Year: 2023

I had to chance to facilitate an “unconference” session for the professional development group, National Association of Program and Staff Development Professionals (NAEPSDP) about Generative AI.  The “unconference” format just means that it is less of an orchestrated presentation by an expert and more of a facilitated discussion.  I offered to lead this one because I’m a regular Chat GPT user,  taught first by my grown children and strengthened by my curiosity, mostly to summarize lengthy extension reports (often my own) quickly.

I wanted to share a couple of items that may be of use to our own staff and teams.

First I should share – Extension Connect provided a very thorough webinar and resources in June that was recorded with resources.  A great basics how-to for those who may be new to the technology: https://connect.extension.org/blog/resources-from-ai-basics-for-extension  

Equally, there was a good briefing in the Journal of Extension Ensuring Responsible and Transparent Use of Generative AI in Extension that includes usage as well as cautions.

In the NAEPSDP “unconference” chat I started with my experiences, suggestions for prompts, and suggestions for how staff new or not so new to AI might want to dabble in it for Extension work, colleagues from across the country contributed to the dialogue, adding their experiences, hesitations, and questions.

1. My usage of AI (I use chat GPT):
   • Use to summarize lengthy reports; leveraging technology to succinctly express impacts
   • Summarizing qualitative data (in quantitative ways) – similar to what qualitative research software can do
   • Brainstorming – responses to questions, providing a framework for stories or issues, or lesson planning 🙂
2. It is all about the prompts.  For those who use generative AI, you will know that you need to consider how to ask the question so that the responses are what you are looking for.
   • My top three:
     1. “Summarize the following in plain language” (where I’m providing the content and asking for dialogue that is written in a way that the lay reader could understand the content.
     2. “Can you group these into buckets of insights, with their associated weight (in %), and list so examples of associated responses for each insight?” (where the results turn qualitative results into quantitative responses)
     3. “Possible titles for the following abstract” (where I’m looking for help giving a clever but understandable title to a story)
   • More prompts for consideration include this great list from our colleagues at Virginia Cooperative Extension that includes prompts for lesson planning etc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GpEhmp2oJPuXS28CPKNHTc74HW_cpXr1WgW43ywIagk/edit?usp=sharing

For the new and not-so-new to generative AI…here are some fun/interesting ways to make use of it:

• “make me a grocery list for x # people and organize it by section in the grocery store. Make a meal plan from this for 3 dinners, 3 lunches and 3 breakfasts” (seriously…try this out…provide any details you would like about the people – it is remarkable)
• Summarize a success story from colleagues or yourself (drop the text into the prompt) – you will land with a few bullets succinctly written from your words in minutes.   Amazing way to help you focus on a few key points.
• Review of survey responses– no names and not for research purposes (community example)  (dropping text into the prompt) – whether you have 5 or 50 responses – this will at least provide you with a framework for how to talk about the responses.

Would be interested to know your experiences!

I recently wrote a blog post for an outside ag tech project that I work on with Virginia Tech.  The project has paired a cohort of Virginia Community College System (VCCS) Ag faculty with Virginia Tech Ag faculty to focus on instructional design that is aimed at helping students gain (and acknowledge the gain of) greater workforce skills.

One design that has prompted a bridge between out-of-school and formal learning is badging to help students reflect on the experiences that they have had outside of class so that the course materials feel more relevant.  One VCCS faculty member aptly named this practice of building gamification in as “jobification”.   I thought this might be of interest to some of my CCE colleagues.  The idea of instructional designs that bridge learning environments is what my own research focus is on.

You can find the blog post here:  https://awt4collaborativeleadership.blogspot.com/2023/10/gamification-or-jobification-applying_18.html 

We are currently working on a journal publication to describe more of the documentation that went into this component of the project.  Stay tuned :).