What this site is about

On this website you will find some examples of the use of GenAI in our curriculum, specifically the data subjects in the ICT&BUsiness curriculum. The site was created for two reasons:

  1. to share GenAI chats that are specific to our teaching;
  2. to start organizing the many chats I have had with GenAI.

Different people do many different things with GenAI, and it never ceases to amaze me when people use it in yet another unexpected way. So far I've used GenAI for 2 main types of use cases: IT product design support and mental model design support.

Examples of using GenAI to help build IT products are:

  • Asking GitHub Copilot in VSCode for help with specific programming problems in Python, R or SQL;
  • Asking GitHub Copilot in RStudio for help with R programming problems;
  • ask a locally installed LLM (LLAMA) for help with programming problems in JupyterLab;
  • Ask ChatGPT to generate a data model and SQL table creation scripts for a given case description;
  • Ask ChatGPT to generate a list of interview questions to elicit requirements for an IT problem in a specific context.

Usage examples of using GenAI to help build and improve mental models are:

  • Ask ChatGPT about the impact of Cognitive Load Therapy on teaching;
  • Ask ChatGPT about the memory footprint implications of different data frame storage models in Python;
  • Ask ChatGPT about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic student motivation and how to deal with this in the classroom.

In building and improving my mental models, I am very aware of the need to be the director of the dialogue. It is my responsibility to maintain a critical mindset in the dialogue and not to accept GenAI's answers as if it has proven authority on the various issues I discuss with it.

This site is organised around these two use cases for the simple reason that they are my two main use cases. Also, there's not a clear distinction between the two: you can ask for help in solving a programming problem and have your mental model of the solution challenged by GenAI along the way. In fact, this is the way I prefer to encourage the use of GenAI with our students: ask for a solution, or ask for feedback on a solution, and then repair the errors and fill in the gaps in your mental model of how to solve these kinds of problems.

On this site it is not my intention to discuss the potential impact of GenAI on our education (it is massive!), nor the limitations of GenAI and the critical attitude you should have when using GenAI. All these topics are very important, and I am sure we all have our opinions about them, but putting them up for discussion is not the purpose of this site.

The examples on this site make extensive (and exclusive) use of GenAI with an LLM and a chat interface, such as ChatGPT. This is largely due to (1) the topics I'm involved in as a teacher, (2) my personal interest, and (3) my lack of experience with e.g. image generation models. Even if I have only scratched the surface of text-generating GenAI, it is so much more than chatting with an LLM, and I hope that colleagues will publish different use cases that use GenAI in a different context and in a different way.

Finally, when discussing GenAI, especially in relational contexts, I do my best to use the personal pronoun it instead of he/him or she/her. The reason for this is that I always want to be clear in my thinking and communication that GenAI is a machine, however human it may (already) appear to be.