I started my freshman year at Georgia Tech on August 15th, 2005—which itself was the 6,772nd day of my life.
As of today—February 29th, 2024—that day was also 6,772 days ago. I never really left Georgia Tech after I started—I began teaching my own classes a week after finishing my PhD, and even while I worked at Udacity 100% of my time was spent on the OMSCS program. So, that means that as of today, I’ve spent half of my life at Georgia Tech.
This seems like the perfect occasion for a completely unnecessary graphic:
Still to date, a little over half that time has been as a student: 3,546 days across three degrees, 3,226 as a teacher and researcher since then.
I’ve known this day was coming for quite a while, actually. I calculated it and put it on my calendar over two years ago. During that time, I knew I wanted to say something to mark the occasion. I thought about writing about why I stuck around, but the truth is that it has never really occurred to me to even consider leaving. Every stage has led smoothly into the next:
I came to Georgia Tech because I wanted to stay in-state and study computer science (…and because my girlfriend at the time was already here, let’s be honest).
I stuck around for a Master’s because I accidentally graduated earlier than I intended and didn’t have anything else lined up yet.
I stayed for a PhD because I learned late in my Master’s about these new efforts to create intelligent tutoring systems, and—as a private tutor on the side myself—I was instantly really interested in the idea.
I stayed after my PhD because developing a course with my PhD adviser sounded like a fun thing to do for a year.
I stayed after that because I discovered that I love online teaching: it has been everything I love about teaching—plus a lot of what I love about coding—without the stuff I never liked, like having to be compelling in front of a live audience.
And I’m still here because—at the risk of being overly quixotic—I really enjoy what I get to do. There’s a Japanese concept called ikigai that has been summarized by some nice infographics, and it’s rare to find something that sits at the intersection of all four areas—but for me, this does. I enjoy what I get to do, I believe the things we’re working on improving the world, I (obviously) have made a living at it, and I think I’m halfway decent at it. Parts of it, anyway.
I thought about writing all the people I would want to thank for helping me get here, but this would be a far longer post and I’m sure I’d still forget several people and be mortified when I realized. So instead I’ll just say: it’s been a fantastic 6,772 days, and I’m excited to see what the next 6,772 hold.
As I’ve done the last three years (2020, 2021, 2022), I’m ending the year by creating a list of my top ten (well, ten-ish) books that I read the past year. Release dates are all over the place, so rather than try to narrow down the books that I enjoyed that were released in 2023, I figure it’s easier and more interesting to just look at the books that I read during that year.
As always, I generally don’t review the books I read because I tend to think that when I don’t care for a book, it’s more a reflection on my tastes than the book’s quality, but listing my favorites from the year has always struck me as a good compromise.
So, my Top 10(ish) books of 2023, in no particular order, along with a handful of honorable mentions (photo shows the top “ten” themselves):
Opium and Absinthe by Lydia Kang—or The Impossible Girl by Lydia Kang, either would have been one of my choices for the same reasons. I first became acquainted with Lydia Kang when I read her Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything last year, and I just assumed it must be a different person with the same name until GoodReads showed both under her profile. I figured she was just branching out, but what I found compelling was the extent to which her medical career/writing pierced her novels as well. The level of medical detail in both books really set them apart from other similar-era mysteries.
Providence by Max Barry. I enjoyed this one so much I wrote a dedicated post about it. In a nutshell, it touches on a variety of elements that are usually left out of science fiction. I described it as Becky Chambers meets Orson Scott Card, and I think that’s still accurate: like Card, it’s a more tactical science fiction book than many I’ve read, but like Chambers, it’s deeply focused on the human elements.
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (but really, The Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages, too). So much has been written in praise of Sanderson already that it’s trite to try to add anything, except that I’ll say this: based on how much praise I’ve heard for Mistborn over the years, I entered listening to this series with super-high expectations, and it still exceeded them. (And while I’m idolizing Sanderson—my daughter and I listened to Skyward this year together, and it’s just as phenomenal.)
