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| Bear the Cat Is Not Ready for AI |
The last few months have given me the opportunity to talk at a few different places about generative AI and some of the concerns, challenges, and opportunities. Many of these I've given and while some were recorded, they were recorded for the organizations I was giving them to. As is my open practice, I like to make these available to a larger group. I often share the slides and resources with Creative Commons licenses. What I've been doing lately is actually re-recording the videos and posting them on my YouTube channel. I decided to pull these together here and share them with folks in case you're interested in learning more.
I'll lean in further with the descriptions for each, but what I appreciate here is watching the slide decks and arc evolve as I've gone along in this work. Yes, of course, my pets largely stay in all my slides (I am a professional after all--hahahha), but I feel like each one has something different to offer folks. Anyways, I hope these provide some guidance and help for others.
NERCOMP, February 2023
This was the first big presentation on generative AI that I gave and there were about 150-200 in attendance for this NERCOMP webinar. For the previous few months, I had been engaging with my personal learning network including colleagues, students, and many different folks around the web while supplementing my knowledge and understanding with additional audiobooks. I felt comfortable and ready enough but wanted to give a talk a specific angle and that was contextualizing it for faculty and administrators. For this talk, I did a dive into helping to capture where this technology fit into the landscape of educational technology. I felt this was important because the conversations I was seeing were ignoring this. Additionally, I wanted this talk to also provide faculty with pathways or frameworks to explore generative AI--that is, I didn't want to prescribe to them what to do (not entirely true personally, but professionally, it's what I needed to do) but rather help them understand the different ways they might approach it.
Rhode Island Career Development Association, February 2023
This is one of those where I might have overprepared yet apparently nailed the dismount. A colleague asked me to join this group to share some insights about generative AI. I updated my approach here as the focus was what role does generative AI have in the job and career development process. I emphasized one of the best elements of generative AI and that is how it unlocks the hidden curriculum of the world and blows apart the artificiality of the cover letter (I really dislike the rhetorical and performative aspects of the cover letter--a post for another time?). I also did a bit more live demoing on at this talk which helped folks get generative AI's potential a bit more substantial. This was a bit of a different audience than usual for me but it seemed like I had a strong and clear enough message to help them think differently about generative AI.
Post University, April 2023
I felt comfortable with talking about generative AI with faculty by the time this talk came around. I was thrown off by last-minute logistics when my contact person didn't have the right zoom controls and we had to scramble a little bit. But the presentation evolved here to think about the different groups faculty might find themselves in and what they might need to move to another. I also used an insight from my colleague and best friend that helped me to understand (and frame) the depth of change that generative AI can represent. I think a good share of this presentation was helping faculty feel recognized for the intensity of challenges that generative AI represents.
Harvard University, May 2023
I had some nervousness about this talk--less because it was "Harvard" and more because it was a niche population: Dental faculty (and some medical faculty). I haven't had as much direct relationship with dental faculty and so was a little concerned about how to thread the loop of connecting a lot of my faculty experience, generative AI, and generative AI. I managed to do that by trimming down my presentation a bit and introducing the ChatGPT query log where I walked folks through some of the questions that I asked it about teaching dentistry. I also ultimately provided them with the full query log of 20 questions. Sharing this and talking through the strategies with it were helpful. Because of how this presentation played out, I barely managed to get to the final slide (we were in discussion) but the conversation proved rich and demonstrated that indeed folks found it incredibly helpful.
North Shore Community College
This felt like a homecoming. I graduate from NSCC; it was the first place I taught in 2006; I became an instructional designer at NSCC; I've got life-long and dear friends from NSCC. It's a home and to be asked to come and talk with my colleagues about generative AI was an absolute honor and pleasure. This talk gave me some time to pull together the other two presentations and make some additional tweaks. I similarly used ChatGPT to create examples of questions and answers that would be helpful for faculty to wrap their heads around how they might use it. My talk was part of a (mini) Summer Institute they were running--an annual event for over a decade and I was part of planning and participating in the first one.
Updated Video & Resources
Based upon the last few talks, I decided to do another video to make my work more widely available than to the audiences that were there. No one here should be surprised that I wanted to continue to make my work accessible. So this video (32:15 minutes) is similar in many ways to the previous 3 talks with many of the same points but provided here in case people find it helpful in their own sense-making around generative AI and education.
If you get the chance to watch any of the videos or check out the resources, let me know what you think or what else you're looking forward.
Finally, since I am sharing, it's worth including the other resources I've created and been sharing around ChatGPT, generative AI and teaching and learning in case those too are of value to folks:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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