I was on a work call recently, and someone mentioned that the OLC Accelerate conference was only 12 weeks away. My immediate reaction was this:
I’ve been pretty involved in conference planning for the last few months, so it’s no surprise that the conference is coming upon us. I guess the surprise is mainly on account of this short but hot summer coming to a close, and autumn being on its way.
While we still have plenty to do to prepare for the conference, much of the programming work is behind us, and knowing about the amazing symposiums, summits, presentations, exhibitors, special sessions, and activities that are planned, my reaction now is this:
One of the pieces I’ve been working on has been the first-ever AI Summit at Accelerate. I’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating with Reed Hepler to plan this event, which will be held on Wednesday, November 19. You may want to mark your calendars.
We’re coming upon the third anniversary of the public release of ChatGPT, and GenAI has saturated conference programs ever since. Due to GenAI’s ubiquity, you may be tired of hearing about it, so your response to an AI Summit might be this:
I understand. However, we decided to hold an AI Summit this year because there is still so much to learn and to share, and our aim was to plan sessions that would thematically speak to one another. To that end, we focused on this idea of “AI preparedness.”
We have three 45-minute Education sessions and one 15-minute Express Session devoted to this theme. Check out these presenters and titles:
- Reed Hepler’s “Preparing for the Small-’s’ Singularities: Preparing Students for an AI-Pervaded Workplace”
- Yingjie Liu’s and Kiran Budhrani’s “Faculty Leading Faculty: A Cross-Institutional Faculty Fellows Model for Scaling AI”
- Samantha Adamczewski’s “Beyond the Algorithm: Cultivating Ethical AI Practices for Student Success”
- Ceredwyn Alexander’s “Symbolic Language Intelligence: A Contextual and Relational Design Approach”
At this point, I’m guessing that you might look like this:
The great news? There is no additional fee to attend the AI Summit! It comes with registration. However, it would be helpful for our planning if, when you register for the conference, you select the AI Summit so that we know about how many people will be attending. Just click the appropriate radio button.
Feel free to visit the AI Summit landing page for more information and for detailed abstracts of the presentations. I am super excited for the AI Summit and the conference in general, and I hope to see you there! I suspect that by the end of the event, we’ll all look a little something like this:
Until then!
Dylan Barth is the Vice President for Innovation and Programs. Dylan provides strategic vision and oversight for professional development, consulting, research and publications, and the Quality Scorecard Suite at OLC. He has 20+ years of experience teaching in higher education and 12+ years working in faculty and instructional development. Dylan holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with an emphasis on masculinities in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction.