The Management Style of Supreme Beings by Tom Holt. You could tell me that Terry Pratchett was still alive and had just switched to a pseudonym and I would absolutely believe you. It had that exact same brand of humor, but channeled into a more familiar world.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (and, to a large extent, Artemis by Andy Weir as well). Like Sanderson, Weir is so popular that it seems silly to add my two cents, except to again note that the book exceeded the high expectations I came into it with. I probably nose Project Hail Mary above Artemis based on Ray Porter’s fantastic narration—it pulled in some mental connections to Bobiverse books that were remarkably compatible. For both books, though, I love how Weir initiates some believable technological rules, and then painstakingly follows them to their logical conclusion. I felt like the entirety of Project Hail Mary was set up in the first few pages in a way that it couldn’t have proceeded any differently save for some believable late twists.
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. This was recommended in Games for Your Mind by Jason Rosenhouse, and appropriately so—it’s a mystery built entirely around logical deduction rather than the absurd coincidences and personalities common in others of the genre. It was particularly fascinating to me how the book managed to show things from both sides’ perspectives, but yet still provide a twist at the end.
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. This book was so short that I finished it in a day, but I’ve kept coming back to remind myself of some of the lessons. They’re remarkably well-explained, they hit the perfect balance between surprising and yet obvious, and so many of them are pretty directly relevant to everyday life.
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry. I read this immediately after Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark which was so out there it may as well have been science fiction, and I found it to be a perfect companion, both more down to earth and more immediately relevant. What’s fascinating especially is that it was written in 2018, and yet the release of ChatGPT only made it more relevant and current, not obsolete.
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. This, along with Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson, have significantly changed—though somehow also reinforced—my views on grammar, writing, and language in the past year. I used to consider grammar and writing a highly structured, rule-driven process, but these books shed light on how arbitrary the rules truly are, and how acceptable it should be to let them evolve. I feel like grammar is sort of like a political map of Europe: it was radically changing for centuries, and then at some point we said “Freeze!” and took the current state as permanent. When that’s about ending wars (as in Europe), that’s great—when that’s about stifling necessary evolution and creativity (as in language), it isn’t. (Sidenote: this is also one of the best read-by-the-author non-autobiographical audiobook I think I’ve listened to.)
And a couple honorable mentions:
Mind Bullet by Jeremy Robinson. Jeremy Robinson remains one of my favorite authors, and Mind Bullet was my favorite by him this year (I also read the entire Project Nemesis series, as well as Torment, Exo-Hunter, and Tribe)—but it’s gotten a little hard to separate his books enough to put one of them in my top of the year. It’s sort of like including all three Mistborn books, except they’re all so similar in style that either they all deserve to be there or none do… but it’s a consistently entertaining style. Whenever I finish a book I didn’t enjoy, I follow-up with a Jeremy Robinson because I know it’ll at least be engaging.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I loved this one, although this is one where its popularity in many ways has taken on a life of its own, and it’s hard to endorse the book without implicitly endorsing some of the decisions that some people have made citing Sapiens as support. But taken solely for its content, I found it as remarkable as many have noted, especially its emphasis on belief in shared fictions and belief in a better future as huge driving factors to the constructs on which modern society is based.
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke. The fact that a book could even be written this way (as an entire series of Slack conversations) is an achievement of its own, and the fact that it was able to touch on some deeper questions through that medium is even more remarkable.
What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet. I honestly had difficulty comparing this to the other books I read this year because most of my reading is primarily for pleasure: this one was so relevant to my job and the classes I teach that it felt more like reading for work. It’s not only a fantastic book about designing with equality in mind, but it’s a great book on design in general.
Impromptu by Reid Hoffman. I’ve been an optimist about the positive impact AI can have on society, and this book—with its issues—was an early nice effort to call out some specific benefits we should focus on developing with these new AI tools.
