Introduction

One thing I find personally fascinating is just how much I was already living in an AI world without really even knowing it. Some examples. This morning when I was texting my best friend, who also likes to get up at 4:00 AM, the phone suggested the next line of text, and even though I don’t use that, it was still an option and it was still happening without my really doing anything to the technology. Then, this morning, later, when I was getting ready and I put my three-year-old in front of a cartoon, educational, of course, Netflix recommended the next show that he should watch. Again, something’s happening in the background with analytics and AI that I don’t even think about. And finally, later today, after work, I’m planning to go to the nursery and stock up on some summer blooms, and I am not so great with directions, so I’m gonna use my GPS, and that’s AI in one day without me even thinking about it, and just happening.

Now, all of those examples are based around what we might call traditional AI, and that kind of AI, as I noted, has kind of been making our lives easier for years without us really thinking about it. But, as you know, something remarkable happened recently. We’re moving away from AI that just helps us do things faster to AI that can actually create alongside us. I remember actually the first time I asked ChatGPT to help me generate discussion questions for an argument-writing course I was teaching online, and argument writing can be controversial because students are free to choose any topic that they’re interested in and argue any side that they feel is valuable, and sometimes having conversations about difficult dialogue is difficult for me as an educator, and so I asked ChatGPT for five different approaches, and it sparked ideas that I hadn’t really thought of. Some were kind of gamification, not taking away the seriousness of the issue, but just leading in with a little bit of community-building before you get to the difficult stuff, and that’s something that maybe I would have come to on my own eventually, but I was so stuck in the moment, worrying about the difficulty of the difficult conversations, that I kind of couldn’t get past that to the brainstorming phase, and ChatGPT helped me with that. It gave me a place to start, it helped me move beyond what normally and often actually happens, which is kind of like a paralysis or a little bit of a teaching block. But I moved past it right away, and then I started to get excited that there were possibilities and there were different ways to look at it that I hadn’t considered, and that wasn’t intimidating or overwhelming for me, it was exciting.

And so I think that’s one of the key differences about traditional AI and generative AI. Traditional AI might help you spell-check an email, but generative AI can help you explore new ways to frame an idea. It can offer you multiple perspectives on a topic or even generate variations on a teaching approach that you’re developing, or is already in use. Now, I know what some people might be thinking. That sounds too good to be true, what about academic integrity, or even, how do I know when it’s appropriate to use AI in these ways? And these are all absolutely valid questions, and we’ll touch upon every one of them in this course. But here’s what I’ve learned personally. When we use it intentionally, AI isn’t here to replace the intellectual work of teaching. Again, it’s here to serve as a collaborative partner. So when AI helps you explore ideas or generate multiple options, you still have to bring your expertise, your knowledge of students, your pedagogical judgment, and even your values and teaching philosophy, to evaluate, refine, and implement those ideas. Now, the video that we’ve included from ‘Generative AI in a nutshell’ will give you the technical foundation here, but remember, you don’t need to understand electricity to flip a light switch, and similarly, you don’t need to be a computer scientist to use AI effectively as a thinking partner in your teaching. So, I’m gonna encourage us to embrace this moment of possibility together. The future of education is really being written right now, and if we want, we can be a part of that story, or even write important chapters in it.