My Robot Teacher

When universities adopt AI at scale, do students learn to treat tools like ChatGPT as authoritative and trustworthy? Dr. Julie Carpenter joins Sarah and Taiyo to unpack AI in education through a sociotechnical lens and ask whether AI literacy can keep up with systems that invite our trust, emotional disclosure, and attachment.

What are faculty and students actually saying about AI when they are given a structured space to speak honestly? In this episode of My Robot Teacher , Sarah and Taiyo talk with April Lawson, co-founder of Insight Debate & Dialogue, about what she has learned from facilitating structured conversations about AI across colleges and universities. Her work brings faculty, students, staff, and admin...

How can AI summon the wisdom of the crowd without the stupidity of the mob? In Episode 12 of My Robot Teacher , Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue talk with Kim Polese—co-founder of CrowdSmartAI and Common Good AI—about collective intelligence, deliberative tech, and a different vision of AI: not as a machine for generating answers, but as a facilitator that helps groups think better together. From enterp...

What does AI have to do with democracy? More than most people realize. In this episode — recorded on My Robot Teacher's one-year anniversary — we're joined by Kim Bisheff (Journalism, Cal Poly SLO) and Emmy-award winning professor Foaad Khosmood (Computer Engineering, Cal Poly SLO), the team behind the Digital Democracy Project, an AI-powered tool that makes state legislative proceedings searchabl...

What does improv have to do with teaching in the age of AI? More than you might think. In this episode, we’re joined by Julie Simons (Applied Mathematics, UC Santa Cruz) and Pedro Morales (Mathematics, UC Santa Cruz) to talk about improv not as performance, but as pedagogy - and, more broadly, a philosophy of classroom life. In this episode: Why active learning may be a stronger response to AI tha...

Science education after ChatGPT: what happens when students can outsource the thinking, and still turn in something that looks right? In this episode of My Robot Teacher, CSU professors Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue talk with UC Davis biophysicist Jon Sack about AI literacy, scientific thinking, and how LLMs are reshaping both the classroom and the day-to-day reality of research. If the most availabl...

What would it look like to teach AI literacy the way UC Berkeley teaches data science? hands-on, interdisciplinary, and open? In this episode of My Robot Teacher, Sarah and Taiyo talk with Eric Van Dusen from Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society about how the wildly successful Data 8: Foundations of Data Science course became a scalable model for modern computing education. E...

AI in higher education, ChatGPT on campus, and Hollywood sci-fi all collide in this conversation with Jason Goldman. When our students say they’re afraid to use their CSU-issued ChatGPT EDU account because it might be a sting operation, what stories about technology are already living in their heads? In this episode of My Robot Teacher, Sarah and Taiyo sit down with Jason Goldman – co-host of the...

Generative AI is reshaping classrooms and campuses, but with whose values, and at what cost? In this episode, Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression and founder of the UCLA Center on Resilience and Digital Justice, joins Sarah and Taiyo to unpack why “neutral” AI isn’t neutral, why interdisciplinarity is hard but essential, and what a public‑interest technology ecosystem in higher...

In this episode, we talk with Madison Van Doren (AI Research & Strategy Manager at Appen) about the limits of AI translation, what AI safety practices like red-teaming reveal about model guardrails, and why humans in the loop remain essential. Madison explains adversarial prompting, how different large language models reflect the norms and incentives of their builders, and why common translati...

How do we teach writing in the age of ChatGPT? On My Robot Teacher, hosts Taiyo Inoue and Sarah Senk talk with Carl Whithaus (Professor of Writing & Rhetoric; Director, University Writing Program, UC Davis) and Aparna Sinha (Associate Professor of Composition & Rhetoric, Cal Poly Maritime) about how AI is reshaping the composition classroom, and how educators can use LLMs to support critic...

What happens when AI forces us to confront what's broken about education? In this eye-opening conversation, Linguistics professor Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz) and English & Ethnic Studies professor Chesa Caparas (De Anza College) join Sarah and Taiyo, and argue that the panic over student "cheating" with ChatGPT is missing the real crisis. Spoiler alert: The problem isn't that students are usi...

What does AI mean for how we teach and learn? In this episode of My Robot Teacher , we explore how ChatGPT is reshaping higher education. In this episode of My Robot Teacher , co-hosts Taiyo Inoue and Sarah Senk share real stories and critical reflections on using ChatGPT and other large language models in higher education. What becomes newly possible - and newly questionable - when thinking itsel...

What happens when ChatGPT crashes into the classroom? In this premiere episode of My Robot Teacher , Cal State University (CSU) professors Taiyo Inoue and Sarah Senk explore how faculty across public universities are reacting to the rise of generative AI in education. From panic to pedagogical adaptation, we dig into what resistance to AI really looks like - and why it often gives way to something...

Faculty insiders Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue unpack how generative AI is reshaping higher ed policy, pedagogy, and ethics - without the jargon. Follow for sharp insight and dry wit. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, AI, ChatGPT, tech, Waymo, science and technology, AI and Humanity, Education, HigherEd, Future Of Learning, Sarah Senk, Taiyo Inoue, editaudio, MLOps, Machine Learning, Generative AI,...