The Updated Comprehensive List of Talks & Resources for 2024
What have I been up to....
It’s been over a month since I posted last. I swear, this isn’t the death of this newsletter (is the average life of most blogs/newsletters still 6 months like it was back in the late 2000s and early 2010s when I first started blogging?). But December has been a hell of a month.
The month started with a new job. I’ve gotten to do some amazing things at College Unbound (including a lot of AI-related stuff), but found it was time to transition. On Dec 2, I started as the Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching and Learning at Northeastern University as part of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research (CATLR). It’s a very exciting new role and one that I feel ready to tackle and figure out (in many ways a lot of what I’ve been doing here has hopefully prepared me for it!).
But after starting December 2024 with a new job, I figured the only other way to double-down on making the end of the year both challenging and exciting was to (finally) defend my dissertation—which happened on December 10! You can read about my experience here and the text and slides of my defense here. So after those two big things, I decided to take a bit of time to recover the rest of December (ok, and some edits that I’m working on with the dissertation after the defense—because, what’s a defense with out some edits!).
Now that those are past, I hope to be on a much more regular schedule again with sharing thoughts, ideas, resources, and conversations here.
Every 6 months or so, I have been sharing the talks and keynotes that I’ve done. You can find my last post from July 1st here for the first half of 2024. I share the slides and the resources mostly just so others might also borrow and benefit from this work. I firmly believe that we are better for sharing, borrowing, and learning from one another and it’s these types of playing out in the open that has been super beneficial for my own development (see this co-authored and open-access piece with Maha Bali & Anna Mills for more about how this has been done specifically with AI)….
Myfest
This MyFest session, Leaning In and Leading With Students: An Open Pedagogical Approach to Exploring AI with Students, was 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.
The Consortium for Belize Educational Cooperation
This keynote for COBEC was named: Sensemaking and Translating: Finding the Right Balance of Usage With Generative AI. The session explored the topic of generative AI in teaching and learning through a mixture of interactive conversations between the speaker and participants about what generative AI is, what it isn’t, what we want to consider about its use, and where we should be clear about not using it–for ourselves, our students, and our institutions. From there, the discussion pivoted to considering practical ways to engage with generative AI for teaching and learning and navigating some of the challenges in figuring out what to do next.
Providence College
Providence College invited me to do two lightning talks. I did the slides and then also recorded them afterward to make them available to others.
5 Tips for Using Generative AI with Students
5 Tips for Generative AI for Designing & Creating Learning
Suffolk University
This workshop was for student support services and I covered in more detail here. But it proved really helpful for the student support side (student advising, accessibility services, tutoring, international student center, etc)
North Dakota State University
This keynote, Out…Standing in My Field: What Should I Make of This Whole AI Thing, Anway!?!??!, explored 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? This keynote was followed by two similar interactive sessions where participants played with different prompts and challenges. All materials are in the slide deck and resources for those sessions.
Springfield Technical Community College
For this workshop, participants engaged in activities that help them to more effectively use generative AI with students in order to improve reflection and critical inquiry skills. This hands-on session guided faculty through testing out prompts, interacting critically with generative AI, and building out activities, resources and assessments that were collectively shared among the group for everyone's benefit.
New England Institute of Technology
This talk for a NEIT’s faculty development program was to kick off a day of professional development and was framed to help engage faculty about the challenges and possibilities that generative AI represents for them and their students.
Northeastern University
This day-long workshop focused on faculty developers and how to support them in guiding and helping faculty in their work. It resulted in this post about 4 Steps for Supporting Faculty with GenAI.
AAC&U’s Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum
For this program, I designed and presented, Chatbots, Projects, Notebooks and Pages: Leveraging customizable features of different AI tools (which also turned into this post, Some New AI Tools to Play With). Here is the session description: Many of the most popular generative AI tools have customizable features that can be incredibly helpful for staff, faculty, and students. In this session, we'll explore a couple of them, how to create them, and relevant use cases. This will include Custom GPTs with ChatGPT, Projects with Claude, Notebooks with Google's Gemini, and Pages with Perplexity. By the end of the session, participants will be able to more strongly understand the value of these tools and guide others in the deployment of them.
University of Saint Joseph
For this talk and brief workshop, AI've Got the Power: Engaging with Generative AI for Teaching and Learning, faculty were considered some of the challenges, opportunities, and questions that we are grappling with around generative AI through a mixture of discussion, hand-on activities, and reflection. The session gave faculty an opportunity to use generative AI in a space that provides both guidance and freedom to dig into these tools and consider their place in the teaching and learning context.
KAMO Educational Leadership Conference
This conference hosted by Pittsburg State University (of Kansas) and I was invited to do a virtual talk to a live audience of educators—primarily in the K-12 realm or college students in that career trajectory. It was a little bit out of my wheelhouse and also the live crowd and virtual person is always tricky.
New England Faculty Development Council
I’ve also talked about this keynote before and why it was important for me here. Over two months later, and I’m still getting folks mentioning how this talk, What If GenAI Is a Nothing Burger?, was valuable to them. It was one of the most intense 36 hours of the year. I gave this talk at 9:30am, I was offered the new position at Northeastern University at 3:30pm, accepted the next morning, and took a flight to Paris in the afternoon for my 10 year anniversary.
Herzing University
This was one of two sessions that I did for Herzing University on the same day. The second session was a co-facilitated session on engagement and interaction in asynchronous and synchronous virtual learning spaces with my colleague and friend, Deborah Kronenberg. This session, Collaborating with AI: Using GenAI to Enhance Teaching and Amplify Teaching and Learning, was one of my typical interactive talks.
