As the integration of artificial intelligence, data science, and information literacy is one of my research areas and I dived into the AI pool, finding the Teaching and Learning AI Conference hosted by UCF in Orlando, Florida was nirvana. This was the second year of the conference and conference attendance exploded from 400 in the first year to over 850 attendees this second year. Faculty, administrators, librarians, researchers, and vendors were in attendance. There were so many workshops that I wanted to attend, however I would have needed to clone myself to attend all of them (Extended agenda: https://digitallearning.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Extended-Agenda_TLWAI-2024-1.pdf ). I realize now why certain universities sent multiple people. I sat at the table with individuals from the same college during lunch and listened to them strategize on who would be attending which sessions.

In the 2 and a half days, 10 concurrent sessions occurred in 11 rooms. Each room offered either 2 25-minute sessions with a 5-minute break in between if you wanted to change rooms or a 50-minute session. I included a table below of the sessions that I attended.

I’ve included key takeaways below:

• The “Generative AI Primer and AI Tool Preview” pre-conference hour, provided input in a variety of generative AI tools and different perspectives on student’s use, how to utilize generative AI as a instructor, and the different types. As there were a couple of tools I haven’t played with listed, I’ll be carving time out in my schedule to experiment.
• David Turnbull’s presentation focused on how to teach students to use generative ai tools as a study buddy in terms of generating study questions and sample quizzes to practice with as well as using prompting strategies to question themselves on technical topics to build/solidify their understanding.
• In Building Better Prompts: Tactics and Strategy, Michael demonstrated different prompting strategies using a topic given by an audience member. It was interesting to see that although different strategies developed content in different ways, that the content itself was either not 100% correct or as in-depth as people were expecting. It went back to the comment an instructor made at one of the CAT workshops that I attended that generative AI was currently at a C level.
• Amanda highlighted how AI tools can change over the years in AI Transcription to Support Accessibility and Access for Digital Collections. Over the span of two years, they had to change AI tools utilized for transcribing digital images of written journals and letters due to an increase in cost and changing functionality.
• From attending a couple of workshops where the title didn’t match the content, I made sure that my presentation on Wednesday covered everything that I said I would do in the abstract and more.
• In Finding Self in Generative AI, Kelly expanded on how she integrated AI in her graphic design course to show students that generative AI and images was not at the point where it could replace their individual creativity. Although the tools could generate images for a social media campaign or a brand image, most of the images generated needed to be tweaked or edited to fit the brief.
• I thought I was safe from the CrowdStrike outage as I drove rather than flew to the conference. However, when I got to the hotel, the key cards were not functional. As a result, after I checked in, the staff member at the front desk called security on the second floor to convey that I was on my way. Security opened my door with a physical key to let me in. I tried to circumvent going out for dinner by ordering Door Dash. My hopes were dashed when the delivery drive left the order at the front desk. Mind you, we didn’t get key cards until Tuesday afternoon. After I left my room in the morning, I didn’t return to the room to stay until I grabbed dinner.
• In talking with novices to experts, there is still much to learn about the different use cases that AI can cover. Thus, my experimenting with AI will continue.