I hadn’t taught my own college course in a very long time.

I’ve taught at nearly every other level. Sunday school. K-12 classrooms. French 1 and French 2 as a graduate student. But for more than twenty-five years my work was helping other people teach: instructional design, educational technology, faculty development, workshops. I spent my career in the room next to the classroom.

This spring I was back in it.

The course was a first-time special topics offering in Skidmore’s Management and Business department called Crafting Digital Identity, one I proposed and designed, and taught outside my normal working hours. Nine students, Tuesday evenings. On paper it was about websites, portfolios, podcasting, personal branding, social media strategy and networking, and the creative and responsible use of generative AI. What I didn’t expect was that the most important lesson would have little to do with any of those tools.

By the end of the semester I understood the course as a kind of makerspace, though not the usual kind. In a traditional makerspace students build objects: prototypes, inventions, things you can hold. Here the bench was digital. The tools were multimedia, web, audio, video, and AI, and the raw material was different too. Students worked with their own experiences, values, skills, and questions about the future.

The thing being built was the student.

That reframing matters, because it names two layers of learning that were happening at once. The first layer is visible. It is the artifacts: a website on Skidmore Domains, a podcast, a set of custom AI bots, a digital narrative that draws a personalized college experience into one story. These are what students have to show.

The second layer is the one I care about more, and it is encoded in the act of making. When you learn by doing, you construct understanding for yourself. When you then build something you can share, that understanding sets. The two are not the same idea, but they reinforce each other, and the course leaned on both. Sharing did not mean making everything public. Some of what students wrote or built stayed private, and they decided on their own terms what belonged to their nascent professional identity and was worth showing the world, and what stayed in a smaller circle or stayed theirs alone. Choosing what to share is itself an act of authorship. The artifact is the cover story. The payload is agency, the quiet shift from someone who consumes tools to someone who builds them.

AI is where that shift got interesting, and where I learned the most as a designer, because the course doubled as a pilot of a new platform called BoodleBox. Much of the public conversation about AI is about speed. Can it write faster, summarize faster, generate an image on demand. Those are real questions. They were not mine.

I wanted students to think about authorship. What do you hand to AI, and what has to stay human work. How do you judge what it gives back. How do you use these systems without surrendering your own judgment.

So instead of only using AI, students built with it. They designed their own bots. One turned dense financial PDFs into auditable spreadsheet models. One was a research-writing companion a student built for her peers. One shaped raw ideas into platform-specific posts for a job search. These were not my assignments dressed up. They were tools students made because they wanted them, then used and revised across the semester.

I should be honest about my vantage point. This course had an easier relationship with AI than most, because its content was the student: personal branding, storytelling, the self. There was little for a chatbot to quietly do in a student’s place. Many of my colleagues, teaching material very different from mine, do not have that luxury.

What also makes this moment different from every earlier version of “build your own tools” is that it used to take code. Now it does not. Custom GPTs, projects, BoodleBox bots, and a fast-growing set of natural-language app builders mean a student can describe a tool in plain language and have it. The barrier that kept tool-building inside computer science is falling away, and the makerspace for the self opens to any student in any major.

The grading made room for all of this. The course used a labor-based contract. Students declared the grade they were working toward and committed to the labor behind it. They did not get to choose their grade, and they still had to do the work. What they controlled was the story they wanted to tell. One leaned into a portfolio, another into podcasting, others into bot design, reflective writing, or video.

I wasn’t sure it would work. It worked. The clearest sign was a change in the questions I heard. Students stopped asking what I wanted, and started asking what they wanted the work to become.

One student wrote about the work in a way that stayed with me. What struck me was not the praise. It was the framing: the website, the bots, the podcast, and the reflections were not separate assignments to them, but parts of one professional identity, designed on purpose and documented over time.

That is the whole thing in a sentence.

The prototype on the bench was a person. The student leaves still working on it, and leaves as someone who now knows how to build the tools that shape it. The artifacts will age. The disposition will not.

Every student deserves the chance to author a story that is truly their own. For the first time, the tools to write it are within everyone’s reach.

The course site is an open educational resource. The student work shared there is public by the students’ own choice: https://craft-digital-identity.domains.skidmore.edu/