As the Paris games go on, I cannot help but think that if AI were an Olympic sport, I would hope to qualify. In the last two years, I’ve done more lectures and presentations than I can count on AI. And every time during the presentation week, I scramble to update things about it. The worst case was in the early days of AI detection while flying out to a conference and having to overhaul a significant part of my presentation during my layover in SeaTac. AI is anything but an easy subject to stay current on, and it impacts higher education.
Upcoming Presentation
One topic that has sparked my curiosity is the concept and future role of AI-generated video or avatars in education. It’s an area I’ve been experimenting with, revisiting my alter AI ego, “Alan,” and exploring Colossyan’s AI avatar and voice-generating suite.
I am in the process of updating, once again, my “AI in Higher Education” workshop and will be first teaching it at the end of the summer. As educators, we rely on evergreen content for our materials; AI makes that nearly impossible. Since 2022, almost 90% of design and practice considerations have become dated and require updates with the current landscape of AI. As I wrote in the Summer State of AI post, the pace sometimes feels like an Olympic marathon. Things like “Checking your prompt in AI” and “referencing non-text-based resources“ are tips that have gone the wayside. Much of the AI resources available to anyone, or in the hands of students, include computer vision, which provides users the ability to have AI see into an image and draw context out. AI can “see” into videos as well, transcribing it. AI could bypass the need for transcription and process the video directly…if it hasn’t already by the time you read this.
Using course only resources because AI doesn’t have it in the LLM no longer helps as RAG AI becomes more and more user friendly to build. ChatGPT “GPTs” in theory could be created to become the perfect study buddy for a student in the right hands. Not to mention that the amount of text that can be freely fed into most AI’s has been increased to pages, and its ability to store that into a memory over time unlocks a lot of potential positively and negatively for teaching and learning. Between now and September, I’m trying to update course design and practice considerations, and hoping to find avenues to advocate for AI’s positive use as just an evolution to overall technology literacy.
Something I use within my presentation is an old adage I heard growing up in an Air Force family: Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome. It is an ethos I’ve carried in many different ways in my professional life, and now have modified it for AI and academic technology as a whole: Adapt, improve, Utilize. Regardless of anyone’s “belief” in what AI means for society, it is here and disrupting things no differently than the Internet once did. Just like in the 90s, society adapted. We are in education, improvised, and eventually wove it into our curriculum and found the value of teaching its literacy. And now we all utilize it ubiquitously. AI is on track to do similar things by and large. In the words of Battlestar Galactica, “All this has happened before and shall happen again. “
“All this has happened before and shall happen again. “
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