This activity prompts students to go beyond the often reductionist responses to new technologies (e.g. technological determinism) by creating a media literacy-focused infographic about the role, uses, ethical concerns, and/or impact of generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT). Sample topics have included the role of AI in specific industries (e.g. film,…

This essay shows how one professor teaching "Introduction to Buddhism" sought to counteract his students' view that Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism represented a deviation from a "pure" Indian Buddhism rather than worthwhile forms of creativity and religiosity in themselves. A simple comparative assignment that asked a…

Generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can quickly produce informative essays on various topics. However, the information generated cannot be fully trusted, as artificial intelligence (AI) can make factual mistakes. This poses challenges for using such tools in college classrooms. To address this, an adaptable assignment called the…

The present article reports our reflections on how to teach an introductory course on poetry in an Indonesian tertiary educational institution where English is a foreign language. The reflections are made on the basis of our experiences of teaching the course, the main challenge of which centres on students' wronged perception of what poetry is;…

Learning computer programming is a challenging task for most beginners. Demotivation and learned helplessness are pretty common. A novel instructional technique that leverages the value-expectancy motivational model of student learning was conceptualized by the author to counter the lack of motivation in the introductory class. The result was a…

Machine translation (MT) provides a seemingly accelerated alternative way to communicate in the target language (L2). A convenient service to the public, MT renders a potential disservice to language learners. In this pedagogically focused article, we show concrete and detailed examples of how language instructors can turn MT and other electronic…

Within the landscape of educational data, textual natural language is an increasingly vast source of learning-centered interactions. In natural language dialogue, student contributions hold important information about knowledge and goals. Automatically modeling the dialogue act of these student utterances is crucial for scaling natural language…

This article presents the concept development, research programming, and learning design of a lexical processing web application, Virtual Vocabulary, which was developed using theories in both cognitive psychology and second language acquisition (SLA). It is being tested with first-year students of German at the University of Victoria in Canada,…

Two complementary theoretical approaches to children's foreign language acquisition, the monitor theory and theory of negotiation, are outlined. Three useful teaching techniques (meaningful practice, communication games, and children's playground games) are discussed in light of these theories, and related issues in syllabus and materials design…