Kate's Take

 Prior to this week, I've been feeling increasing discomfort with some of the research questions I had been working with.  Multiple speakers in my 795 Dissertation Prep class had me questioning my choices and really unsure that the direction I was heading was where I wanted to go.  So, Dr. Bonk and I had a discussion and decided that it would be more in line with interests to make a few changes and focus on innovation using AI in Middle Grade teaching AND to open up the data collection to multiple school districts(pending approval from districts and IRB).  I feel much more settled with this and that the information collected will be useful to those interested in studying innovative ideas as well as classroom teachers who are looking to try a few ideas of their own.  Zhang, Y., Ning, Y., Li, B., & Liu, Y. (2021, November). An innovative classroom teaching technology assisted by artificial intelligence of things. In 2021 2nd International Conference on Infor...

 Several of the articles I have found surround personal device use in AI, such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa.  Today, I'm going to dig further into this to see if I want to shift to this area of thinking and focus, or learn more toward generative AI such as ChatGPT which was formerly my plan.  Chen, Y., Jensen, S., Albert, L. J., Gupta, S., & Lee, T. (2023). Artificial intelligence (AI) student assistants in the classroom: Designing chatbots to support student success. Information Systems Frontiers , 25 (1), 161-182.   Dousay, T. A., & Hall, C. (2018, June). Alexa, tell me about using a virtual assistant in the classroom. In EdMedia+ innovate learning (pp. 1413-1419). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).   Van Brummelen, J., Tabunshchyk, V., & Heng, T. (2021, June). “Alexa, can I program you?”: Student perceptions of conversational artificial intelligence before and after programming Alexa. In Proceedings of the 2...

 Today is an exercise in search optimization.  I've been trying different search ideas and re-ordering the words to get at the essence of what I'm trying to find.  "Definition of Artificial Intelligence" and "Artificial Intelligence Definition" are two COMPLETELY different search result.   Now, I'm searching "artificial intelligence in k-12 education" as I'm finishing up my committee question for quals and finding just a few more references to support the claims in my paper.   I spent a good part of the afternoon looking into JSTOR, ERIC, Google Scholar, etc and determining how to evaluate a journal tier beyond whether it is peer reviewed and it's a fine line.  It looks like SJR is a good resource for determined Q1 or Q2 journals so I'm trying to focus on Tier one and two.  1.      Humble, N., Mozelius, P. The threat, hype, and promise of artificial intelligence in education.  Discov Artif Intell   2 , 22 (2022)....

 My strategy has been to mark articles as Source worth Reviewing, Useful info (with notes that are searchable, primarily advantages,    Useful info (with notes that are searchable - primarily disadvantages), examples I may want to references , and knowledge claims - as that is what we used in a previous course to determine the main points of an article and though it isn't required for my mini-bibliography, it works for me.  This was pretty helpful when referencing these articles during quals practice and I wish I would have developed this system (and a good EndNote habit) when I first entered the program.  Listen up, future IST program friends.  Figure this out early, keep notes for everything.   It will save you tons of time later (and provide a great portfolio of what you've read and where you've come.  I spend a lot of time looking for an article I've read (Dr. Bonk's massive syllabus is usually the source as I got to choose what I read t...

This week I focused on finding information and articles that were aligned with my Quals Committee question and annotating them.  I found some great options that were cited in the articles I pulled last week so I started there.   BAİDOO-ANU, D., & OWUSU ANSAH, L. (2023). Education in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Understanding the potential benefits of CHATGPT in promoting teaching and learning. Journal of AI , 7 (1), 52–62. https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1337500 Kohnke, L., Moorhouse, B. L., & Zou, D. (2023). Chatgpt for language teaching and learning. RELC Journal , 54 (2), 537–550. https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882231162868 Karaishi - Teaching English in the age of AI: Embacing ChatGPT to optimize EFL materials          Seeing the progressive inputs and outputs here was fascinating.  I hadn't appreciated previously how deep the memory was here and how ChatGPT could refine it's own response over and over and over....

It's interesting to be in this space.  I didn't know at the end of last semester that this would be my last semester of classes before THE DISSERTATION began - and honestly, I've been spending a lot of time thinking and working toward it as part of R795, which was also unexpected.  I'm not sure why it snuck up on me - I SHOULD have been aware, but I wasn't.   I've read that choosing a topic is one of the hardest parts of earning a doctoral degree, and it was a bit of an evolution for me.  I thought about what was interesting enough to me to get me through - that I could read and read and read and never get bored, and what could be a valid contribution to the field.  In my very first course with Dr. Bonk, the articles that I found most interesting were those focused on AI, and the statements and policies that I read from different schools and classes drew my attention.   My process to this point is simple.  I'm using my ipad to find articles a...