Thanks for attending Fall Faculty Focus 2024! We hope that you found some enjoyment in the day and that you had a chance to interact with colleagues and presenters. We hope that you are taking something useful away to continue to reflect upon, explore, play with, try out, or discover. Please see the resources below, including links to slides and presentations and a feedback survey.

To a wonderful new academic year!

Presentation resources and slides

Keynote Speaker Slides and video

We are so excited to welcome Wilson Nitunga, who is a faculty member at Portland Community College involved in the Center of Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Computing. He will be sharing his own academic journey from "at risk" student to college faculty, instructional and relational strategies to develop the best possible support system for students, and innovative ways to use AI for enhanced teaching and learning.

Wilson came to the United States with his family at the age of 12. He was born in Burundi and spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Tanzania before being resettled to Tucson, Arizona and, a year later, moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was an enormous cultural shock and he struggled to adapt on many levels. He was labeled as an at-risk student starting middle school.

Fast-forward twenty years, Wilson is now on the faculty at Portland Community College in teaching Business & Entrepreneurship, while helping the department integrate Generative AI into its curriculum. In 2020 he was named one of Portland’s 40 Under 40. Wilson will share how he went from a struggling teenager to a successful academic, entrepreneur and consultant.

Wilson’s focus on AI has allowed him to become an avid AI user in everyday life and an AI Curriculum Integration Lead. He has successfully completed the Applied Data Science Program through MIT professional education. Wilson has given numerous workshops around integrating AI tools and frequently attends AI conferences & workshops to stay in the know of the latest trends.

When he is not in the classroom, Wilson works with organizations on student engagement, leadership, and the incorporation of technology and generative Artificial Intelligence into education. Wilson is the founder of WK Social, a digital agency revolutionizing the way businesses brand themselves and engage digitally.

Wilson believes in closing the opportunity gap…TODAY!

Keynote Video

Click on the image to view the video.

Keynote Slides

PPI 101: Understanding the Influence of AI

This Power, Privilege and Inequity training is eligible for Clark College's antiracist training program.

Power, Privilege and Inequity 101: Understanding the Influence of AI, provides a foundational understanding of key concepts related to power, privilege, and inequity, and how these concepts can impact identities. As we discuss these concepts, we will explore how AI can amplify or mitigate these issues and examine the implications of AI development and usage.

PPI Slides

AI and DEIA: A Starting Point; Library Instruction Lab

Join Clark Librarians Laura Nagel and Marisol Moreno Ortiz in an interactive session to learn about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it intersects with diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Explore how this impacts your work and what you can do to minimize risk and use AI in ethical and effective ways. This is a great opportunity to take a deeper dive into equity issues related to AI after our morning PPI session.

AI and DEIA Slides

Engage Your Students: Improve Your Course With AI Art!

Join Jennifer Baran, Transitional Studies Professor, in this workshop on using AI art to engage students, support learning, and improve diverse representation to promote belonging. Engaging students takes some creativity, and let's face it: Canvas can look a bit dull. Many activities are just a bunch of words on a screen. If there are any images, they are usually just clip art or from a Google search. Since there are different types of learners, adding images and videos helps engage more students. AI text to image is one method to customize your online materials, and you can use it for your in-class handouts, too!

There are numerous benefits to using AI art. In this session, you can learn how to generate images tailored to your course, your students, and your activities. There will be a demonstration showing the step-by-step process of adding AI imagery to activities in Canvas. As with all new technology, there are limitations and controversies. Open conversation is encouraged at the end of the session.

Slides coming soon...

Artificial Intelligence: Powerful Learning Tool or the Easy Way Out?; PEC Center

Join Dani Depuy-Grobbel and Dena Al-Mousawi from Clark's Penguin Early College (PEC) Center for an exploration of how AI can be an asset to enhance learning. Description of Objectives:

By the end of this workshop, faculty will:
Understand how to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices in fun and creative ways.
Learn methods to teach students about ethical AI use and academic integrity, and hold them accountable to those standards.
Learn to identify signs of academic dishonesty involving AI.
Develop a growth mindset regarding AI's role in education.