Of those 119 books, 88 were audiobooks, 23 were physical books, and 8 were on Kindle. It’s interesting to see that shift: it used to be closer to 1/3rd audiobooks, 2/3rds physical, but the kids growing up has eaten into some times when I used to read a lot—and morning carpool has added around an hour to daily audiobook listening time now that Lucy and I listen to books together.
A few months ago, I tweeted about the AI collaboration policy I added to my course syllabi essentially at the last minute before the summer semester began.
I'm "finally" adding an official policy on collaboration with #ChatGPT (and AI assistants in general) to my course syllabi, and the fact that this is now needed is definitely my "we're living in the future" moment.
For those curious, this is my tentative policy language: <🧵>
— David A. Joyner @davidjoyner@fediscience.org (@DrDavidJoyner) May 14, 2023
I feel like it’s a little trite nowadays to say something “went viral”, but I do know that I woke up the next morning to a ton of notifications and replies. Over the next few months, I had a numberof differentmedia requestscome up that could be traced directly back to that thread. And frequently in those, I was asked if there was a place where my policies could be found, and… there really wasn’t. I mean, my syllabi are public, but that just shows the policy in isolation, not the rationale behind it. Plus, my classes actually have slightly different policies, so looking at one in isolation only shows a partial view of the overall idea.
In most of my classes, there are a number of specific skills and pieces of knowledge I want students to come away with. AI has the potential to be an enormous asset in these. I love the observation that a student could be writing some code at 11PM at night and get stuck, and instead of posting a question on a forum and waiting to get a response the next day they could work on it with some AI assistance immediately. But at the same time, these agents can often be too powerful: it’s entirely plausible for a student to instead put a problem into ChatGPT or Copilot or any number of other tools and get an answer that fulfills the assignment while having no understanding of their own. And that’s ultimately the issue: when does the AI assist the student, and when does the AI replace the student?
To try to address this, I came up with a two-fold policy. The first—the formal, binding, enforceable part of the policy—was:
However, all work you submit must be your own. You should never include in your assignment anything that was not written directly by you without proper citation (including quotation marks and in-line citation for direct quotes).
— David A. Joyner @davidjoyner@fediscience.org (@DrDavidJoyner) May 14, 2023
My “We’re living in the future moment” came from the fact that this is exactly the same policy I’ve always had for collaboration with classmates and friends. You can talk about your assignment and your ideas all you want, but the content of the deliverable should always come from you and you alone. That applies to human collaboration, and that applies to AI collaboration as well.
With human collaboration, though, I find that that line is pretty implicitly enforced. There are some clear boundaries. It’s weird to give a classmate edit access to your document. It’d be strange to hand a friend your laptop at a coffeeshop and ask them to write a paragraph on your essay. There are gray areas, sure, but the line between collaboration and misconduct is thinner. That’s not to say that students don’t cheat, but rather that when they do, they probably know it.
Collaboration with AI tends to feel a bit different. I think it’s partially because it’s still a tool, meaning that it feels like anything we create with the AI is fundamentally ours—we don’t regard a math problem that we solve or a chair that we build as any less “our” work because we used a calculator or a hammer, though we’d consider it more shared if we instead asked a friend to perform the calculations or pound in a few nails. And this is the argument I hear from people who think we should allow more collaboration with AI: it’s still just a tool, and we should be testing how well people know how to use it.
But what’s key is that in an educational context, the goal is not the product itself, but rather what producing the product says about the learner’s understanding. That’s why it’s okay to buy a cake from a grocery store to bring to a party, but it’s not okay to turn in that same cake for a project in a culinary class. In education, the product is about what it says about the learner. If a student is using AI, we still want to make sure that the product is reflecting something about the learner’s understanding.
And for that reason, I augmented my policy with two additional heuristics:
Heuristic 1: Never hit "Copy" within your conversation with an AI assistant. You can copy your own work into your conversation, but do not copy anything from the conversation back into your assignment.
