Welcome!

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My name is Shyam Sharma, and this is my blogfolio.

Linked on top are pages about my work, and on right are links to some of my professional networks. Blog posts are below, starting with some of my favorite posts. I write about international education and students, new media in writing studies, cross-cultural rhetoric and communication, and critical pedagogy (which can be filtered by theme from the right). I will appreciate any comments/feedback on blog posts.

Thank you.

Shyam Sharma
Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director
Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stony Brook University (State University of New York)
New York, USA, 11794

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Using AI: Credit, Content, Credibility [Republica Repost]

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AI is blurring boundaries of all kinds, so we all need a communicative philosophy to help us set boundaries for content, credit, and credibility when using AI tools. Learning with and from AI is flawed because their content is inaccurate or incomplete due to their extremely narrow datasets. It is also problematic because AI’s algorithms (or thought patterns) are limited to certain discourse traditions and practices. AI content can be unreliable because the tools are mostly designed to “generate” plausible patterns rather than locate and synthesize information (so hallucination is a feature not a bug).

Published in The Republica on May 16, 2024

An image depicting the tension between human judgment and AI-generated content. The scene shows a college professor at a desk with books and papers on one side and a futuristic AI interface on the other, both generating text. The professor is carefully reviewing a paper, symbolizing critical judgment, while a student is standing in front of the desk, holding a paper with a confused expression. Behind the professor, a digital scale balances between the AI interface and the professor's books, representing the balance between AI assistance and human evaluation. The background subtly hints at an academic setting with elements like a chalkboard with complex equations and diagrams, further emphasizing the theme of learning and intellectual growth. The lighting highlights the professor's thoughtful expression and the paper in hand, underscoring the importance of critical thinking and transparency in education.

Faced with machines that seem to (and often actually) match our linguistic abilities, students, professionals, and the general public alike are struggling to maintain boundaries for effective learning, professional relationship, and honest communication. The usefulness of any AI tool is at the intersection between its ability to generate content and our ability to judge that content knowledgeably and skillfully. If a tool generates more than we can judge, we cross the zone of safety and enter the zone of dangers, which risks undermining the value of the content, making the credit we seek undeserved, and threatening our credibility and human relationship.

 AI and credit

Let us begin with learning. Imagine that you were a college professor before the internet, and you learned that one of your students submitted to you a research paper that he had asked his cousin to write. Imagine that he actively guided his cousin to meet your expectations for the top grade. Most likely you would not have given that student the top grade. Now imagine that you are a college professor today, and you just learned that a student has submitted a paper he prompted an AI tool (such as ChatGPT) to write. Imagine that he skillfully used ChatGPT to produce the paper, and the final product meets your expectations for the top grade, while he learned little from the process. Would you give the student the top grade? Continue reading

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We’re Hallucinating, Not AI [Republica Repost]

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When lawyers lie, doctors kill, or teachers fool and then deflect responsibility to a machine, we must see these problems as the visible tip of humanity’s collective hallucination. 

Published in The Republica on March 17, 2024

We’re Hallucinating, Not AI Cohen, a former lawyer of a former US president was recently caught submitting AI-generated (meaning, fake) legal cases to court. He was appealing to shorten a probation for lying to Congress earlier. But Cohen is not a rare case. Artificial intelligence tools are convincing millions of educated people in highly sensitive professions and across the world, and not just everyday people using them for mundane purposes. Doctors are embracing AI-generated assessments and solutions, and engineers even more.

Most people know that AI tools are designed to generate plausible sentences and paragraphs, rather than just locate or synthesize real information. The “G” in ChatGPT means “generative,” or making up. But AI tools like this are so powerful in processing information in their datasets that they can produce stunningly credible-looking responses that range from the most reliable to the most absurd (called “hallucination”) on a wide range of topics. And they cannot distinguish between the absurd and the reliable: human users have to do that. The problem is that because people are increasingly trusting AI tools without using their own judgment, humanity is becoming the party that is collectively hallucinating, more than AI. Factors like speed, convenience, gullibility, and a seeming desire to worship the mystic appearance of a non-human writer/speaker are all leading humans to ignore warnings that even AI developers themselves are placing everywhere from their log in screens to about pages.

