And so my journey with Chat GPT begins

It was Christmas 2022 holiday, as I was waiting in the airport for a flight to Denver when I first heard about this thing called 'Chat GPT'. Over the next few days, as I randomly scrolled through the somewhat frenzied headlines and posts in my online professional learning networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, I began to realize the magnitude of it. First I had feelings of "how did I not already know about it", followed by "what the heck is this thing", and "how are we to use it" swept over me.

Chat GPT launched in November 2022. Once I realized that, I felt a bit better that I hadn't missed the emergence of this revolution by months or years, ye gads! At least the rock I apparently was living under for approximately a month coincided perfectly with the intense time period of the Fall semester and the holiday rush. This explains a lot!

As for figuring out what IT was, I began to dive into the articles and posts that were being published in earnest throughout my PLN. It consumed all my reading as I was trying to understand what all the fuss was about. To try to capture some of my findings, I began collecting links to helpful resources using to a board on Wakelet. In my view, Wakelet is Pinterest for professionals and I use it for a quick and easy place to store links I might want to return to. My thoughts were that a Chat GPT Wakelet may come in handy as I begin to figure out how to answer the next question, "how are we to use it"?

Before our time away from campus was over and before the Spring term started, I reached out to an academic colleague to inquire what he knew of this Chat GPT and what were other academics in his circles saying. My experience with educational technology was telling me we will want to get up to speed so that we could lead discussions with faculty and others about leveraging it for its best use in the classroom and research. Looking back now, I realize naivety is bliss, am I right? The response I received then is consistent with experiences since then which leads me to realize EVERYONE is still trying to figure out what the heck is it and how are they going to use it, faculty and academia are no exception.

While I wanted to write this article to document my 'where I was when' moment with Chat GPT, I also wanted to share the personal experience I've had in the past few months with Chat GPT as a graduate student in the MS IDET program at SUNY Potsdam.

As a student enrolled in IT661: Advanced Instructional Design, our instructor Dr. Karen Coldwell encouraged the class to discuss our thoughts regarding our use of Chat GPT as part of our classwork. Reminder: this being the first semester since the tool launched the previous November, this was brand new ground. Lots of attention in the media. No prior experience. And no formal training or guidance. The discussion was helpful to gain insight on what others were thinking and their intentions of using it. By the end of the talk, we all agreed that if Chat GPT, used as a tool, could be helpful in the coursework that students were encouraged to explore it and properly credit it. That experience told me a lot, and gave me the license and curiosity to see what ChatGPT could do.

So what I found through a few simple trials, is that Chat GPT can be very helpful to the instructional designer for developing scenarios, stories and other supporting resources. A task like developing a fictional story to be used to exemplify a lesson now takes a mere few seconds. Where before a task like this would have burned all kinds of creative energy and time, now the ID can move onto more higher level tasks more efficiently. In the learning experience I was developing, I wanted to take participants on a journey to hear a story of an individual challenged with an accessibility concern. In ChatGPT, I used a prompt that went something like, "tell me a story about a 16 yo boy with dyslexia who is experiencing challenges in school" and seconds later I received the basis of a version I could use to tweak and modify to match my liking, copy/paste into the learning experience, done! Onto the next one... The time benefits are obvious. Are there moral challenges? Am I stealing someone else's work? Is this somehow cheating? In this scenario with this use, I don't believe so. These are fictional scenarios set up to teach a lesson. Because I'm educating myself on the issues around Chat GPT, I know I want to watch for accuracy of facts stated by Chat GPT. I also know that I need to be observant for bias - because of its dependence on other's work out on the web, the bias we know to exist for marginalized people and issues are amplified in Chat GPT results. More about writing good prompts in Chat GPT.

I experimented with Chat GPT in a few more scenarios to help with my course work. Another surprising result was when I asked for a STAR statement using just the following terms, accessibility and workforce development. This turned up a tidy statement with each of the STAR points. I adjusted each of them to meet my preference, but the fact that there was a model to begin with that I could edit made the work quick, and easy. I edited more than a majority of the content of the original results, so I will call the work my own, while referencing support from Chat GPT. There is stigma associated with that, and I'm not sure if that stigma causes enough negative reaction to counter the use of it in the first place. I'm just not sure at this time.

There are so many lessons yet to be learned, and you'd think we would be getting good at that by now. The technological evolutions that have occurred in my professional career alone are astounding. Consider this:

I started as an undergrad at SUNY Potsdam in 1992 and in world wide web came into existence in 1993.

I remember listening to a lecture in grad school in 1998 that was predicting that in less than five years everyone would have a cell phone. Cell phones became common in the 90's-eary 2000's.

In 2005-2010, I was a stay at home mom when social media began to take center stage. I remember sitting around community town hall meetings talking with small businesses who were trying to figure out what the heck they were gong to do with social media, some of them are still trying to figure that out.

And now in 2023, Chat GPT has busted out onto the worldwide scene with all kinds of trepidation and curiosity. The conversations seem to have a similar ring, what is it?, why do I need it?, how are we going to use it?, what do we need to be careful of?

I can not be more excited to be in the world of work and technology. Just imagine what they will come up next.