This year, through my University, I participated in a Provost-endorsed program: AI-Enhanced Pedagogy.  The program included multiple structured events with external AI leaders (like Joseph Yun), presentations and discussions regarding different applications of student use of AI for class assignments, and 1-1 disciplinary conversations about how AI will/won’t change teaching and learning in specific fields. One of the program deliverables was a reflection on how our experiences throughout the year changed our understanding and use of AI and another was a Generative AI Philosophy video which I did specifically for the context of Mechanical Engineering, where I currently sit professionally.  I’ve included both deliverables below.

Reflections: AI-Enhanced Pedagogy program

I have really appreciated this group and the wide variety of exposure to tools, ways of using them, and the speakers.  I read Co-Intelligence and found that the 4 principles there have really helped me.  Like many of us, I initially felt a little guilty about using AI at all.  Was I cheating?  Was I rotting my brain by outsourcing tasks I could do but didn’t want to?  I feel like this group and Ethan Mollick’s “always invite AI to the table” principle really freed me of some of that.  And it’s been eye-opening.  I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of what I could be doing with it and I definitely want to stay connected to AI Horizons to keep me focused.  One thing I would like to do if I can find a willing collaborator is within Mechanical Engineering to develop a custom GPT that could be used intentionally in a course to help teach students – leveraging AI’s capabilities while implementing guardrails to avoid it simply providing answers.

A deeper question that has emerged for me—one that also came up during a panel I was on at AECT last fall in Kansas City, ‘Navigating the Future: The Role of AI in Instructional Design’—relates to foundational knowledge.  In the instructional design (ID) community, there has been discussion about using AI to help with writing learning objectives or rubrics.  I think there’s a big difference between a novice instructional designer doing that and an experienced one who has developed the expertise to be able to evaluate the output.  This expert-novice distinction applies to all fields.  It’s okay to use a calculator but it’s still important for some professions to be able to know how to do long division without one.  This is especially the case as the output continues to be what Mollick calls the “jagged frontier”: meaning AI does some things very well and other things surprisingly poorly.  One example that’s often given is counting the number of “r”s in “strawberry.”  Sometimes it gets it right, other times not so much.  But if I didn’t already have the ability to count the “r”s, I couldn’t evaluate whether it was right.  Another area I continue to grapple with—and one I feel is often overlooked—is AI’s energy usage. Is there a way to experiment responsibly or is the environmental impact already so great that using it at all is problematic?

My final point has to do with something I started thinking about a year ago and continue to have the same questions about. Are we diving headfirst into a world where we are using AI to create narrative content, often from bullet points, and then using AI to synthesize and summarize that narrative content back into bullet points?  About a year ago, I wrote a short blog post pondering this question: https://andreagreggphd.com/ai/ It’s at times hard not to wonder why we are bothering at all.  Why not just stick with bullet points since it seems that’s all we are interested in creating and consuming anyway?

AI Philosophy: Teaching and Learning in Mechanical Engineering

(I’m on the tail end of COVID in this video so please forgive the sniffling :-))

My Own Approach to Writing this Blog

It seems important to mention here that when it comes to my blog, aside from built-in spell check and grammar suggestions in Word, all my posts are authored without the assistance of AI.  I continue to enjoy the process of reflection and mental clarity required for this writing and don’t want to sacrifice that.  I also experience these posts as a form of communication with the reader and still feel there is a greater level of authenticity and connection with you when I am the one doing the writing myself.