Episode 42: Mark Watkins

“It was the first time I was introduced to the idea of academic integrity—because I had done something.”

“Assessment is broken now that AI’s here. It probably wasn’t in great shape beforehand.”

In this 42nd episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, Tricia speaks with Marc Watkins, Assistant Director of Academic Innovation and Lecturer of Writing & Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, and author of the popular Substack - Rhetorica.

After revealing that he learned about academic integrity from his fourth grade teacher, Marc and Tricia explore the challenging and nuanced middle ground between AI hype and AI resistance. How we both teach students (and faculty) about the harms and downsides of AI reliance harms of the AI hype, the moral compromises baked into edtech, and the challenges . Watkins calls for nuanced discernment rather than blind resistance or enthusiastic adoption and advocates for teaching critical AI literacy and AI fluency as essential durable human skills.

From handwritten journals in hybrid courses to AI-fueled loneliness and student mental health, this episode ranges widely—and offers practical strategies to bring students back into relationship with learning, and each other.

You can follow Marc on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-watkins-7a760356/) and keep up with his writing, thinking and teaching at https://marcwatkins.substack.com/ and https://marcwatkins.org/.

(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using Youtube's Transcript and ChatGPT and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human).