High Tech Doublespeak (and Moral Failure)

August 7, 2025 by Brian Hughes

One of the benefits of a liberal arts education (LAE)—perhaps the greatest benefit—is that it protects us from ill-intentioned, manipulative, and evil people. That is, principally: your LAE protects you by helping you become a better critical and systematic thinker.

Image: Noor Siddiqui on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” NYTimes podcast.

Today’s inspiration for a reflection on the value of learning to think is Ross Douthat’s interview with CEO Noor Siddiqui. Her company, Orchid, provides “full” genetic testing of IVF embryos to parents—evidently the first to do so.

Throughout the conversation, Siddiqui comes off as a pleasant, mild-mannered, well-spoken friend who’s here to help you. She is always on-point putting forward Orchid as a beneficent purveyor of technology that will help parents “do what’s best for their child.”

Unfortunately, her position coincides with insidious commercial interests and an intellectual sleight-of-hand. As in: am I really doing what’s best for my child if I decide it’s not good enough to have in the first place?

Unpacking her position and coming to a moral decision about Orchid’s service is not an easy task. There is a complex history of eugenics to explore, as well as understanding the science involved. The moral question of “who in society gets to control what and why?” dimension is complex, if you allow that it may be profoundly unfair that wealthy parents have access to this tool while poor parents will not. And this is all just the tip of the proverbial “what it means to bring a child into this world” iceberg.

Indeed, Siddiqui’s foundational position that “parents want what’s best for their children” threatens to undermine our attempts to tease apart her motivations from our own. Indeed, it’s not in her best interest to undermine her company’s value, even when it threatens a core tenet of our social life. Equality, it seems, is steamrolled here by a sort of capital-techno-futurism—a belief that we should be able to buy our way to genetic “superiority.”

These days an LAE is expensive. It is often considered a distraction from a career. Is it worth the cost?

Here at least, my LAE has kicked in an helped me put a CEO’s claims and sales pitch into a broader socio-historical context. It allows me to define a conceptual position to support my responses: “that’s not right” and “that’s not moral” and “that doesn’t square with my goals for society.” It allows me to ask more theoretical questions like, “is she evil, misguided, or just seeking a different outcome of our combined social life than myself”?

These aren’t easy questions to sit with, but they’re worth a lot to me.

Additional notes/inspirations:

Does Siddiqui act from a position of “moral failure” or “moral ineptitude”? In other words, is she ignorant of larger issues, being dishonest with herself, or simply against equality?
There is a lot of doubt these days about the value of a LAE (via Forbes).
Does a LAE need a rebrand (also via Forbes)? The “liberal” part seems to be an issue.

The Post-literate Society (We Didn’t Ask For)

July 18, 2025 by Brian Hughes

In a recent The Gray Area podcast, James Walsh, a features writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer, asks, “Who is going to be able to afford to go to college to learn to write?” It is an earnest question, grounded in both economic insight and uncertainty about the very nature of higher education.

Hosted by Vox writer Sean Illing, James and Sean reflect on current and possible future impacts of AI on learning, higher education, and the structural supports of democratic society. Walsh, who recently wrote Everyone is cheating their way through college (paywall)—a report on AI’s impact on higher education after interviewing current college students—is here to tell us that there is no going back to a time before AI in education, and everything must change. But how and why? There are no obvious answers.

One line of thought is that faculty, schools, and universities need to redesign long-standing approaches to curriculum to be “AI-proof.” This is a common tack, appearing in many thought-pieces. For example, in writing about the future of writing, Meghan O’Rourke opines that the days of teaching essay writing are over, and professors need realistic assessment strategies (pass/fail) and spaces where students must work without access to AI. Similar approaches call for falling back to AI-proof assignments and evaluation (e.g., oral exams and blue books!).

But let’s consider an alternative, perhaps more extreme outcome: the age of higher education is over, and we’re headed into a post-literate society. Whether the topic is writing or anything else, this society embraces the reality that humans don’t need to know as much anymore. AI-driven tools will assist us in every aspect of our lives. Sure, there will still be hallucinations and mistakes, but maybe accountability isn’t as important as speed and efficiency in this future?

