Professor Laurie Miller

04/15/2025

I was more than delighted to help Paola and her classmates. Working with international students like her who are motivated and dedicated to learning always makes me thankful that my job is focused on developing people's potential.

The bonus is being able to watch them soar into successful careers and lives.

Meet Paola from Colombia 🇨🇴 From finding her dream job to building lifelong friendships, Paola’s journey at Mason has been nothing short of inspiring. Through the pathway program, she transitioned smoothly into her master’s program, landed a full-time offer from Allan Myers Inc....

04/05/2025

is life changing.

Northwestern University engineers have developed a pacemaker so tiny that it can fit inside the tip of a syringe — and be non-invasively injected into the body. Smaller than a single grain of rice, the pacemaker is paired with a small, soft, flexible, wireless, wearable device that mounts onto a p...

03/27/2025

All the buzz surrounding generative AI pushes people to decide if and how they will use it in their work and personal lives. Here's a response from Lester Mapp at ZDNET that I agree with. AI

Here's what's quietly reshaping the job market, and it's happening faster than you think.

03/23/2025

Given the fact that AI literacy is #1 on this top ten list but that, in my estimation, at least seven others require human interaction, I'd say we human teachers don't need to panic about being replaced by AI, but it also signals that we need to learn how to work with AI as it evolves so that we can help our student use it ethically and effectively.

(After all, our students use it, with or without our consent -- see https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7307779912050819072/)

03/18/2025

My current curiosity project asks the question "How can writing instruction help students use AI writing tools ethically and effectively while developing critical thinking skills?"

Being at a university like Mason that is already working to integrate AI in instruction will add some local, contextualized hands-on models from other disciplines as I go about looking for answers to my question.

As the largest and most diverse university in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., George Mason University is leading the future o inclusive AI across the commonwealth and developing responsible models for AI research, education, workforce development, and community engagement within a modern un...

02/22/2025

Good advice for fact-checking

Nowadays, everyone needs to learn how to do their own fact-checking and content moderation. Just because something is repeated thousands of times does not mean it is true.

02/22/2025

While I agree that our new tech will return us to a "pre-literate" state (which Plato would approve of -- see Kate Disten's "To write, or not to write? (Or: what Plato didn't know)" on the Psychology Today website) and am more welcoming of this than perhaps other writing faculty, I know that as we forge into this new media we also must be vigilant about where ideas and content originate from (and are used by AI systems), especially in regard to bias and purpose. In other words, we must insure we THINK about the origins and intentions of what we consume and not simply react to it.

Technology is changing our world — and how we communicate — at an astonishing rate. So much so that entrepreneur Victor Riparbelli predicts that artificial intelligence will drive audio and video to replace text as our primary form of communication by the end of this decade. He imagines a world ...

02/13/2025

While I am not writing a book anytime soon and you may not be either, the tools presented in this article are of interest to anyone writing in our current digital era.

If you're a budding writer, an advanced author, or somewhere in between, you know that the right tools can help you stay organized and on track to complete that article, memoir, or manuscript.

02/11/2025

Good information about bird flu as it expands its reach across the US. Glad my institution is helping provide evidence-based information.

Infectious disease expert Amria Roess answers pressing questions about avian influenza cases reported across the U.S., in light of the first reported human death in Louisiana

02/06/2025

Revisiting philosopher's ideas you read in the past is always a good idea as their ideas can strike you anew in your new reality. Here's a good read about Hannah Arendt's ideas in the context of our current times. Be sure to read through to the end, but here's a significant few sentences from the middle of Professor Stonebridge's article: "Loneliness was a symptom of totalitarian regimes, she said, and with it came incapacity to think for oneself. Loneliness gripped people, fear gripped people. So thoughtlessness, she said, was part of a totalitarian regime."

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the most influential political theorists and philosophers of the 20th Century. Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA explores three of Arendt's key concepts – totalitarianism, statelessness and the banality of evil – to explain the importance of her thinking for ...

02/02/2025

Ever since the question "Can you have a thought without language?" was posed to me in a 100 level philosophy class during my sophomore year at Cal Poly, I've been a bit obsessed with the connection between the thought and language. If you share this interest/obsession, here's a good article to read: https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4857/ (Image generated with Freepik.com AI.)

10/18/2024

I have been asked by many colleagues about my dissertation, and it's hard for me to sum it up quickly.

Imagine my happiness when I learned about NotebookLM, a free web-based AI service (from Google, so it uses Gemini -- https://notebooklm.google/) that helps you draw insights from documents (and links & recordings) that you upload. The insights it draws come ONLY from these sources.

One of the coolest tools it offers is the creation of a customized audio summary, in the form a podcast between two interlocutors, that sound pretty dang human. So for those who would like to listen to a short podcast that introduces the concepts in my dissertation, here you go:

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b0d75909-77bd-4b19-9728-f8a3f03b7ec2/audio

10/17/2024

Did you know that humans process speech and song differently? Did you know that singing is a universal human trait? Curious to know why humans across cultures sing? Read or listen to this podcast -- but if you listen you will get some special musical treats.https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/does-singing-have-an-evolutionary-purpose/

08/28/2024

I totally agree with the need to integrate A.I. generative chat bots (LLMs) into writing instruction. As a student I lived through the math pedagogy revolution and its embracing of calculators and PCs, so as an instructor, I can live through this next revolution in composition pedagogy.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/ai-and-the-case-for-project-based-teaching

08/12/2024

Sketchplanations offers good advice for using for visual design. Humans have always been focused on visual cues, and in our current "fast media" era, it is important to design course materials that lean on visual cues for conveying meaning quickly. https://sketchplanations.com/gestalt-principles

07/26/2024

Deep thinking takes effort ... and that is okay. I know I experienced the pain of this recently.

I spent two weeks thinking, and reading, and thinking, and reading, and thinking about a topic I thought I understood. In the end, my explanation pretty much matched the investigated one I first wrote, but now I know I know it. Sometimes this process makes "putting in the work" does not matter, but it does because now I can not only paddle on the surface of my knowledge, but I can also explain to others what in down in the depths and why and why not they would want to take a deep dive into it or not.
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/a-respect-for-intellectual-messiness

07/24/2024

A short article that helps explain why the term "professional" can have racist undertones. Another voice for the importance of teaching college writing using a linguistic justice stance. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards #

07/18/2024

Random cartoon that made me chuckle. It's good to get in at least a few chuckles every day. https://www.gocomics.com/theargylesweater/2019/01/11