I’ve been giving local history talks since my Lost Dayton book came out in 2018, but this year I’ve started trying something new. Up to this point I’d always just relied on other organizations to find me and request a talk. Over the past few years I’d be asked to speak from time to time […]
YouTube Channel Growth and Future Plans
Over about the past year and a half I’ve been slowly but surely recording videos about local history, preservation, and redevelopment for my Dayton history YouTube channel. A couple weeks ago I was excited to see that my latest video, about what happened to a street where a surprising number of prominent early Dayton business […]
Helping Connect My College to the Downtown Community
Lately I haven’t been as active on my blog here as I used to be, and looking back on my most recent posts I was a bit surprised to see how they make it seem like all I care about these days is AI! There was definitely a reason for my AI focus: for a […]
How ChatGPT is Affecting My Information Literacy Instruction
I’ve written about AI’s effects on libraries and librarians more broadly, and today I’ll share some thoughts about how AI is affecting library instruction and approaches to information literacy. There there are a lot of credible fears about AI’s propensity to mislead, but I think there are also opportunities to refresh conversations about authority, search […]
Why OER Textbooks Are Important (and How AI Can Help Create Them)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are free for anyone to use. We most often are referring to textbooks, but they can also be videos, tests, software, or even full courses. Crucially, they are not copyrighted like most publications but instead are released under a license (most often Creative Commons) that allows others […]
Prompt Engineers at the Library: Should Librarians Teach AI Searching?
Over the past year and a half as the capabilities of ChatGPT have thrust artificial intelligence to the forefront of public discourse, new sets of skills have emerged. It’s become increasingly clear that although ChatGPT and similar Large Language Models (LLMs) can do amazing, paradigm-shifting things, the specific prompts that you type in have a […]