Deflecting responsibility 

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Educating Beyond the Bots [Republica Repost]

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The current discourse about artificial intelligence not only reflects a narrow view of education. It also represents romanticization of, or alarmism about, new technologies, while insulting students as dishonest by default. 

Published in The Republica on February 12, 2024

Educating Beyond the BotsIt has saved me 50 hours on a coding project,” whispered one of my students to me in class recently. He was using the artificial intelligence tool named ChatGPT for a web project. His classmates were writing feedback on his reading response for the day, testing a rubric they had collectively generated for how to effectively summarize and respond to an academic text.

The class also observed ChatGPT’s version of the rubric and agreed that there is some value in “giving it a look in the learning process.” But they had decided that their own brain muscles must be developed by grappling with the process of reading and summarizing, synthesizing and analyzing, and learning to take intellectual positions, often across an emotionally felt experience. Our brain muscles couldn’t be developed, the class concluded, by simply looking at content gathered by a bot from the internet, however good that was. When the class finished writing, they shared their often brutal assessment of the volunteer writer’s response to the reading. The class learned by practicing, not asking for an answer.

Beyond the classroom, however, the discourse about artificial intelligence tools “doing writing” has not yet become as nuanced as among my college students. “The college essay is dead,” declared Stephen Marche of the Atlantic recently. This argument is based on a serious but common misunderstanding of a means of education as an end. The essay embodies a complex process and experience that teach many useful skills. It is not a simple product.

But that misunderstanding is just the tip of an iceberg. The current discourse about artificial intelligence not only reflects a shrunken view of education. It also represents a constant romanticization of, or alarmism about, new technologies influencing education. And most saddening for educators like me, it shows a disregard toward students as dishonest by default.

Broaden the view of education Continue reading

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Making Learning Happen: Book Post

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I am delighted to share with you a new book, with thanks to STAR Scholars Network whose publication wing is making works of public scholarship like this accessible to teachers and scholars around the world.
Titled “Making Learning Happen: Five Shifts Toward Student-Focused Education,” this book evolved from a brief training guide for teachers at my alma mater in Nepal, capturing what a network of professors were practicing in 2016-18, to what is now an expanded, transdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and up-to-date form. I am grateful to my colleague Surendra Subedi who helped to draft that early version, as well as early leaders of TU Grassroots Community, for their contribution to it.
This work captures the collaborations of communities of teachers in Nepal and South Asia and around the world, inspiration of thousands of students in the past 29 years, extensive research and reading in the past few, and experiences as a faculty trainer and curriculum developer/reviewer. I am grateful to teachers in Nepal, India, and the United States whose good teaching strategies I have emulated as a teacher, to colleagues in a very teaching-rich discipline (Writing Studies), and to the many scholars whose teaching ideas I have adopted as a teacher.
नेपालमा खास गरी त्रिभुवन विश्वविद्यालयका शिक्षक साथीहरुको सहकार्य र प्रेरणा प्रति म आभारी छु । हामीले नेपालमा गरेको काम विश्व भर साझा गर्न आवश्यक छ भन्ने लागेर यो पुस्तकलाई २-३ गुणा चौडा, प्रशिक्षण नभएर शिक्षण-केन्द्रित, नेपाल मात्र नभएर विश्व दक्षीणका अरु सन्दर्भहरुमा पनि लागू हुने गरी, विविध विधाहरुलाई र कोभिड महामारी पछिको माहोलमा प्रविधिको प्रयोगलाई समेटेर, अनि सबै परिच्छेदहरुलाई व्यवहारिक शिक्षा र न्यायिक समाजको अवधारणा अनुसार अद्यावधिक गरेको छु ।
Please download a copy for yourself and share it with your network. STAR Scholars Network has kindly made the digital copy free for a while. Hard copy is available for order via Amazon (where it delivers). For colleagues in Nepal, Sunlight Publication, Kathmandu is reprinting it in collaboration with SSN (hopefully within a month) – please wait before you print the .pdf until that low-cost copy arrives.
I am planning to facilitate a few virtual workshops to promote the book. Please let me know if you’d like to organize one. I also have plans to visit a few universities, here in the US and abroad. Please let me know if you’re interested (I have the funds to travel). The e-book is free and I intend to not receive royalty from print. I passionately believe in the need to promote teaching practices that go far beyond lectures and exams, an education that prepares students for successful lives and careers (and not just get degrees and then start learning skills or figure out what to do with their education).
Please share/repost, download, forward, and help to promote. Please remember to skim through and pick what you like best and include that in your post.
THANK YOU!
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Expertise Cycle — Rethinking Faculty Training [Republica Repost]

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Published in the Republica on July 26, 2023 08:30 

To truly improve teaching, it is time to take the expert out of training, center professional development back in the classroom, and unleash the power of the practitioner-as-expert–letting such a cycle of expertise replace traditional teacher training.

