Colloquium: Dr. Justin Olmanson
Tuesday, April 28
3:30 PM
115 Avery Hall
"AI Fatigue Across Contexts: Learning, Programming, and Human–LLM Workflows"
Abstract: Recent discussions of “AI fatigue” describe professionals overwhelmed by shifting role expectations, unproductive prompting loops, “70%-there” outputs, and frequent context switching in open-ended knowledge work. While this account resonates in many professional settings, AI fatigue does not appear to manifest uniformly or as acutely across learning contexts. In most academic environments, student work is structured by assignment boundaries that constrain scope, impose clear stopping rules, and value learning and growth over product. Programming and other open-ended academic tasks, however, begin to weaken these boundaries. As debugging, iterative refinement, feature expansion, and product-as-instantiation-of-learning all become central to the project-based learning task; the architecture of effort can start to resemble professional practice. Drawing on a multi-study research program examining how students use large language models for coursework, academic reading, and programming, this talk introduces a taxonomy of AI use as a framework for understanding how AI can sustainably fit in professional and learning contexts. I conclude with suggestions for how we might better prepare students for an AI-infused professional landscape that differs in important ways from their collegiate experience.
Bio: Justin Olmanson’s research interests / work is focused on how AI, particularly generative AI, can be used to engage each human’s full communicative and sense-making repertoires within the learning process.
Specifically, via multi-agent systems, aiming to ensure that AI:
• harnesses human diversity;
• enables transformative learning;
• is applied across multiple scales; and
• is strategically employed across the taxonomy of scaffolding for learning.
Olmanson’s interests in collaborative technical development are wider, with a lab / skill set that includes: design-based research, server-side development, APIs, web application prototype development (python, JavaScript, full stack, SQL, MongoDB, Neo4j, Pinecone).
An associate professor of learning technologies at UNL, Olmanson leads the Innovative Learning Technologies program in the College of Education and Human Sciences. He is a member of the faculty senate and its Information Technology subcommittee, an advisory board member for UNL's Center for Transformative Teaching, and a member of the Center for Intelligent Health Care at UNMC, and in these roles, he leverages his experience in emerging digital technologies, learning and curriculum theory, design-based research, and strategic initiatives to support the University of Nebraska System, UNL, the college, and the department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education. He founded the educational software and consulting company, B Street Systems, and co-founded the nano-bioscience company, B Street Biological Systems, serving as Chief Technology and Chief Experience Officer.
Olmanson designs and develops educational experiences that support students in engaging with new and challenging learning practices, including computational and mathematical problem solving, language and literacies development, as well as transdisciplinary knowledge construction. His work integrates technical innovation in AI with insights on curriculum, learning theory, and pedagogy. His research group actively investigates multi-agent systems applied to education and healthcare. As part of this mission, his group also develops frameworks for human-agent interaction in learning.
Olmanson’s research has been featured at venues such as AERA, NORA, EdTechX, CALL, and ACM's SigDoc. He has co-designed and developed CipherLand, Distributed Biography, FunWritr, InfoWriter, Chinese Character Helper, iPLA Alex-TA, Advising Helper, Giuseppe Creative Coding Bot, and Blood Antigen Tutor. He completed postdoctoral and graduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (postdoc), the University of Texas Austin (PhD), Harvard University (MEd), and the University of Houston (MEd).