Here, Walsh’s expensive education is for a minority of elites who value thinking. It’s a nostalgic endeavor: cognition as a mix of memory, facts, and intellectual muscle. These will be slow and anti-capitalist spaces where higher learning is powered and buttressed by pre-AI norms. The expected ROI would be dismal in an AI-driven culture and marketplace. Learning would just be “for fun.”

Wealthy, lefty elites may opt for this, just as I chose to study art as an undergraduate. After all, what was I thinking? There were more profitable disciplines (business, medicine), and more practical ones (law, science, politics). But I chose to focus my studies on art and art making because I enjoyed it, and helped me explore the world around me in powerful ways. But it did not prepare me for a particularly focused or accessible career path. Learning about art and art making was an end in itself.

Today, we are already hybrid animal machines, and we all must face our cyborg future: the forces of AI and capitalism are fast-approaching to demolish our educational traditions. A post-literate society will follow, and humans will adopt new ways of thinking, learning, and doing. The academy must adapt by offering competitive technologies and services, as well as acknowledging its limitations.

Collaborative Transmedia Lectures

July 18, 2023 by Brian Hughes

Session description:

The lecture is dead; long live the lecture! Today, instructors face a daunting task of teaching across face-to-face, online, and hyflex modalities where the traditional lecture is often deprecated as an outmoded method of instruction. But expert narratives can and should be reimagined in and across new media and new learning spaces. What I call a “collaborative transmedia lecture” is a framework for evolving lectures with new technologies. With an eye on video production and diverse learning platforms, this session highlights new opportunities for engagement and learning.

SXSW EDU is organized around similar themes as SXSW: innovation, multimedia, and networking. In short, it’s “a celebration of innovation and learning.” I’ve attended virtually for two years, and find it to be an exciting mix of viewpoints and formats. This year, I’ve submitted a proposal for the first time. I chose the format of a 30-minute solo presentation for my talk.

Some ideas I will define and discuss in my session:

Post-pandemic hyflex teaching
The instructor as copyleft DJ
Student-led content curation
TikTok edits and glam-casting
Transmedia storytelling

To me, these are all key aspects of the future of higher education. Why? Let’s briefly look at each idea:

Post-pandemic hyflex teaching

At Pace University, I help faculty create engaging multimedia (primarily video) for courses. Student preferences continue to evolve, and the pandemic has left us with the remnants of hyflex: the desire to access course experiences (lectures and in-class activities) on demand. This isn’t always possible, but faculty need to find ways to make their course content as accessible as possible without the downside of the recorded-with-the-webcam-during-class aesthetic.

The instructor as copyleft DJ

A simple way to enhance any slideshow or recorded lecture is with images. Used in the right way at the right time, images help students engage with and remember content. Searching for images (or generating them with AI) is a good strategy for illustrating lectures, and copyleft (and public domain) content provide a trove of possibilities. To me, this feels a bit like the work of a DJ curating a great multimedia experience.

Student-led content curation

Faculty don’t have to do all the work–and shouldn’t. Students should participate in activities that require research, like investigating the history of a topic. An instructor can incorporate student research, discussion, and share-outs into lectures. This content can be brought into the course platform during or after a class session. With a creative and playful mindset, students (and faculty) can also share course-related content on social platforms beyond university-sanctioned tools.

TikTok edits and glam-casting

Translating a lecture into a video format is hard. While it’s easier than ever to capture video, it still requires a lot of attention and time, starting with a great script. I believe many faculty members avoid video because it is much less forgiving than delivering a lecture in person–even poorly. Students see great videos every day, and have high standards. For example, YouTube creators deliver content with passion in well-lit, well-designed studio environments (even when it’s their bedroom). Students themselves continuously create media on platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, and are familiar with using dramatic camera angles, hip soundtracks, and flashy motion graphics. While these aesthetics might not be right for lectures (or are simply too time-intensive to sustain at length), faculty can borrow elements from these other mediums.

Transmedia storytelling

Putting all of the previous elements together sets the stage for a transmedia experience. The term “transmedia storytelling” denotes using multiple digital platforms to tell a story–where social media and multimedia converge to reveal a larger picture. The big idea here is to break lectures up into several segments that traverse in-person and digital media, while creating a more interesting, content-rich, active learning experience for students.

