Monday, October 20, 2025

We’re kicking off a week filled with curiosity, creativity, and connection! Join us for Mole Week (October 20-23) hosted by the IT’s Research Delivery team. Mole Week is a four-day exploration of research, tech, and unexpected ways ideas come to life! 

 

And speaking of unexpected…today’s Canvas LMS outage serves as a gentle reminder that even in the digital age, a little patience and a solid backup plan still go a long way. In reflection of Monday’s mayhem and mid-semester surprises, we hope you’ll take a moment to breathe in gently and exhale fully to reset your day. Restore your Monday momentum with a few quick tips and upcoming workshops to stay connected with your students.

 

Quick tips for restoring calm when Canvas LMS is down:

• Communicate with your students via Gibson portal, Teams, email, or an alternate platform. 
• Share links to critical materials through your Box Cloud Storage, OneDrive, or another shared folder. 
• Consider adjusting deadlines, if needed, and reassure students that flexibility will be provided based on the situation.
• Consult with the ILC and CELT teams during Teach Anywhere Office Hours for assignment considerations and modifications when the LMS is back online.
• Remember, you are not alone. Reach out with questions or concerns about navigating the outage. Email help@tulane.edu to report outstanding issues or ilc@tulane.edu with inquiries. 

Bobbie Garner-Coffie, MSW, MLA 

Manager Instructional Technology

Innovative Learning Center 

Teach Anywhere Office Hours

 

Mondays and Thursdays | 12pm to 1pm

 

No appointments necessary, both online via zoom and in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Suite 300 for all pedagogy and academic technology needs.

Today, October  20 - Thursday, October 23

 

Sponsored by: Tulane Information Technology Research Delivery Team

 

Join us during Mole Week for a series of digital research technology sessions designed to support Tulane's growing research community. Discover tools and resources that drive innovation, from advanced computing to secure data transfers, and see how Tulane's Research Delivery Team helps faculty, students, and researchers push discovery forward.

Sessions are open to Tulane students, faculty, researchers, staff, and the general Tulane community.

• How to Participate: Register for the session(s) you plan to attend and join via Zoom. Session attendees are included in the Mole Week Raffle!

Monday, October 20 | Sessions via Zoom. Register to receive the meeting link.

• 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM | Introduction to Research Delivery Services
• 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM | Introduction to Computation Resources
• 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM | LONI, Louisiana Optical Network Initiative Info Session
• 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM | Introduction to HPC (Cypress Supercomputer)

Tuesday, October 21 | Sessions via Zoom. Register to receive the meeting link.

• 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM | Parallel Computing on HPC
• 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM | R on HPC
• 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM | Python on HPC
• 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM | Introduction to LabArchives ELN
• 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM | MATLAB on HPC
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM | Containers (Singularity) on HPC

Wednesday, October 22 | Sessions via Zoom. Register to receive the meeting link.

• 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM | Mathworks MATLAB Info Session 
• 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM | Wolfram Mathematica Info Session
• 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM | ArcGIS for Research: From Mapping to GeoAI 
• 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM | NVIDIA Info Session
• 3:00 PM - 3:50 PM | Microsoft: Cloud Computing Options AZURE + FABRIC 

Thursday, October 23 | Mole Day Celebration | Participants can register to join via Zoom or in person.

• 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Faculty Lightning Talks: Cypress HPC in Action
• 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Bytes & Bites Networking - Research Resource Mini-Fair (In-person only)
• 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM | The Future of Research Computing at Tulane
• 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM | Research Data Management Panel
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM | AI in Research Panel

Engaging Distracted Learners with Top Hat | Register 

Tuesday, October 21 | 12pm - 1pm | Hybrid

The first minutes of class are crucial for setting the tone and direction of the course. Engaging students, building a sense of community, and establishing clear expectations can lead to a more successful learning experience. In this workshop, you'll learn how to use Top Hat to demonstrate empathy, and apply creative strategies that engage students, minimize distractions and keep students focused before, during and after class. You'll also learn how to leverage the insights you've collected so far to further inform your approach in the classroom and enable agile teaching. 