Slides coming soon...

AI and Universal Design for Learning; GHL 205

Join Lindsey Schuhmacher from the Teaching and Learning Center for an exploration of generative AI tools that help brainstorm ideas for universally designed lessons, activities, and more! See live examples of using AI to apply UDL guidelines: multiple means of representation, engagement, and action/expression. Share ideas for how AI can support us in our work towards culturally inclusive teaching and active learning. Tools we will explore: Magic School, Goblin Tools, and Gemini.

AI and UDL Slides

Open Lab: Explore AI Tools!; SHL 135 (or Zoom)

Join Reference Librarian Andrew Shaman in Scarpelli Hall 135 or Sociology Professor Virginia Kyle via Zoom for an open lab where you can explore AI tools in the company of your colleagues! This will be an informal session where you are free to try things out, play, and investigate. There will be a handout from the Teaching and Learning Center with a list of potential AI tools to practice with, as well as some prompts and ideas for trying them out. The last 15-20 minutes of the session will be a discussion with peers about your experiences - which tools did you find useful and might try again? Can you imagine using these tools in your lesson planning or with your students in class? What questions and concerns do you have?

Open Lab Handout

A Way Forward: Appreciative Joy and Valuing Adversity in Times of Transition; PUB 258 B and C

Join Professors Tanya Diaz-Kozlowski and Sarah Blanchette for a joyful and creative session. Collective exhaustion, grief, racial trauma, accelerated efforts to privatize medical care, limit access to affordable housing and food, instability in instructional leadership, and increased stress and tension are coalescing as COVID-19 shifts from pandemic to endemic. Structurally reimagining diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational institutions is rooted in fostering appreciative joy, belonging, and connection (embodied) among faculty which cannot be tended to by using the master’s tools of productivity, hustle and grind, and hyper individualism.

An overreliance on artificial intelligence through disembodied and asynchronous communication coupled with holding fast to fear is cultivating a kind of artificial intimacy among Clark College faculty. Our relational capacities as people, as educators, are atrophying. Now is not the time to push through, to write more emails, schedule more Zoom committee meetings, create more committees, hyper focus on outcomes and deliverables, to do more, or pretend this is the ‘new normal’. We’re out of alignment.

Appreciate joy, not artificial intimacy, is a way forward. How could teaching with and valuing appreciative joy possibly make a difference in such difficult times and turbulent transitions? The kind of joy people tend to chase after usually depends upon circumstances that they may or may not be able to control. On the other hand, appreciative joy is our innate ability as human beings to delight in what’s good in the present moment, independent of our external circumstances or perceived successes. Appreciative joy is an essential quality for mindful educators because it provides us with more balanced perspectives, a foundation for conflict resolution and resilience, and a tool for healing and liberation.

The fall faculty focus is an important time for faculty to pause, to connect as community, to witness each other, and reorient ourselves to ourselves as colleagues and human beings. Faculty are leaders at Clark College. We are the change we've been waiting for. So let's build a campus culture in which people embody appreciative joy and prioritize learning, collaboration, transparency, trust, and boundaries. This is possible! Come cultivate appreciate joy and support it in your colleagues as a way forward in transition.

Appreciative Joy Sharable

Baby Steps to Authenticity: Using Small Teaching to Nudge Writing Pedagogy into the AI Age; GHL 205

Join English Professor Toby Peterson for some active learning with colleagues. This session is inspired by Baby Steps—the fictional book penned by Dr. Leo Marvin in the cinematic classic What About Bob?—and informed by Small Teaching, the real-life pedagogical approach championed by educational theorists James Lang and Flower Darby. Small Teaching champions “small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” (Lang, 2016). In this hands-on workshop, participants will plan a brief (5-10 minute) class activity, one-time course intervention, or small modification in course design or delivery that responds to the proliferation of artificially intelligent chatbots and their potential impacts on student writing. Participants should bring an existing class syllabus, lesson plan, and/or assignment to work on.