This fall I’ll be teaching Introduction to Podcasting in the Communications and Media Studies program. As a production-focused course with an emphasis on student-centered learning (i.e., “experiential education”), it’s a great excuse for me to use instructor-created video in creative ways.

With some luck–and your support via PanelPicker voting from August 8 – 20–I’ll have a platform to share this work with the SXSW community in 2024.

Learning and Storytelling

January 18, 2023 by Brian Hughes

This week, I presented on the opportunities and challenges of storytelling at the 4th Annual Pace Online Conference. My talk, titled, “Creating Engaging Stories with Video,” was meant to inspire new possibilities for telling stories in our instructional videos at Pace University.

The main theme I explored was how stories that are even only indirectly connected to the subject matter have the potential to help students better connect with multimedia content. As David JP Phillips shares, stories can make your brain more receptive to learning. These could be personal stories or stories from your field that connect to the subject matter or lesson.

Image: David JP Phillips presents on storytelling at a TedX event.

But telling stories also requires students to spend more time with our media, and that can be a challenge. I shared the story of Quibi to reinforce how even 10-minutes videos fall awkwardly between short videos (that require less commitment) and long videos that rival media choices with higher production values and well-crafted stories (well, some of the time).

Image: My depiction of the “Battle for Eyeballs.”

A Call to Action

What’s the best way forward? It’s up to each faculty member to wrestle with this issue, but I challenged everyone to try to bring a story into lectures that are longer than 10 minutes.

After sharing a personal example, I asked everyone to reflect on a time or experience in their life that led them on their academic journey. I thought it would be helpful to experience this work of identifying possible stories, even though it can be frustrating sifting through memories and making connections to subject matter! And further complicating the path ahead, a professor will need a handful of ready-to-use stories to call upon over the course of a semester.

Image: I shared my experience as an early-career media maker working with comedian Josh Kornbluth on an instructional video.

For the final part of my presentation, I reviewed the resources and services of the Online Learning Center, and invited faculty to seek our help in bringing stories into their videos.

What do you think? When and how can educators use stories to create the conditions for learning?

University-made Multimodal Curriculum?

September 1, 2022 by Brian Hughes

How can schools, colleges, and universities offer sophisticated, up-to-date, and effective curriculum across diverse disciplines without relying on Publishers? While this is sometimes an informal faculty role (e.g., creating presentations, sharing original research), it is rarely a formal one. Could it be an administrative or library responsibility? Or is it just too hard to pivot away from Publishers?

Image credit: LearnUpon Blog. Read it for a quick review on “multimodal” learning!

My current role at Pace University has me thinking about multimodal curriculum on a daily basis. Using Open Education Resources (“OER”) is one response, but it is problematic (or, at least incomplete) in several ways. For one, if institutions rely heavily on open content, how do they distinguish themselves in the marketplace? (Maybe they don’t, but that’s another discussion.) And another issue: what kind of systems are in place to keep underlying resources up to date and accurate? And how are they jig-sawed together into a coherent whole? A university’s response must either be ad hoc, or rely on intermediary companies that prepare and deliver these open resources.

But the obvious alternative to using open educational resources as curriculum is for colleges and universities to produce their own. Assuming faculty have the appropriate expertise, the primary hurdle is the sheer time involved in producing and maintaining content. I think multimedia – and multimodal curriculum – will be the game changer here. I will be writing about new approaches to the development, production, and maintenance of multimodal content in the future.

Climate Optimism

May 4, 2021 by Brian Hughes

I’m currently reading and being inspired by The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.

An important theme is that optimism (about the climate crisis or anything else) is a requirement for change, and not (only) a result of progress. Since I find myself too often on the side of pessimism, I need to take in this perspective.

It’s made me think about how the twin themes of optimism and the climate crisis can be adopted into art education at any level. Observing the natural world is a great foundational skill, and adding a layer of communication about environmental change (and conservation!) is a great challenge.

What would you make to promote climate optimism?

Anticapitalist Antiracism

June 25, 2019 by Brian Hughes

From the from the book review of “Anticapitalist, antiracism”:

“the U.S. education system as little more than an obfuscated expression of ‘commodity fetishism'”
“His only recommendation is pedagogical—using anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy to disrupt and dismantle racism, capitalism, and neoliberalism at the classroom level.”