— David A. Joyner @davidjoyner@fediscience.org (@DrDavidJoyner) May 14, 2023
Heuristic 2: Do not have your assignment and the AI agent open at the same time. Similar to above, use your conversation with the AI as a learning experience, then close the interaction down, open your assignment, and let your assignment reflect your revised knowledge.
— David A. Joyner @davidjoyner@fediscience.org (@DrDavidJoyner) May 14, 2023
Truth be told, I really prefer just the second heuristic, but there are instances—especially in getting feedback from AI on one’s own work—where it’s overly restrictive.
Both heuristics have the same goal: ensure that the AI is contributing to the learner’s understanding, not directly to the assignment. That keeps the assignment as a reflection of the learner’s understanding rather than of their ability to use a tool to generate a product. The learner’s understanding may be enhanced or developed or improved by their collaboration with AI, but the assignment still reflects the understanding, not the collaboration.
There’s a corollary here to something I do in paper-writing. When writing papers with student co-authors, I often review their sections. I often come across simple things that I think should be changed—minor tips like grammatical errors, occasional misuse of personal pronouns in formal writing, etc. If a student is the primary author, it makes sense to give more major feedback as comments for the student to incorporate, but for more minor suggestions it would often be easier to make them directly than to explain them—but I usually leave them as comments anyway because that pivots the process into a learning/apprenticeship model. By that same token, sure, there are things generative AI can do that make sense to incorporate directly—that’s part of why there’s been such a rush to incorporate them directly into word processors and email clients and other tools. But reviewing and implementing the correction oneself helps develop an understanding of the rationale behind the correction. It’s indicative of a slightly improved understanding—or at least, I suspect it is.
So, in some ways, my policy is actually more draconian than others. I actually don’t want students to simply click the magic AI grammar-fixing button and have it make suggested changes to their work directly (not least because I subscribe to the view that grammar should not be as restrictive and prescriptive as it currently is seen to be—see Semicolon by Cecelia Watson for more on what I mean there). I’m fine with them receiving those suggestions from such a tool, but the execution of those suggestions should remain with the student.
Of course, there are a couple wrinkles. First, one of my classes deliberately doesn’t have this policy. One of my classes is a heavily project-oriented class where students propose their own ~100-hour project to complete. The goal is to make an authentic contribution to the field—or, since that’s a hard task in only 100 hours, to at least practice the process by which one might make an authentic contribution to the field. Toward that end, if a tool can allow students to do more in that 100 hours than they could otherwise, so be it! The goal there is to understand how to justify a project proposal in the literature and connect the resulting project with that prior context: if AI allows that project to be more ambitious, all the better. The key is to understand what students are really expected to learn in a particular class, and the extent to which AI can support or undermine that learning.
And second and most importantly: we are right at the beginning of this revolution. Generative AI emerged faster than any comparably revolutionary tool before it. Educators ultimately learned to adjust to prior technological innovations: when students received scientific calculators, we assigned more and tougher problems; when students started writing in word processors rather than with pen and paper, we expected more revisions and more polished results; when students got access to search engines instead of library card catalogs, we expected more sources and better-researched papers. Generative AI has arrived with unprecedented speed, but the fundamental question remains: now that students have a new, powerful tool, how will we alter and raise our expectations for what they can achieve?
And finishing catching up with porting my top 10 book-I-read-this-year lists to my blog by posting this from 2022:
As I’ve done the past couple years, I’m making a list of my ten favorite books I read in 2022. No particular order. (Well, actually, the order is the order I read them.) They’re not books that came out this year, just books I read this year.
Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling. I’d love an update to this for the pandemic and new AI era, but it provides a far more useful way to look at the world and understand its development. One of the few books that actually gives some optimism for the future.
Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell. I’d heard about how things like oceans receding 60 million years ago informed modern voting patterns, but this book covered so much more, like how geology led to the evolution of intelligence itself.
