Doing Social Research: The Podcast · Doing Social Research

AI and Higher Learning with Mish Boutet

·59 min·2 clips

CHUO 89.1 FM's AI and Higher Learning opens with Mish talking to University of Ottawa sociology professor Phyllis Rippey about what AI means for students. The setup is straightforward, but the conversation quickly moves into the messy part: how to help students use the tools without letting them skip the thinking. Rippey stays grounded. She keeps coming back to assignment design, making the case for work that is tied to a specific class and harder to pull from a homework site or an old file on the internet. One example comes from a survey design course where students collected their own data and then had to use that same data in the next class. That choice makes the task feel more real, and it makes cheating less useful. The discussion does not treat academic integrity as suddenly easy. Rippey acknowledges the critiques around AI and the real problems it raises, while also saying social scientists and people in the humanities still need to ask the questions rather than avoid them. Mish gives that room to breathe. The pace stays loose enough for side roads. The conversation shifts into search behavior, SEO, and the way Google rewards what appears on the first pages of results. Rippey talks about helping with a website and learning how few people look past the first results. That detail turns the AI talk into a broader point about visibility online and what gets seen first. The episode keeps that connection in view without getting preachy. It stays conversational, with pauses, clarifications, and the occasional detour doing real work. That makes the ideas easier to follow, even when the answer is more uneasy than tidy. The result is a thoughtful interview about teaching, writing, and the systems that decide what gets seen.

As heard by us

A steady, practical look at AI, writing, and classroom integrity.

AI and Higher Learning treats AI in education as a classroom problem with real tradeoffs, not a theory exercise. Mish Bhute speaks with University of Ottawa sociology professor Phyllis Rippey about assignments that actually make students think, and about academic integrity as…

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If AI has you rethinking essays, this gives you a real classroom conversation.

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