A lot more teacher training is taking place in Nepal today than, say, ten years ago. In schools and universities, training programs range from informal one-hour sessions run by teachers to formal multi-day ones organized by institutions. They also range from free and virtual gatherings to lavish retreats at fancy places. Unfortunately, this great development remains characterized mostly by lecture–with hands-on practice being an exception.

There is a reason why teacher training remains entrenched in the old habit of delivering lectures. Both trainers and trainees continue to believe that an expert is needed to “deliver” content, that the key objective of training is to increase knowledge, rather than for trainees to learn by doing, sharing, and experiencing.

In reality, there is little to no practical value of content in training. We might as well train farmers how to improve crop yields by taking them to fancy hotels in the city and give them lectures on how to do it. Even simulated activities and discussions are inadequate. Imagine an agricultural expert taking a group of farmers to a sandbank to show them how to use modern farm equipment. Such an expert can teach how to use the tools, but he won’t really show how to grow a crop.

We need a radical shift in how training is done. Training should not only involve participants in doing things and sharing experience, solving problems and creating materials–not lectures or even discussions. It should also happen right in their classroom, as I will describe. A little bit of content may be needed to set up the context, clarify instructions, or during follow up discussion. But if content takes more than a quarter of a program’s time, it is no longer training.

Skipping the expert

One easy and effective way to make training more like training is to get rid of the expert and use a facilitator instead. The less the facilitator has to say the better. The more she makes time and creates opportunities for participants the better. In fact, when the facilitator tells participants that she is not an expert, and that the participants are the experts–in that they are the ones teaching–the training becomes far more effective. In fact, training becomes even more effective when one of the participating practitioners serves as facilitator. All that the facilitator needs is skills for managing the process and fostering collaboration. In exchange for losing the quantity and depth/breadth of knowledge when losing the external expert, such training can gain far deeper grounding in practice and far deeper commitment and accountability among participants. This shift to expertless training does require courage.

Continue reading

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Educating Beyond the Bots [Republica Repost]

  By , ,

Published in Republica on February 12, 2023

The current discourse about artificial intelligence not only reflects a narrow view of education. It also represents romanticization of, or alarmism about, new technologies, while insulting students as dishonest by default. 

“It has saved me 50 hours on a coding project,” whispered one of my students to me in class recently. He was using the artificial intelligence tool named ChatGPT for a web project. His classmates were writing feedback on his reading response for the day, testing a rubric they had collectively generated for how to effectively summarize and respond to an academic text.

The class also observed ChatGPT’s version of the rubric and agreed that there is some value in “giving it a look in the learning process.” But they had decided that their own brain muscles must be developed by grappling with the process of reading and summarizing, synthesizing and analyzing, and learning to take intellectual positions, often across an emotionally felt experience. Our brain muscles couldn’t be developed, the class concluded, by simply looking at content gathered by a bot from the internet, however good that was. When the class finished writing, they shared their often brutal assessment of the volunteer writer’s response to the reading. The class learned by practicing, not asking for an answer.

Beyond the classroom, however, the discourse about artificial intelligence tools “doing writing” has not yet become as nuanced as among my college students. “The college essay is dead,” declared Stephen Marche of the Atlantic recently. This argument is based on a serious but common misunderstanding of a means of education as an end. The essay embodies a complex process and experience that teach many useful skills. It is not a simple product.

But that misunderstanding is just the tip of an iceberg. The current discourse about artificial intelligence not only reflects a shrunken view of education. It also represents a constant romanticization of, or alarmism about, new technologies influencing education. And most saddening for educators like me, it shows a disregard toward students as dishonest by default.

