The Origins of AIAppleseed

When ChatGPT was first released in November of 2022 I was serving as provost at Manhattan College. I shared it at a large meeting of faculty and deans a few days later, saying we needed to think immediately about how we could,

1. protect the integrity of our courses by designing assignments and projects that could not easily and completely be done well by ChatGPT alone, but also
2. find ways to teach students to leverage this powerful new tool (and others that would follow) to be more productive, which would surely be the expectation of employers and others as our students entered the workforce and the world.

But the more I spoke to people in a wide range of settings on and off campus, the more I realized that most people had heard of ChatGPT, but few knew much about it, and even fewer were taking the time to understand its implications and potential.  

So I became a sort of Paul Revere of AI (“AI is coming!  AI is coming!”), sharing ideas about AI at meetings, cocktail parties, and even weddings!  As part of that, I arranged forums with experts in the field of AI in March and October of 2023.

As AI continued to develop through and past the summer of 2023, it became clear that, as I said in a post in LinkedIn,
“The opportunities and challenges related to AI in Education are developing so fast and in so many ways at once that it's impossible to think that teachers (K-12 and Higher Ed) can get, much less stay, on top of them. It's like a meteor shower of ideas--thrilling, yet impossible to capture every one.”

And so, having stepped down as provost, with time and energy for something else that was important, it occurred to me that I needed to evolve from Paul Revere to Johnny Appleseed, the pioneer who helped introduce and nurture apple trees throughout much of northeastern North America--but I would work to do that with AI in education.

For now, that “introducing and nurturing” takes two forms:

1. this website, which is a curated dashboard giving busy educators easy access to a holistic view of education-relevant developments in AI, and
2. free onsite and remote consulting to help educators explore, consider, and manage the opportunities and risks associated with this “meteor shower of ideas” that is AI.

Please feel free to use the “Suggestion Box” to suggest changes, edits, new resources that should be included, or anything else you think would make the site more useful.

I hope the site is useful and look forward to hearing from you.

Bill Clyde

About
​Bill Clyde

Bill Clyde has been carefully integrating transformative technologies for more than 30 years, first as a faculty member, and then as founding Dean of Academic Technology at Quinnipiac University, and throughout a long tenure as Academic Vice President and Provost.   He co-authored "Using Technology in Teaching" (Yale Press, 2005) and arranged forums with experts in the field of AI in March and   October of 2023.  A full bio is available here.