An Update You Can Skip

Where I do the thing to say "hi" to all the readers and encourage them to consider ways of supporting this work...

Hey, it’s been about 5 months and 30+ posts since I’ve started Substack. I’ve greatly appreciated it as a space for me to figure things out, to share with others, and to learn from many of you.

Most recently in the last month or so, my readership nearly doubled and I find myself reaching over 1300 readers at the time of this writing—which is amazing and cool and it means there’s a lot of folks who I don’t know or am not directly connected to in some way. That’s both cool and a lil intimidating.

I thought I would take the time to do 3 things in this post given that growth. The first is thank you all because I so do appreciate you being here. The second is to talk about why I’m doing this—particularly for folks that are just tuning in. The final piece is to encourage you to be active and engaged with what I put out (that will encourage the tiniest of nudges to consider subscribing, but no obligations).

Let’s get started!

Image source: DALL-E 3 from ChatGPT 4

Thank you

Hello everybody! I’m so glad we’re all here and excited to know this newsletter has been providing something useful to you all around generative AI and education.

Thank you all! No really! Having you all here makes me think differently about what I say and how I approach this work. Knowing there are folks interested and invested in my work, both contributes to motivating me to keep doing it as publicly as I am but also gives me other perspectives (directly and indirectly) to consider.

I owe particular thanks to the folks who have decided to subscribe to this newsletter financially. I didn’t get into this to make money from the Substack but deeply appreciate the handful of folks who have chosen to support this work—it means a lot.

As deeply appreciative as I am to them, I’m also just grateful that folks are here for my explorations. It’s a strange time to be in higher education for so many reasons and yet, I feel like I might be able to offer some guidance, support, or insight to this one particular avenue of it all. Seeing so many reading this tells me that I just might be right on that!

I’m not trying to say that I’m writing because I have an audience; but rather because so many readers are my peers and colleagues across higher ed and beyond, it feels more like conversation and sharing of learning that perhaps we’re all trying to figure out.

What (and Why) Am I Doing Here?

It’s strange, I’ve been blogging for for 13 years and am pretty sure that blog has a small and consistent readership (I’d guess 50 or so, two-thirds of which are friends and colleagues). That’s not a complaint but an observation. That blog is really a place where I try out and do different things, which means it’s a smorgasbord of writings on all sorts of things. But this space, well, this was and is intentional; it’s to provide a place for me to work through my ideas around generative AI in higher education, share those ideas, and also make it clear as I can what sense I am making of it.

Within that, is a belief that I have the abilities to help and guide others around this because of the intersection of interests and pursuits I’ve accumulated over the last two decades in my professional and personal pursuits. With degrees in history (bachelor’s), criminal justice (associate’s), American studies (master’s), public administration (master’s), instructional design (master’s), and (hopefully soon) higher education (PhD), I’ve got quite the eclectic but useful academic background to explore this subject. Coupled with that is 18 years of teaching and 15 years of working with faculty. There’s also a broad range of institutions including working at a community college, a small liberal arts college, a research institution, an Ivy League (in a research center on Internet and society), and a younger niche institution focused on degree completion. None of this is to brag but to give context to the different lenses I bring to bear on these conversations—I’ve been around the block and carry each of those places with me as I explore this work.

Ultimately, my hope for this space is to offer an environment where folks can learn about AI, get some insights and feel more settled (or appropriately unsettled as the case may be) with what it is, what it isn’t, and where they can determine their own edges around AI and its place in higher education. Hopefully, I can help folks figure out what is your line in usage of these complicated tools?

By talking about generative AI, sharing my own experiments, the different other works (talks, publications, videos, etc), and responding to themes I see in the overall conversation, I believe I can offer folks some paths to explore without having to fully commit to them just yet.

An Invitation to Engage

Ok, so now, I’m going to do the ask. Not a huge ask but really, just offering a menu of possibilities for folks who are regularly reading this. When I write on my other blog, I’m primarily writing for myself—I am my own audience. It’s great if others find value in it but a lot of it is just sharing my own sensemaking. This space is different, I want this to be helpful and in conversation with folks. Therefore, some engagement can go a long way in doing that.

So what does that look like?

Like, Comment, Share

Within any given post, providing comments and reflections are tremendously helpful. I know there are a lot of brilliant and thoughtful people here so I’d love to learn and be engaged with you all. I typically will respond if I can and also, your contributions can often point me in new directions for posts. Conversations around these ideas are always going to be welcomed as it helps me to understand how folks are responding to the content.

But even if you have nothing to say, hitting the heart icon or just restacking the post within the Substack environment lets me know that folks are both reading it and finding it useful. Of course, along those lines, resharing it on other social media is also helpful (particularly, if you tag me so I can see if any conversation emerges). These both let me know folks are reading and finding it helpful while also creating opportunities for others to find their way into this conversation here.

Would I want more paying subscribers? Sure, I would not say no to that, given the work that I’m doing here including both writing and sharing materials that I’ve created from video content to resources from talks I’ve given. But I would say that if folks know of opportunities to which I would fit well—doing a talk or presentation, helping a team, department, or institution navigate the AI and education discussion, or some other project—to reach out and invite me. If you’re curious about the quality of work, you can always check out the testimonials about my work from the different institutions that I have done work for over the last 7-8 years.

Finally, one of the most exciting ways to engage is to become a contributor to this substack. This could be an exploration of a particular topic or angle around generative AI and education. It could also be a conversation (recorded, edited, and formatted for this space) between us. It could be an interview with someone you’ve wanted to talk to. It could be contributing to the Research Insight series with a selection of articles. I’m pretty open to ideas and then figuring out how to make them work for this space. So if you got something, you should definitely the Contribute to AI+Edu=Simplified page.

One final thing—I know these “asking” posts can be annoying or cringey. I’m not a fan of doing them and was reluctant to do so. I don’t plan to do it often—if I write a post a week, I hope that it might be only one a year depending upon on readership growth. But I thank everyone for putting up with it (especially if you actually made it to this point in this post).

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AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International