I, like many teachers, am struggling to understand the significance of, and usefulness for, newer forms of AI, such as ChatGPT. Two big trends I have noticed are: 1) the rush to include large language model abilities like ChatGPT in a variety of software products, and 2) the emerging need to develop skills in manipulating chat-style AI to get desired results.
AI in Notion
Notion, a general purpose note-taking and database web application, has a free education subscription price. It was one of the first services that offered an AI agent to its note-taking abilities. It has begun to charge for usage of the AI facility, which I think is another trend to watch for. Other services like Craft, a note-taking/writing web app, and Taskade, a web-based task manager, have added AI as well.
One place you can use AI is when you add a new page in Notion. Here, it offers to create a number of types of written documents based on your prompt or you can ask it to write something that doesn’t fit the given types.
I have used Notion for a few years as a web clipper, primarily, but it has many useful functions. To get the full benefit of all it can do does take some time and effort in learning. If you are interesting in learning how to use Notion there are a few Notion gurus who have good how-tos including Marie Poulin and Thomas Frank.
Chat prompting skills
Besides AI popping up in all sorts of services, another emerging trend is the skill of developing methods to get high-quality results from a chatbot like ChatGPT. A site on this topic called Awesome Chat Prompts provides some suggestions. This is also a good site to see all the possible uses of a large language model AI.
Related to prompts is the ability to supplement the data the AI uses with your own data. For example, my original interest in this sort of service was a desire to create drafts of quiz and test questions, similar to what you might see in commercial textbook instructor’s manuals, for my OER textbook. The data in ChatGPT from the internet doesn’t have the specific terms and ideas from my textbook, so I would need to supplement it with those unique terms and definitions. Feeding these models your own data, beyond what a prompt contains, is not easy yet. There are some experiments going on now using tools like Llamaindex, but it is early days for this sort of manipulation.
There is so much activity around this technology that I know it will be awhile before we see the true impact of it, but these are two trends to watch for as we try to understand and use it.
Update-April 26
Here is a post from Richard Byrne in which he compiles a collection of 15 AI tools he has written about. He is a K-12 blogger but much of the tech he discusses can be useful for college faculty as well.
https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2023/04/a-round-up-of-15-ai-resources-created.html
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