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Or, really, the entire Grisha series, but this was the first I read. The characters are captivating, and every book has a remarkable ability to make you think it’s going one way before veering somewhere else while remaining believable.
Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. That rare book that defies any sort of genre boundaries. It’s like the autobiographical version of historical fiction: plenty of truth, but plenty of fantasy as well. It’s beautiful.
What Is Real? by Adam Becker. A fantastic look at the different macro interpretations of quantum mechanics. One of the more accessible quantum physics books I’ve read.
Zoey Punches the Future in the … by Jason Pargin/David Wong. I loved the humor, but I wasn’t expecting such an insightful look at a whole bunch of modern themes: social media, human augmentation, privatization, identity, and more. Plus, great characters.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. Words created to capture common feelings that are hard to describe without a word to label them. My favorites are galagog, star-stuck, harke, yu yi, grayshift, moledro, and foilsick.
In our original design for CS7637: Knowledge-Based AI, there were six homework assignments, but students only had to do three. Specifically, they had to do one from each of three pairs of assignments. Each pair was due a week apart. Doing the earlier assignment in each pair meant getting earlier feedback and more peer feedback (since most students do the later assignment); doing the later assignment meant having an extra week to work on the assignment, and getting to see some peers’ work before submitting one’s own.
To prepare our grading resources, we did a class poll on the course forum to ask students whether they planned to submit to the first assignment or the second one. About 80% said they planned to submit to the first assignment. We thought, “Huh, wow, online students really are more committed if they’re going to intentionally submit earlier than they need to!”
Then in practice, only about 30% of students actually submitted to the earlier deadline. 70% submitted to the late deadline.
Did students overestimate themselves? No; but students who are active on the course forum and who will respond to an optional poll are more likely to be more invested, and thus are also more likely to submit early. 80% of students who would respond to an optional forum poll did submit early; but 70% of students as a whole would submit late.
As time has gone on, this experience has been repeated over and over again in many ways. One common refrain I hear from students is, “I’m struggling so much. People on the forum are so far ahead of me, and I’m so far behind.” Typically the students saying this aren’t behind at all. Usually they’re ahead, actually, since the kinds of students who will even go to the trouble of self-assessing their progress are usually ahead of the average. But they’re comparing themselves to a very biased sample: the types of students who will engage on a forum are more invested than average.
What makes this different than in-person classes is visibility. Online, students only ever see classmates who do something to be seen. In-person, by comparison, students see everyone in one way or another. Students see classmates in the back of the room typing on their laptops instead of paying full attention. And more than that, students see empty seats. Students may know that a class is full, and if the class is full, they know every seat should be filled. They can look around and recognize that if the lecture hall is 75% empty, then 75% of the class didn’t attend. That helps them calibrate. They can think, “Sure, I’m probably not doing as well as that person in the front row asking questions I can’t even understand, but I’m doing better than the 75 people who never even come to class!”
Online, there are no empty seats. There is no back row where people are typing away, present only in case the instructor throws out some insider knowledge for a future test. The analogue to those front-row question-asking students are the only ones that students see, and so the comparisons they draw are severely skewed.
That’s part of why I think it’s so important to require things like peer review: it gives everyone more of a view of the typical distribution of the class rather than just the biased sample visible on the forum and in other places. It’s why I would like to share things like class averages, except I find those backfire: they may reassure some students that they’re not as far behind as they fear, but they also become the basis for other students to protest already-high grades because they insist on having the best grades even if there’s no practical difference.
More generally, it’s part of my push to feature more peripheral and semi-peripheral community in online classes. There’s some natural community that forms when you have peripheral indicators of some shared foundation, even if you never interact with other members of that community directly. Recreating it online is a challenge, but also can have a significant positive effect on students’ self-perceptions of their progress.
