Today at the last minute, I was able to hop on a webinar over the noon hour with folks over at the Harvard metaLAB hosted by Sarah Newman. Maha Bali, who co-led the, “Learn With AI: 10 Ways to Try AI in Your Classroom Right Now,” webinar, helped facilitate and MC the event. I wasn’t familiar with the metaLAB, which describes itself as, “an idea foundry, knowledge-design lab, and production studio experimenting in the networked arts and humanities.” One of my student assistants majoring in Computer Science got to sit in on part of it during his shift so I’ll look forward to catching up with him when he’s back next time.

The purpose of the meeting was two-fold: a) introduce the AI Pedagogy Project website and the story about its development; b) provide breakout rooms for folks from all over the world to network and discuss some questions. Some screenshots will follow in this post.

Built mostly by Harvard students to deliver non-technical materials to explain many things about generative AI, the AI Pedagogy Project is a curated collection of crowdsourced assignments which I highly recommend taking a look at. You can even upload your own!  Sarah did a great job explaining the inclusive values at the heart of the project which, paraphrasing her, aims to break down the sometimes inherent gatekeeping that technical experts have about AI. Sarah and her team want to make AI as accessible and transparent as possible and mitigate the alarmist narrative in the media.

In the breakout room to which I was randomly assigned, I met a librarian from USC and a professor from the University of Winnipeg. We were given these prompts:

It was only 7 minutes but I think we got through this pretty quickly because there were only 3 of us. There were 202 people on the call.

There was a poll from which I’ll share some screenshot highlights. (Pro-tip: Click on the images to make them bigger so you don’t have to squint especially if you are reading this on your mobile device!)

Regarding the AI Pedagogy Project website,

What is a metaphor for AI you would use?

They read some of these out loud as they trickled in. They got progressively wittier (at least those Sarah and Maha read out loud musing). After Sarah read, “Frankenstein” out loud, I simply couldn’t resist and typed in my answer, “Nice Narcissus.” OMG, Sarah read that one out loud as well and I sure was glad it was anonymous! < digital blush >

Here are a few good ones. These crowdsourced polls are awesome! Nice to know I am not ALONE to ponder and make sense of this stuff!

I enjoyed the networking and learning about the AI Pedagogy Project and website. What a cool open educational resource!