Baby Steps Slides

AI and Information Literacy in the Classroom; Library Instruction Lab

Join Librarians Katy Anastasi and Laura Nagel for discussion and collaborative resource-building. Information literacy requires us to think critically about how we obtain, evaluate, and use information. How has artificial intelligence changed the way we practice information literacy? How do you and your students use AI to find information? How do you evaluate information with a lens critical of AI? What constitutes "ethical use" of AI in your classroom, your discipline, and your everyday life? Join Clark Librarians for a thoughtful discussion and collaborative review of AI literacy guides from other community colleges. Our conversation will lay the groundwork for a similar AI literacy guide at Clark Libraries.

AI and Info Literacy Slides

AI and Info Literacy Handout

Stopped Listening: Co-Creation of Knowledge in the Age of AI; GHL 213 or Zoom

Join Keynote Speaker Wilson Nitunga for a deeper dive into his talking points from the morning session. Explore instructional and relational strategies to develop the best possible support system and relationship with every student, including AI best practices for teaching and learning. Bring your questions.

Stopped Listening Slides

These are mostly the same slides as the keynote session, but there are a few extra meant for the hands-on nature of the workshop.

Using Generative AI to Help Students Achieve their Professional Goals; Zoom

Join Transitional Studies Professor Zach Patrick-Riley for an interactive session that focuses on how to use generative AI to help students achieve their professional goals. Among the topics covered are using AI to help with job interviews and using AI to help with emails, as well as the art of a good prompt.

AI and Professional Goals Slides

Using AI in Geospatial Courses; Zoom

Join Portland Community College Professor and member of PCC's Center of Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Computing team Lorena Nascimento for a workshop that shares her journey to using AI, ethical considerations, and applications in various aspects of life. Here is the run-down of what to expect in her session:

1- 10 min: Introductions and icebreaker about AI
10 - 25 min: How AI works, data ethics principles and data training in AI
25 - 50 min: AI applied for a specific subject (geospatial technologies, business, or everyday life)
50 - 60 min: Final thoughts and questions

AI in Geospatial Courses Presentation

On Love and Robots; Zoom

Content warning: This workshop touches on themes of isolation, addiction, and associated maladies. Please take care.

Join CTEC Professor Robert LaCosse for a session that reflects on the risks of AI: Gather round friends! We need to talk about the all-too-friendly chatbot next door and the imminent behavioral implications of these unregulated perversions of generative logic. We've all seen the dip in engagement in our classrooms. We know the world is not as it once was. Something is off on a grand scale and the root cause continues to elude us. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come and in a vastly more insidious way that we may expect. That said, we all know that knowledge is power and, thankfully, resistance is not futile. However, in order to help ourselves and our students navigate the onslaught, we all need to be keenly aware of the horrifically addictive digital products on the horizon. This is a lecture for anyone who does not want to go quietly into that good night. This is for those who are called to rage against the dying of the light.

On Love and Robots Slides

Thoughts for us?

We welcome your feedback, reflections, anecdotes, limericks...

Fall Faculty Focus 2024 Feedback Survey

Thank you!

Sandra Bush

Tre Sandlin

Julie Austad

Andra Spencer

Alyssa Montminny

Dr. Terry Brown

Stephanie Leeper

Rhianna Johnson

Virginia Kyle

Andrew Shaman

Robert LaCosse

Zach Patrick-Riley

Jennifer Baran

Clark’s amazing facilities team!

Clark’s amazing media team!

Bleu Door Bakery

Lisa Hasart

Meghan Moss

Wilson Nitunga

Toby Peterson

Laura Nagel

Marisol Moreno Ortiz

Tanya Diaz-Kozlowski

Sarah Blanchette

Dani Depuy-Grobbel

Dena Al-Mousawi

Katy Anastasi