Recent Publication on AI Policy Development in Higher Ed
Collaboration from idea to workshop to article
I’m super excited to share this co-authored piece that appeared in EDUCAUSE Review this week, Cross-Campus Approaches to Building a Generative AI Policy. My fantastic colleagues, Esther Brandon, Dana Gavin, & Allison Papini, had a great time writing this and a lot of work around this in the past year.
The piece grew out of this work and was focused on giving institutions different considerations and approaches to developing generative AI policies—something that still many folks haven’t done yet (though if you’re looking for a great collection of higher ed institutional policies, you should check out this padlet!). Thus, our hope is that this may provide different committees, institutional leaders, and whoever else may be trying to move this work forward a useful set of ideas to think about in order to do this work well.
The Collaboration
I can’t talk about a work like this without talking about the power and enjoyment of collaborating with others. Over the years, collaborating with others around workshops and presentations has always been enjoyable and proven enriching for those of us involved. More recently, working with other folks on a writing project has been equally enjoyable. Hence this year, I had three co-authored publications, two of which sprung from previous collaborations.
In this instance, the four of us came together to do a pre-conference workshop for the NERCOMP conference in March 2023: Institutional Policy Development for AI Generative Tools in Teaching and Learning. We had a lot of fun planning that and working together on it. We each brought different skills, insights, and vantage points from within higher education. And the workshop went really well.
We knew we had something and decided to write about it. From April to June, we met weekly for about 30 minutes on Zoom. We got into the room, did a quick check in, discussed what we individually wanted to work on, and then just got into writing. We’d do a quick check in at the end and then be done. It was so cool to get into a space and in 25 minutes or less watch the writing grow often by 2 pages or more. As we finished the writing, we moved into editing and repeated the process.
While working on the article, we also checked in with NERCOMP and they were interested in us doing the workshop again as a 2-day virtual workshop, which we ended up doing in November. We’ve also put in a proposal for the 2024 NERCOMP conference to continue in this work.
I say all this to say that if you are looking for ways to enhance your thinking, your work, your presentation possibilities, or your writing, connect with some colleagues and try this out. It’s amazing how much can get done in small pockets of time and it’s so energizing to be in community with folks in such small spurts. While it can feel small and hard to get a lot done, in 30 minutes, we still managed to connect, share, and work on the project—and that can provide a lot of sustenance from some of the other minutia one might be working on in the day-to-day work.
AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
