Out…Standing in My Field: What Should I Make of This Whole AI Thing, Anyway!?!??!

Lance Eaton, ABD
College Unbound

Explore some of the real challenges and concerns about how faculty navigate generative AI before pivoting into a richer discussion about the implications of these tools and their ubiquity. What are the concerns, the unknowns, and the possibilities of generative AI in the college classroom in the 21st century? The session will be a mixture of interaction between the speaker and participants drawing out what is and isn’t working while also allowing the speaker to draw upon a variety of examples, contents, and considerations that can help guide faculty to more effectively engage with generative AI. The goal will be to help participants better understand why an engaged approach (rather than dismissing or banning generative AI) will help them and their students to more effectively understand and determine the right lines to draw as it relates to generative AI’s uses in teaching, learning, and assessment.

You will:

• Clarify the possibilities and benefits of using generative AI in teaching and learning.
• Identify concerns about using generative AI and how to address them.
• Discuss with students the concerns about using generative AI tools.
• Apply effective prompts to get more robust outcomes.

Lance Eaton is the director of Faculty Development & Innovation at College Unbound, a part-time instructor at North Shore Community College, and a doctorate student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston with a dissertation that focuses on how scholars engage in academic piracy. His work engages with the possibility of digital tools for expanding teaching and learning communities while considering the various deep issues and questions that educational technologies open up for students, faculty, and higher ed as a whole. He has given talks, written about, and presented at conferences on artificial intelligence generative tools in education, academic piracy, open access, OER, open pedagogy, hybrid flexible learning, and digital service-learning.