(W.A.V.E.) 9-5 AI: A Day in the Life of AI Productivity | Register 

Tuesday, October 28 | 1pm - 2:30pm | Hybrid

This workshop provides attendees with a practical guide on using AI tools to streamline their workday. By walking participants through each hour of a typical 9-5 schedule, this presentation will showcase how AI can optimize tasks ranging from meetings to research, brainstorming, and content creation.

 

 

(W.A.V.E.) Building a Second Brain with AI: Using RAG AI for Productivity and Efficiency | Register 

Tuesday, November 11 | 1pm - 2:30pm | Hybrid

Build a persistent knowledge hub that thinks with you: note triage, spaced‑repetition flashcards, retrieval‑augmented writing, voice journals—anchored in “Second Brain” methodology and turbo‑charged with local LLMs and vector databases.

By Blaine Fisher, Ph.D., MS, MA, NRP, PG-Cert

If you sit still in a campus library long enough, you can hear a new kind of study group. It has one member and two minds. A student types. A model replies. The student frowns, then nods. Everyone else hears silence. That quiet is not a void, but a new homework ritual.

 

This essay braids two strands: Anthropic’s Education Report on real student conversations with Claude, drawn from about a million interactions filtered down to roughly 575,000 academic conversations, and local Tulane student surveys from consecutive semesters. The Anthropic team used a privacy-preserving pipeline called Clio that strips personal content and aggregates patterns, and nobody is peeking at anyone’s homework, which matters if we want honest signals from real use. The Tulane surveys, cleaned to exclude faculty who wandered into the student link, gave us 844 responses in the first run and 798 in Spring. Together they describe ordinary behavior with important consequences. Not a scare story. Not a miracle. Just the world we have to teach in.

 

Here is what we found. The same research sorts student behavior into four familiar postures. Sometimes a student wants a fast answer. Sometimes a fast paragraph. Sometimes a partner to reason with. Sometimes a coauthor. None of this is exotic. It is essentially the old spectrum of learning, from the single fact to the whole essay, now collapsed into one chat window. The shocking thing is not that students do all four. The shocking thing is that anyone is shocked.

The Work and the Worker

 

Students mostly talk to AI for two things that matter: creating and analyzing. They ask the model to draft, revise, explain, debug, and outline. In other words, they use it at the point where thinking is work. That should not scare us. It should make us curious. When a tool shows up exactly where effort lives, the lesson plan should not be to lock the toolbox.

 

Creating or improving educational content accounts for about 39 percent of conversations. Technical explanation and problem solving account for about 34 percent. The rest spreads across data analysis, research design, diagrams, translation, and proofreading. In Bloom’s terms, students often ask the model to operate at higher levels first, which is both the promise and the risk.

 

At Tulane, the patterns rhyme with the global story. The share of students who never use AI dropped from roughly 21.9 percent to 11.0 percent across our two survey runs. Daily use dipped from 19.0 to 14.2 percent, which sounds like retreat until you notice what is really happening: the middle bands are swelling. More students are using AI a few times a week, keeping what works, tossing what does not. They are becoming pragmatists, not evangelists. High familiarity with ChatGPT fell from about 60.6 percent to 31.8 percent in the Spring sample, likely because the cohort included more newcomers. Familiarity with Claude stayed low and steady around 5 to 6 percent, consistent with a STEM-heavy adoption pattern.

The Results Are in! Our first-ever album cover art contest yielded submissions from several talented students.

 

The Express Yourself: Album Cover Art Competition was held during September's Groove at the Library Celebration.  Album covers were created with Adobe Express using themed design prompts.

 

Top reviews (and prizes) were awarded to Sequoyah Richardson, Veronica Ise, and Davvid Cole.

Special thanks to reviewers: Lindsay Cronk, Mike Griffith, Dodd Loomis, David Robinson, and Meghan Saas. Album cover art will be on display soon!

Contact the IT Service Desk

support.tulane.edu | help@tulane.edu | 504-988-8888
Hours | Mon - Fri 7:00 AM - 7:00 PM | Sat - Sun 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM

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