As I’ve previously described, teasing my forthcoming article Teaching Law, my teaching is both traditional and revolutionary. In my biased view, I combine what is excellent about our pedagogic past with what correlates to modern cognitive science. So, my teaching is Socratic to be sure—though I take the liberty of defining that differently than some—but it critically leverages retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and transfer of learning. My textbooks ask students actual questions—instead of tossing out oceans of rhetorical ones—and I expect actual answers. This Fall, I am introducing a Solutions Manual and Outline that will provide both my answers to those questions and a substantive outline of the course. Just as were I teaching engineering, I have zero interest in hiding the ball.
And since I am a fan of contemporary generative AI, I will also be rolling out a HendersonBot tailored to each course so my students can query ‘me,’ author of their source material. To do so, I am leveraging Google’s NotebookLM Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). It is ‘source grounded,’ meaning that it looks for answers in the information that I provide, thereby reducing hallucinations—both machine and human authored—and provides citations to the most relevant source material.
In case anyone wishes to give it a go, here is a HendersonBot built upon 120 of my writings. You will need to login to a Gmail/Google account to use it, as your access to NotebookLM depends upon that account—we are, after all, burning up our atmosphere with these things. Hence, I believe a free Gmail/Google account gets 50 queries per day, whereas paid accounts get more.
I know… who could need more?! Still, it’s fascinating how ‘good’ this tech is becoming, and it would be ignorant not to realize its ultimate potential for better education.
(To be clear, I cannot see what use gets made of the bot. By signing in to Google, you can use anybody’s accessible NotebookLM, including your own, and what Google does with that data is between you and Google based upon its terms of service.)
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