Broaden the view of education

If we focus on writing as a process and vehicle for learning, it is fine to kill the essay as a mere product. It is great if bot-generated texts serve certain purposes. Past generations used templates for letters and memos, not to mention forms to fill. New generations will adapt to more content they didn’t write.

What bots should not replace is the need for us to grow and use our own minds and conscience, to judge when we can or should use a bot and how and why. Teachers must teach students how to use language based on contextual, nuanced, and sensitive understanding of the world. Students must learn to think for themselves, with and without using bots.

Continue reading

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Transcending Monolingual Worldviews: Magnifying the Impact of Knowledge in Academe and Society

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This is a post to simply share a public talk I gave at Cornell University in March 2022, titled “Transcending Monolingual Worldviews: Magnifying the Impact of Knowledge in Academe and Society.”

BLURB: All societies, and especially diverse ones like the US, are multilingual; translingual
communication mediates life and professions and makes knowledge grow and work. Yet, myths
about language set up barriers, inhibiting free exchange and application of knowledge. These
myths include the ideas that knowledge must only be produced, can only be exchanged, and is
applied best through dominant languages—damaging assumptions that adversely affect many
domains, but particularly knowledge work by academics across the disciplines. Harm caused by
this suppression of languages has been long documented in the literature in language, writing,
and communication studies. Drawing on the research and his own efforts to counter language
ideologies, Dr. Shyam Sharma will present a framework and share practical strategies, showing
how transcending monolingual worldviews (and mobilizing all languages) helps academe and its
scholars to magnify the impact of the knowledge they produce, both transnationally and within
US academe and society.

Incidentally, I also facilitated a workshop for graduate students at Cornell, titled “Working Across Languages and Genres: Strategies for Magnifying the Impact of
Scholarship”
BLURB: Even in culturally and linguistically diverse societies, myths and ideologies narrow down the
number of languages and genres of knowledge sharing often to just one. But, as society and
technology both advance, beyond the journal article, and beyond English-only venues lie a vast
world of knowledge that circulates in many languages and many genres. Graduate students,
whatever number of languages they speak, have access to that vast network, which needs and
rewards their knowledge, offering them the opportunity to grow while giving back to
society/world. How can you harness the power of all your languages? How can you overcome
the barriers of perceptions and policies? A scholar who researches and teaches research and
writing across disciplines and countries, Dr. Shyam Sharma will engage graduate students in
hands-on activities and share practical strategies, helping graduate students explore how they
can harness the full power of different languages, genres, and mediums of communication. This
workshop will help them develop diverse ways to multiply the impact of the scholarship they
produce.

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TU is Well [Republica Repost]

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Published in Republica on February 11, 2022.

Nepalese academia, including Tribhuvan University, has challenges, but we must tell the full story, including what it is doing well.  

I paused, somewhat sad, while skimming through responses submitted to the weekly reading assignment in a professional development workshop series last December. I was supporting the organizers, an informal network of Tribhuvan University scholars from across the country, as a resource person. One participant, who indicated was a senior scholar, had written that they “of course” didn’t need to “read about this issue … any more.” For the final workshop on “new opportunities for scholars’ professional development,” the task was to read some material provided and do some further research on how to prepare effective applications for scholarship/funding. The prompt said that everyone should share what they learned “whether it is for yourself or for supporting your students.…” This senior scholar’s refusal to read, it seemed, was due to “status issue.”

“Our son has finished reading” (padhisakyo), say our proud parents, meaning that he has completed a degree. “Reading” does refer to “studying” and “finishing” terminal degrees. But the reality that many scholars “stop reading” much once they enter academic careers makes the semi-metaphorical expression look very ugly. Discontinuing to read in a profession defined by lifelong learning is a real shame. Sounding like last year is not what a real scholar should do. This unfortunate condition is partly due to a misguided notion of status but it is also caused by current policy: while scholarship is required for promotion, serious study and production can be bypassed by using various shenanigans. The situation is improving but publication quality can still be skipped, especially by those who are politically active.

However, the reason I write this piece is to show that the above is only one part of the story about Nepal’s academe, including about Tribhuvan University. The rest of the narrative must also be advanced. Let us do that.

Flipping negative narratives Continue reading