Luke Steere is the librarian at Wilson Middle School in Natick, MA
Below is a screenshot of cold, hard, but fertile ground:
If you haven’t seen something like this yet, it’s ChatGPT’s submission interface. You sign up and ask questions which are generated by an artificial intelligence language bot. In addition to my editing duties, I am sitting on the Strategic Plan Committee and, in Natick where I work, I have been listening in on talk about the impact of ChatGPT.
So, why cold, hard ground? Well, the weather imagery of a long, strange winter giving way to a shy but hopeful spring is ironic, but let’s not pursue that line of inquiry: let’s just talk about inquiry itself. In college I had a professor, a Dickens scholar named Dr. Diana Archibald who taught my freshman year writing 101. It was a bootcamp on academic writing, and I learned a lot, but the stickiest thing was ‘acorns’. Acorns grow into trees, and since we wanted our writing to be forestlike, we were to tend to our acorns, and open them up. If I was to type in acorns to ChatGPT, we probably wouldn’t get such exciting metaphors, but the program seems to be good at providing acorns in the way I remember Dr. Archibald discussing them. And it is these acorns that make the cold, hard ground fertile.
The outline provided by the AI tells us what to do, “serve as a voice,” “establish…standards,” “promote research,” and who or what to support “library services,” “new ideas and practices,” “other stakeholders,” but telling is not showing. We need you to help us show what’s meant by any number of acorns above.
In our Winter Issue, President Jen Varney explains some opportunities to do just that in a month’s time at our Conference, Gear Up: Moving Forward Together; Deeth Ellis outlines the ongoing Project S.L.I.D.E. and its treasure trove of data, and we welcome new columnist Courtney Ahearn, an elementary librarian in North Andover, who writes about managing book challenges with our youngest populations.
The outline provided by the AI tells us what to do, “serve as a voice,” “establish…standards,” “promote research,” and who or what to support “library services,” “new ideas and practices,” “other stakeholders,” but telling is not showing. We need you to help us show what’s meant by any number of acorns above.
In our Winter Issue, President Jen Varney explains some opportunities to do just that in a month’s time at our Conference, Gear Up: Moving Forward Together; Deeth Ellis outlines the ongoing Project S.L.I.D.E. and its treasure trove of data, and we welcome new columnist Courtney Ahearn, an elementary librarian in North Andover, who writes about managing book challenges with our youngest populations.