, and I’m sticking to it! 

On that note, here’s some inspiring  student writing. One of the college application essays featured in the New York Times last week. Eric Muthondu, who’s entering Harvard, talks about his Kenyan grandmother.

“When I return, the chapatis are neatly stacked on one another, golden-brown disks of sweet bread that are the completion of every Kenyan meal.”

Or this piece of writing by Jeffrey C. Yu, a second generation Chinese American.

“Not all sons of doctors raise baby ducks and chickens in their kitchen. But I do. My dad taught me.”

These essays are worth a read, if only to recognize that good student writing exists –in certain places one has to dig to find. Here’s another place: Write The World. A global community for student writers I have been in touch with, and have covered in a previous post. By some coincidence, this month, Write The World has a Food Writing contest for students. First prize for a 6,000-10,000-word essay is $100.

More chapatis and chicken, please!