The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear. I received this as an advanced promotional copy, and I almost gave it away because I just didn’t think I’d ever go for such a long book about the topic. But then an audiobook came out and I decided to give that a try—and holy cow I’m glad I did. Phenomenally informative and fascinating in so many ways: it’s like all of computing history played out once already, and now we’re just repeating it.
Vicarious by Rhett C. Bruno. One of the most imaginative and original science fiction books I’ve read. It’s like The Truman Show meets Ready Player One meets probably a bunch of other books I’ve never read, but it’s fantastic. (And proof sometimes you can judge a book by its cover: I bought it in part because of its gorgeous cover design).
Infinite2 by Jeremy Robinson. The book that cemented Jeremy Robinson as one of my favorite authors—though if it wasn’t this book, it’d be another Jeremy Robinson book I read this year. I love his mix of action, humor, philosophy, and fourth-wall breakage.
Failure to Disrupt by Justin Reich. It’s easy to talk about the potential of technology. It’s far harder to dissect and investigate why certain technologies don’t catch on. Justin manages to do that not only for some technologies, but entire classes of technologies.
Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb. I’m not convinced of the thesis, granted—Loeb hypothesizes that Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, with the reason being the object is too much of an outlier to actually be an instance of a known object like a comet. I think he adequately supports the idea that it’s not of a class of objects we already know about, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he supports the hypothesis that it’s an extraterrestrial spacecraft—just that it’s definitely something new we don’t understand. But beyond any of that, it’s a fantastic book about how science is done, how different hypotheses are tested and reasoned through deliberately, etc. It’s fantastic not for its argument that Oumuamua was alien technology, but for its depiction of how science as a whole progresses and its subject to the same kinds of trends and internal political pressures as other endeavors.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Anything by Carlo Rovelli is what happens when a poet takes a wrong turn and ends up in physics, but continues to write about it with the eloquence of a poet.
Indexing & Indexing: Reflections by Seanan McGuire. I listened to these back-to-back so I can’t separate them easily, but these books were amazing: a premise simultaneously original and familiar, executed brilliantly. I wish this was made into a TV procedural; it’s the perfect candidate.
Minds Online by Michelle D. Miller. The best book I’ve read about teaching online, grounded in learning sciences and cognitive sciences. It’s always nice to read a book that gives you evidence supporting those things you suspected but hadn’t investigated or tested.
Master of Formalities by Scott Meyer. I love Meyer’s writing style and characters, and this was the best of the ones I’ve read. Luke Daniels is also the perfect narrator for his writing style.
There are also come books worth noting that I have trouble really comparing to others, so I’ll mention them here:
Whale Day by Billy Collins. It’s unfair to use a spot on anything by Billy Collins because there’s always going to be one. I read a lot of other poetry books this year, but his are by far my favorite.
Heaven’s River by Dennis Taylor. It’s hard to rank this separately from the rest of the Bobiverse, but I found this to be the most mature and nuanced of the books. This series deserves a spot among the historical best of science fiction.
Making Money and Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Similar to Heaven’s River, it’s hard to rank these individually compared to the Moist von Lipwig saga as a whole (and Discworld as a larger whole), but it’s my favorite Discworld subseries.
Blankets by Craig Thompson. I love graphic novels, but I find I always go through them quickly enough that they don’t leave as lasting an impact. I remember thoroughly enjoying this at the time, but it hasn’t left as durable impression, I think just because the amount of time it commanded. (I could say the same about On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden.)
An Atlas of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe. I learned later he took some liberties with history to make the writing funnier, which knocks it down a peg, but it succeeded at being hilarious and informative, if also a tad bit misinformative.
Mostly a place where I write down things I repeat often so that instead of repeating them so often, I can just send a link.
Disclosure: I use Amazon referral links in the some of my blog posts. That's mostly just a lightweight way to track and see if anyone's even clicking through. If you buy something through one of these links, I may get a bit of money back and achieve my dream of one day being able to buy the nicer set of kitchen scissors that Amazon sells instead of the bargain variety.
