I welcome GenAI into my daily life to help streamline my work. The number of things I can do in a day that GenAI helps make faster are innumerable. And I feel comfortable and confident in my ethical and reasonable use of the tools as a staff member.
Note Taking: The tools are good if you have a good sense of when to use them. In my role, I have used Zoom AI Companion for note taking during meetings. I have taken meeting notes for a long time in my career, it is quite time-consuming. Unfortunately, Zoom’s AI Companion does not provide the level of detail or reliability of information I need in order to draft effective minutes. Furthermore, Zoom AI seems to spotlight inconsequential conversation during meetings, while also ignoring key discussions and takeaways. While this tool doesn’t work well for the needs of our team, I am hoping that Rutgers will provide us with more and more useful tools for these purposes in the coming year.
Image Generation: I have used Adobe’s stock photographs in much of my work, including using photos for our website. I just learned that the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences’ New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station has a great list of Sources for Stock Photography But, I have never experimented with image generation, which seems like it could be more valuable in terms of targeting the purpose of a photograph. However, I am concerned about the quality of the end result. I would be interested, similarly, in how Canva would handle image generation. I certainly intend to investigate more.
Project Management: I have used AI to generate project management plans, which I can then use to think of different and potentially novel ways to create my own. The Harvard Business Review discusses ways to project manage using AI in “How AI Will Transform Project Management.” Forbes’ “8 AI Tools Every Project Manager Needs In 2024” outlines some tools one can use to create project management plans. I never find that the plans can replace what I develop, as with anything we might use AI for, but it definitely expands the possibilities of how to approach the plan.
In case you are also a staff member seeking support and tools for your work, the P3 has hosted three workshops in our SMARTeaching Workshop Series dedicated to AI tools and their implications in the classroom:
We also launched a Year of AI website with a comprehensive set of resources around AI for the Rutgers-Newark community. We want to take away the scary impression of these tools and make them accessible for everyone. But, there are some real ethical implications around the use of AI that cannot be ignored. Read more about those in Catherine’s post from the summer.
My takeaways from our workshops thus far are vast. I am super interested in continuing to explore the many tools that our colleagues have shared (thanks to Rick and Suparna for this list in their workshop Assignment Planning for the AI-Era (9.11.24)):
Comment below what AI tools you use so I can learn more about those too!
Some other useful information about AI around the University:
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