By MJ Jackson
Welcome to AI Commons
It’s July 2024. In the U.S., that means we are on summer break and a time for looking back and looking forward. When we look back on the academic year, every educator will remember wrestling with the question – “what am I going to do about generative AI?” We will remember being astonished at how much generative AI tools changed in only 9 months.
You might also remember talking with colleagues about generative AI and the new challenges or opportunities it was bringing. Maybe you even met new colleagues from across campus in these conversations (much easier these days thanks to Zoom meetings becoming a regular practice). That was how I met Sarah Freye.
In my position as a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation and Sarah’s position as an Instructional Designer with MSU IT’s Educational Technology department, we had discovered pockets of conversations across campus having conversations about generative AI for teaching and learning. Along with Rhonda Kessling, also an Instructional Designer with MSU IT, we started brainstorming how we could help connect and enlarge those conversations.
Even though MSU is a big institution, sometimes it can be difficult to talk with or hear from people outside of our own units or our own networks. We realized we wanted to create a place where people from across campus would feel welcome to share not only resources and policies, but also perspectives, experiences, and opinions.
We think of AI Commons as a resource to help educators make sense of AI and its evolving place in teaching and learning. We believe that hearing from many voices is an essential part of that. This is a site about your perspectives and experiences on teaching and learning with generative AI. Promoting your voices is our central focus.
AI Commons is about connecting and engaging with others. Our hope is that the site becomes your gathering place for sharing perspectives and positions on generative AI for teaching and learning. We can’t do this without you. If you have a story, an insight, or an idea to publish on AI Commons, please submit it here. Let’s get started.
MJ is a faculty fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning and serves as a co-founder and reviewer for AI Commons.