The Blog of a Chronic Content Creator
Each year I try to put together a “About Me” page or post for my new students to help get to know me a bit better. This year I figured I’d ask an AI (Microsoft Copilot in this case) the following prompt: Imagine that you’re a new student at a University and you decide to …
Continue reading “An AI Interviews Your Professor, Dr. Westfall”
AI Analyzes my musical tastes.
It’s been over a year since my last Weight Loss / Fitness update (Click here for the whole story), and I figured I’d put down an update on where I’m at, and where I’ve been. When we last left off, I’d completed the “weight loss” part of my journey, going from 415.6 pounds to my …
Continue reading “Formerly Fat, Formerly Skinny, Now Just Jon 2.0”
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of a telephone call. I live in a region where many people still believe that the only way to get action on anything is to call someone, which leads to many, mostly in the younger generation, having extremely awkward phone etiquette. Both Karey & I often …
Continue reading “The Lie Destroying America: If It’s Important, They’ll Call”
Our learning management system asks us to write an “About your Instructor” page for our students. Here’s Fall 2023’s – I think I’ve reached peak “This is who I am”… I was born last century, the only offspring of artists who both never had the opportunity to complete a college degree. From an early age …
We’re at the end of the Summer II term, and I’m reading term papers. It has made me think about the biggest issues I see with student writing today. So here is my list, in no particular order, of my biggest pet peeves. If you are a student in one of my classes, this is …
Continue reading “Dr. Westfall’s Writing Pet Peeves (a.k.a. How to Write a Paper I Won’t Hate)”
I teach a variety of courses where I give comments to students that I sometimes like to re-use or modify for the next semester (Typically combining with a tool like TextExpander). Recently I created a course with about 25 different assignments, and I wanted to be able to download all of the submission comments. But …
Continue reading “Download All Canvas Submission Comments In Bulk!”
A colleague and I are creating a Discord server to discuss psychology and all things related (Technology, community, academia, culture, etc…) We’re hoping to use it with our students, and our colleagues and friends. If you’d like to join in, head over to https://go.jonwestfall.com/psychout and jump in. Right now just a few channels in there …
Each semester I teach General Psychology, I do an activity where I ask a series of True/False questions to determine if my students believe some of the biggest “myths” of the field. Recently I asked our excellent Graduate Assistant to pull the previous semesters (5 in total) and report the percentage of people who got …
A few days ago, my MacBook Pro had to go on a quick trip to Texas for a doctor’s appointment (a.k.a. Some service work on a misbehaving main board). With my “spare” MacBook mostly used by my wife these days, I figured “I wonder if I can survive on my 2018 11’’ iPad Pro and …