How Open is Your Open Content?

June 11, 2019 by Brian Hughes

Here’s an interesting discussion of open educational resources (OER): Framing the Open Conversation – Branded Content & Fair Use

Rolin, the author and Assistant Professor & Director of EdTech & Media at Seattle Pacific University, believes content should be remixable rather than merely accessible. (Rolin goes further to discuss “openwashing” of content, which offers an interesting comparison of content makers.) With decades of web content available, it’s helpful to keep this ideal of remix in mind when choosing or creating OER.

Free access to educational materials is important for many learners, but educators can potentially do more with content that does not foreclose possibilities of remix.

Immersion: When Media is Educational

February 16, 2019 by Brian Hughes

Sure, video games are immersive, but are they educational? Only to a very small extent. Educators have been pursuing the connections between immersive media like gaming and education for decades, but I want to offer another perspective: learners have to be suspended between being gamers and game-makers. Here’s a brief reflection on how that can happen…

Put Away the Video Games

Games are really only interesting in small doses. So if you’re going to use them for broader educational purpose, keep it short. This same advice applies to many other activities as well: hooks, icebreakers, brainstorms, research, and perhaps even reading. When it comes to ambitious learning goals, how long does it take until we get bored? Are all engaging educational experiences short in duration? (And is this a feature rather than a bug?)

If we contrast active and exciting learning experiences with more conventional lecture-style information delivery, let’s say the best experiences are the short ones. (Even traditional teacher-led experiences collapse after about 50 minutes, though there is evidence that more interaction is perceived as better.) Is formal education—educational experience that spirals and requires significant exposure to achieve significant recall—ever likely to permanently achieve the velocity to escape boredom for most students most of the time? It seems unlikely, but what if the answer was that it could…

Dynamic Interventions

Teaching often begins with a presentation or a group activity—activities that help individuals explore new ideas while confronting factual information from experts or authoritative sources. A part of our jobs as “producers” in the Learning Theater is to bridge events (and our event partners) from the present into a better-designed-built-environment future.

In the past two years at EdLab, we have begun experimenting with what I will call “dynamic interventions.” These are generally small multimedia gestures that connect classroom activities: a soundtrack, a light cue, an introductory video for an activity, or a background image. The Learning Theater has enabled us to manipulate the built environment in both subtle and dramatic ways during a face-to-face learning experiences. Using light, sound, video, props, and furnishings, we have built many multimedia experiences to enhance what began as more ordinary learning scenarios.

Adding multimedia to an educational experience is not always the right thing. (As in all design, sometimes simple is better.) But increasingly we’re seeing the blending of “simple” and “multimedia” moments as creating the optimal conditions for sustaining learning over the course of an hour, an afternoon, a day, or longer.

Recent events have given us more confidence to steer our partners toward building dynamic interventions into their plans, and I’m excited to see where these efforts lead. But it won’t just be a matter of adding “fun” and “exciting” multimedia moments into lectures that optimizes learning. The learners are going to be active participants in the process of design and execution.

Immersion

I think “immersion” is a helpful word to describe this enhanced educational experience. Often used in language learning to describe a situation where learner can’t help but be confronted with educationally rich experience, it also comes to us with a sense that the learner is sustained in a state of flow. How can that happen?

Only learners can ultimately tell us what they need. Do they need a break? Do they need a boost of energy? Do they need time to reflect and write? Or time to talk together? Involving learners in the ebb and flow of educational experience with dynamic interventions will raise the stakes. Educators can offer learners an environment, but learners will need to activate it.

Collaboration is a key element of dynamic interventions we’ve made so far. (Learning is often more fun together!) With respect to collaborative activities, learners are really asked to be both participants and educators—taking an active role in their colleagues’ learning. Dynamic interventions can help support learners in both their roles by giving their work new contexts as an activity unfolds—and in a highly aesthetic way. Ultimately, I imagine that the suspension of learners between these different orientations can best sustain a flow experience. Time will tell…

Alas, we are just beginning to explore the possibilities of this exciting—and I think somewhat novel, or at least technologically-heightened—nexus of knowledge, creativity, and learning.

What are ways do you think we can further (or best) support the development and sharing of these ideas and our toolset?