As a staunch supporter of an open Internet, where advice can be freely shared, I'm stumped by the lack of results form a few simple Duck Duck Go queries:
- University sources Podcast Scripting for AI
- College guides Podcast scripting for AI
Fordham's page on using ElevenLabs proved the only hit that was not from some start-up trying to hawk AI services. This outcome discourages me greatly. Here's why.
Universities, even ones under the hammer of Federal and state funding cuts, have robust I.T. presences. Internal materials for faculty and students can be shared with no more than a few high-level links. To me the lack of materials portends either a lack of care about reaching beyond the campus gates (a sad lack of marketing savvy) or, more ominously, that colleges and universities are as ill-prepared as Ian Bogost claims in his recent Atlantic piece, "College Students Have Already Changed Forever." Bogost notes that "plenty of professors are oblivious. It isn’t that they fail to understand the nature of the threat to classroom practice. But my recent interviews with colleagues have led me to believe that, on the whole, faculty simply fail to grasp the immediacy of the problem. Many seem unaware of how utterly normal AI has become for students. For them, the coming year could provide a painful revelation."
One would think that schools such as Washington U at St. Louis, where Bogost is on the faculty, would do a great deal, as Ohio State has begun with its recent initiative. I found this page on AI resources at Washington University, but you must scroll to the bottom to get resources for faculty. Mostly, the page emphasizes new degree programs for students. Digging in a bit, I found this page for teaching activities, a page on an AI summer institute, and some philosophical advice about how to design assignments. Why don't such in-house materials appear higher in search results than those of peddlars of their software solutions? "They didn't give us any money" would be the answer for Google, but for Duck Duck Go, it seems dubious.
My hunch is that our schools are so overwhelmed that "sharing the wisdom" remains a very low priority.
Luckily and of more use to faculty, The WAC Clearinghouse has launched an initiative to build a library of open-access lesson plans for AI. I'm still not sure why universities have left it to a talented group working across our institutional boundaries to do this. I'd claim that Generative AI poses the largest challenge to how we educate in a long time, categorically different from the coming of the Internet.
image: a really lame prompt and result, "Impressionistic image of traditional campus Humanities building with students going to class," given to Dall-E, when I was first using the image generator.
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