Yao Hill Professional Reflection

Generative AI technology permeates our lives. It generates excitement and fear among educators. What is it and what can educators do with it? Below are some notes from presentations by Paul McKimmy , Michael Menchaca , and others, with some independent research notes. Generative AI is predictive.  Generative AI produces new texts, images, sounds, and videos based on a trained model with a large language database. But it does not recite them. AI produces what it predicts as a reasonable response to a question, but not necessarily as a factual or accurate response. It is not a dictionary or an encyclopedia. This is the reason that you will receive different responses for the same question that you ask at different times. As Dr. McKimmy said, "If you are not the expert to evaluate the response, you have a problem." What can AI do? Brainstorm Draft Outline Writing Programming Everything that we ask students to do in a written assignment  Source  AI in Syllabus and Classroom, 2023

Have you ever had the experience where you have 15 tabs open in a browser and you can't find the tabs that you just opened so you have to go to your email or your Zoom Chat to copy and paste the link to create yet another tab to be lost in the forest of tabs!!! As my project lists grew longer, I spent longer and longer time finding the right tab. The difficulty of finding the right tabs has been the pet peeve that I brought up consistently in all my Zoom meetings in the past two weeks. A rewarding experience is the tips and strategies that my different Zoom collaborators shared, summarized below: Close them promptly. Leave the only tabs open for your current project. (Good suggestion. But as I have 10 projects going on at the same time, if I close a tab, I may miss a task that I need to complete.) Pin tabs. It's maddening that I always have to find where my email and my calendar tabs are. Right-click on them in Chrome. Select  pin . Now my email is always the first tab to the v

 Today, I accidentally bumped into this video  Achieve more In 1 DAY Than Others Do In 1 WEEK (Ask Who, Not How!) - YouTube  by Little Bit Better. Some ideas are refreshing. This video is a book summary of WHO NOT HOW by Dan Sullivan, who give 11 Lessons for entrepreneurs to better manage their time. The most important lesson is to ask the question of WHO. Who can solve this problem for me? Problems can be divided into two types: technical problems and adaptive problems. Find WHO for the technical problems and focus your time and energy on the adaptative problems that only you can answer.  For example, if you have a business, you need a website. This is a technical problem. Hire the WHO to solve it. On the other hand, how to grow the business is an adaptive problem. It needs your creative ideas. No one can replace you. So you will have to do it. When you go about the adaptive problems, ask yourself the seven questions as the "Impact Filter": 1. What is the project? What is th

I love Chris Lysy and his freshspectrum blogs and cartoons. This is an evaluator who knows how to communicate and catch his audience's attention. In a recent blog: Access is NOT a Vanity Metric . Chris proposed five strategies to increase access to one's work, traditionally presented in the form of a report (as PDF files posted on the website) or as journal articles behind the Login gates. His strategies are: take a PDF and adapt it into an HTML-based report. take a long wordy report and adapt it into a string of infographics. take a report written at a post-graduate reading level and adapt it into a report that doesn’t require more than a lower secondary education level. turn big tables or complicated charts into nice, easy-to-follow charts. turn qualitative interview transcripts into a story collection. (Blogging is also what Chris proposed to increase access to and influence of one's work, back in 2011 in fact. And I finally started doing it now in 2023, more than a de

Private school is expensive. And you have to be really good at academics to be admitted. For these two reasons, I have not thought about sending my kids to private schools. Yet one day in early June, I got a call from the Vice Principal for my 5th grade graduating daughter, recommending her to apply for La Pietra because her teacher considered her as a top 20% student. I was in quite some disbelief. I know my daughter is creative and talented in her way, but top 20% in academics?! But who am I to deny her the opportunity to go to La Pietra. So I went on this process to apply for a private school and below are lessons learned (in progress).  1. You can make the cost manageable by applying for both financial aid and merit-based scholarships from the school and other organizations. The Financial Aid application is done through a third-party vendor and charges a fee ($60 for School & Student Services ). Completing the financial aid is like the experience of filing taxes on your own, w

I have joined the Grand Challenges in Assessment Project (GCiA) Implementation Team in 2021. Over the years, my team and I feel that we do not always know where the project is and where we are going. Reflecting on my personal work habits, I know that I heavily rely on my center's website to document my work and track projects. It just happened that I had a day free of meetings. I ventured into editing the project page: Pedagogical Improvements that I has been leading. It looked like any other project page with just the project goals. See an example from the Drive Innovation team page: Honestly, I do not like editing websites. Because it takes enormous amount of time, speaking from the experience as a webmasters for a student club when I was in grad school, for the professional organizations that I chaired, and for my center's website and project sites that I led. I usually keep my sites as simple as possible. I give a lot of credit to Karen Singer-Freeman who created and ma