Notebooks to self

I invited the specter of AI into the first session of "DIY Religion" today, even as we set up a very analog classroom. As an icebreaker I'd asked students to tell us something they'd done for the first time in the last week - sort of a no-brainer for first year students - and we heard about sleeping in airports, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and visiting the Met, getting a nosering, asking someone to be their friend, and lots about food: first fried oreos, Taco Bell, Five Guys and a sandwich costing more than $35. When it came my turn all I could think to say was that I'd gotten to know NotebookLM, one of the AI devices the university is sharing with us. I was relieved that the name drew a blank, though they surely know other similar programs. I told them a little about it anyway, and how when I added a bunch of texts from our class it described another class - interesting enough, but not the one we're embarking on. I guess I'm opening a space, or acknowledging we're all now in the space, where AI is always present.

Or maybe not always. I've been moved by articles I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education on student fatigue at online LMSs (learning management systems), as well as on the irresistible ease with which AI can generate summaries, to abandon online reading responses. Instead, I'm having students buy a notebook (I showed them my MUJI one as an example) and copy passages from the readings into them, and then respond, all longhand. Mind-maps, diagrams and drawings welcome too! The notebooks will start our class discussions but also provide them an archive of the highways and byways of their thinking over the course of the semester.

This isn't about keeping AI at bay - NotebookLM could handily give me a set of suggestive quotes from any text in no time flat - but focusing on the time and work of our own thinking. Getting them to understand things in the context of the arguments in which they appear comes later. Today I told the class about Ross Gay's essay collection The Book of Delights, daily essays he wrote longhand in notebooks. He quotes Susan Sontag, who said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use. But more compelling are his own thoughts on why. The pen is a digressive beast and reveals our thinking in all its uncomputable glory.

On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out is the archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is. 

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender LePen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. ...

(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2019), 31-33)

Welcome to college, 2025!