Title: Professor
Department: Journalism / School of Communication and Information
College/School: College of Social Sciences
Showcase Course: Jour 481 Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Email: brett.oppegaard@hawaii.edu
“Every student interaction, every lesson, every course, every emerging communication technology creates an opportunity to practice teaching and learning in new ways and to get better at the craft of both.”
Table of Contents
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching keeps me focused on how much I have to learn. Every student interaction, every lesson, every course, every emerging communication technology creates an opportunity to practice teaching and learning in new ways and to get better at the craft of both. From that perspective, I carefully focus and align learning objectives and developmental goals with the present. Was I an effective and inspiring teacher just now? Did my students learn in an enduring way from what I just did? What evidence do I have to support those assessments? What can I do better tomorrow? Also, I don’t just want to use the teaching tools that other people make, especially those builders focused mostly on profits. I think teachers need to make tools for teachers and students, reflecting upon what we want and need. Journalism Watchdogs was my response to a student need that also served important community needs.
Diacritical Marks Matter: Novel GenAI Webtool Supports Hawaiian Language Use
Teaching Practice
To begin with, we needed a publishing platform to be the media we wanted to find in our community. So for months before this Spring semester, I worked nights and weekends creating an entirely new website and media brand, called The Mānoa Mirror (manoamirror.org), for this class but also for the Journalism program and its students. That was a major innovation story of its own, including collaborating with dozens of students to develop the name, the look, and the focus of the online publication. But something even more interesting and innovative bloomed from this effort. To provide some context, Native Hawaiian students had been lobbying our Journalism program for years to better support integration of Hawaiian diacritics into local news coverage. Journalism students and faculty members supported that idea but encountered practical obstacles preventing classroom implementation, including a lack of programmatic-wide expertise, laborious editing processes, and competing pedagogical priorities. There also were no role models, such as professional media organizations in the state consistently using the language’s markings. So we had no clear model of how to do it. Yet my research and development of a novel GenAI writing-coach tool, called “Journalism Watchdogs” (www.journalismwatchdogs.org), mitigated or eliminated previously insurmountable workload concerns and allowed journalism students to assert university-wide and statewide leadership in this important ethical area.
UH has been designated as a Native Hawaiian Place of Learning, and the state theoretically has two co-equal official languages, English and Hawaiian. At the abstract level, the university supports both languages, but at a practical level, that support is not equal, creating a discriminatory ethical concern throughout the organization about the unbalanced use and development of one official language in our classrooms over the other. As a faculty member recruited from another state — with no experience using, let alone teaching, the Hawaiian language — I have been sympathetic to this concern by my students throughout my decade at the university but also unable to imagine a suitable way to address it, considering not only my lack of expertise with the language but also that of most of my colleagues, combined with the extensive amount of time I have found it takes to institute human-level quality controls for diacritics, when considering the massive overflow of other important journalistic lessons simultaneously competing for time and space in my classes.
In those assessment experiments I did with diacritics as the focus, depending on the quantity in any given story, I learned that it took me roughly five to 10 minutes to read a piece, identify the Hawaiian words or names, check their markings, and then provide clear feedback, without any attention spent on the journalistic aspects of the work. With 40 students over two writing classes a semester, that equated to an additional 3 to 6 hours of grading per assignment, per week, added on to the time spent checking stories for grammar, punctuation, AP Style, math, and other technical concerns, and that was after addressing the many complex journalistic aspects that need the primary attention, including development of the story angle, news values, sourcing, choosing a medium, the logic, structure, and aesthetic style. Pragmatically, it was just a straw on the workload pile heavy enough to break the teacher’s back, which is why no professional journalist in town or other teacher in our College would commit to it. But my applied GenAI research tool helped to change the game. This Journalism Watchdogs webtool, inspired by the industry metaphor of the Watchdog, created alignment with the practice of a publication’s local style, which captures the energy and voice of its community. In short, this tool created an unprecedented opportunity. It is easy to use and has an approachable aesthetic, using portraits of dogs to represent journalistic characters. This GenAI webtool could speed up assessment and feedback to the point where any teacher, and regardless of expertise in the Hawaiian language, could quickly get a text checked for diacritics and prepared for return to a student in just a few seconds. Or, even more proactively, students also can clean up their drafts before submission by using the tool, making that writing-and-editing process even faster, smoother, and more automated, with multiple points of robust feedback. The webtool checks the words for diacritics, provides definitions for them, assesses if those were used correctly or not, provides feedback on each case, and then prepares a full report to the student that shares all of this information in a straightforward summary that is easy to use and digest.
This webtool was created in a particular journalism class (Jour 481 Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Spring 2024) with the advocacy and support of two Native Hawaiian journalism students, in particular, but with the interest, engagement, and excitement of all of the students in the class, who unanimously voted to adopt a policy in the class requiring diacritics, boosted by the use of the Watchdogs.
Impact
Once we adopted the classroom policy to include Hawaiian diacritical markings in every story, supported by Journalism Watchdogs, students thought that this tool and this policy should be expanded to more of their classes and even their entire School. This policy then was adopted at the programmatic level, with a unanimous vote of support, followed by a student presentation on the matter to the full faculty of the School of Communication and Information, at its Congress, which also supported the policy unanimously. In summary, the use of diacritics in that class increased from spotty-at-best to fully integrated and then spread throughout the School and all of its classes and initiatives. The 20 students in this class generated about 200 journalistic stories during the semester, mostly published on the new platform, The Mānoa Mirror, with nearly all of those stories including at least a few Hawaiian words or names in them, properly marked, illustrating our leadership position on this issue and community impacts that we spurred. While the emphasis of this innovative teaching practice is on the research, development, and implementation of the novel GenAI tool Journalism Watchdogs, there were also several other complementary and essential innovative parts of the teaching practice that led to the teaching practice, including the development of a new publishing site, The Mirror, the creation of the ‘Dogs as indiviualized webtools, and the policy proposals, presentations, and adoptions, all creating complementary and compounding impacts throughout the class, the program, and the School.