Western Governors University
This was a 4-day program (2 hours a day) that delved into how student and faculty support can thoughtfully engage with generative AI. It ranged from using AI for administrative tasks to prompt development to examining case studies and edge cases as well as constructing individual ethical considerations about how to use these tools thoughtfully. It was one of the most challenging and engaging sessions I had this year as the group brought a lot of thoughtful and insightful considerations to every session.
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
I was honored to be asked to come back to UMASS Lowell, a place I taught at for about 4-5 years and have some really amazing colleagues at. This talk, Who's Cheating Who? Reconsidering The Value Proposition of Generative AI, Higher Education & The Way We See Students, offered an interesting question about generative AI--what do we lose if we don't meaningfully engage with this new, ubiquitous, and challenging technology in our classrooms with our students? Are we cheating our students or preparing for a world where it is everywhere? While there is a place for concerns about academic honesty, it can't be the barrier that keeps us from critically engaging with these tools by ourselves, with our colleagues, and with our students. Join us to help untangle and consider how we can reimagine our relationship with AI--not as something to avidly avoid or something that is utopic in any way--but as a complicated technology that urgently needs our wisdom.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
This session considered some of the challenges and opportunities that AI represents in education by exploring what the future might look like with and without AI. This discussion leads to reconsidering how concerned we should be about AI, before moving into examining what might be new possibilities for using these tools or collaborating with others around AI in ways that do feel more aligned with our values.
Magna AI Conference
In this talk, Bots, Projects, Notebooks and Pages: Exploring customizable AI features, I tried to do a survey of what’s new similar to the AAC&U talk above.
Reflection
I end 2024 with having done over 50 talks, workshops, and panels on generative AI, mostly at colleges and universities, or adjacent organizations. I’ve become part of the AAC&U’s faculty for their Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum and a facilitator for a Teaching with AI series for EDUCAUSE. I had the honor to organize a day-long event about AI in educational development spaces for NERCOMP in November and bring together nearly 20 different folks in the New England area that are doing cool things and/or engaging in meaningful discussions about AI. And now, I’ve taken a role that’s focused specifically on generative AI in education. This substack has gone from just under 600 followers to 4,600 followers (which is nuts and amazing!).
I always like to say that I don’t think I could backward design my career—it’s continued to feel emergent over the decades. Still, these last two years have seemed more so on levels I wasn’t prepared for.
In looking at what has happened, I appreciate the many opportunities I’ve had to engage with faculty, learn from them, and support their own figuring out about how to go forward with generative AI. I continue to try to balance the idea that I’m an “expert” brought into talk about and support institutions around this and yet, so much of what happens for me is learning and insight from listening and engaging with faculty.
I’m also grateful and blessed to have some sagacious people this past year that I’ve looked to and learned from about how to navigate my career in this new space. I will probably be reflecting more about this aspect of my career on my personal blog—discussing what it means to be a more public figure where you are getting regular requests to do talks, workshops, and consultations and how to make sense of it (or at least how I’m making sense of it). Still, several folks have helped me think a lot more about how to do this and I would be remiss if I didn’t specifically call out Bryan Alexander, Lauren Barbeau, Robin DeRosa, and Liza Talusan. I’m sure there are books (or audiobooks) and different guides to how to figure this out. But having folks who either are or have travelled this road who provided thoughtful and caring responses to my questions made a lot of difference and helped me make decisions that were right for me and others.
In terms of thinking about generative AI in teaching and learning over the last two years, I don’t know that I have a lot of great insight to offer other than I continue to feel I have a lot to learn. In the new year, I hope to carve out more time to actively play with and try out different things with generative AI. I envision creating a jam group of colleagues and friends to come together every other week for 60 minutes (or some kind of similar pacing). The idea would be to get together and play with generative AI. We’d either have a common goal or just figure out our own goals. We’d play for 45 minutes with a GenAI tool (or more than one) and see what we can do, learn, and share back to the group.
I keep thinking that while I can continue to help translate or come up with adjacent use-cases, I still feel like I’m scratching the surface. I think a lot of folks think that GenAI is all surface and I can’t deny that in many areas, it still feels that way. But I wonder if that is the result of general disdain for GenAI or a lack of imagination to think about what this tool does differently that might be value added. To me that’s a really interesting place to dive into over this next year. Mayhaps some of the readers here would be intrigued to join me in this endeavor?
In part, I think this will be an exciting opportunity for collaboration and also I think it will be helpful to be thinking about what’s next. My guess or maybe my hope is that in the next year, institutions start to think about what’s next with GenAI? Beyond the introduction, how else do we meaningfully engage with or navigate the challenges that GenAI represents in education? Can we move beyond surfaces uses or the cheating conversation? Not that these aren’t important parts in the process of figuring it out and some folks still need to engage in this phase. Rather, what if these frames are holding us back or blocking us from the way forward? That’s probably a bit too vague and I don’t think it makes sense for me to go on about this much longer here—that’s a bit of what I hope to further explore in this substack going forward.
For now, I’ll end with just saying, it’s been a hell of a year on many fronts. I’m extremely grateful for the readers, friends, and colleagues here and out in the world that have helped me continue to think about generative AI in education and look forward to more learning and conversing with y’all in 2025.
AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Love the idea of collaborating! I’ve also been presenting on genAI tools at national conferences in the teaching, research and practice space. I’ll send you an invite on LinkedIn.
Your exploration of generative AI's potential beyond just 'surface' interactions really resonates; the idea of creating intentional spaces to play and discover feels so vital. At the same time, many students I meet are deeply concerned about the ethics of using AI from a resource perspective - particularly in terms of water use, and the exploitation of labour in sub-Saharan Africa. Have you come across any thoughtful resources that speak to these concerns?