AI

Lance Eaton facilitates the MYFest session held on 15 July 2024. This session is a case study of how College Unbound worked with students to develop their institutional policy on the use of generative AI for students and faculty. From there, the session explored through conversation, activities, and sharing how we can think and learn with students about how to critically use generative AI in general and in our respective disciplines.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 26 June 2024. Sometimes caricatured as mere regurgitators of online content, tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are more like a growing child that is facile at fabricating fresh ideas and novel imagery. A peek under the hood of these models will equip participants to grasp their special brand of creativity, along with their limits in representing diverse perspectives and potential for disinformation.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 27 June 2024 with the full title: Thinking Machines? Or Lying, Cheating, and Stealing Machines? This interactive workshop encourages participants to critically examine how and why generative AI tools were designed and what that means for their use in education. Topics of exploration include: Bias, Hallucinations, Exploitation of Human Labor, Data & Privacy, Digital Divide, Academic Integrity, and Intellectual Property Rights. As participants explore each of these topics, they will consider how to bring these critical issues into their practice and how to help prepare students to become critical AI users.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 27 June 2024. Maturity, whether in childhood development or in AI use, means knowing when to trust instinctual responses and when to check their unimpeded influence. Drawing on a range of sources from the mathematics of probability to Roman history, this workshop proposes a framework for sifting appropriate uses of AI from those that can cause undue harm, be they in healthcare, business, or education. (Spoiler: it’s not high- versus low-risk tasks!)

Anna Mills facilitates the MYFest session held on 26 June 2024 with the full title: AI for Writing Feedback: Supporting a Human-Centered Writing Process and Building AI Literacy. In this interactive session, we’ll test out various forms of targeted AI writing feedback. How can AI feedback be incorporated to support students’ development of their own voice and ideas and also to give students practice questioning plausible AI advice? Can we put AI in a limited place where it supplements the responses of human readers and stimulates student thinking without telling them what to write? We’ll explore student comments on how it felt to use AI feedback from recent pilots of the teacher-created app MyEssayFeedback.ai.

Jon Ippolito facilitates the MYFest session held on 25 June 2024. In this three-part session series, we use the metaphoric structure: AI as a Growing Child. So in this first session we describe AI’s impact on democracy as the “adolescent phase,” where it can be rebellious and unpredictable. Just as it would be irresponsible to let a young child adolescent play with a firearm, AI and elections are a volatile mix. From deep-faked images of politicians to more subtle threats that can disable government infrastructure, this session demonstrates how AI tools can help saboteurs destabilize democracy. Participants learn the weaknesses of commonly proposed solutions like AI watermarks as well as other solutions with a greater chance of safeguarding the democratic process.