About Learning with AI
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) currently dominates conversations and debates in higher education and beyond, and there is a great deal of both fear and excitement around this subject, as well as an awareness of the challenges and opportunities it presents. Within this book we use GenAI and AI as a shorter term for Generative Artificial Intelligence.
We are all new to it
Most academic staff are new to GenAI, and we as students are too, but we know that many of us are experimenting with GenAI and exploring how it could be useful for our learning as part of our studies.
The project Learning with AI is student-led and supported by University of Leeds staff in the School of Education, Digital Education Service (DES), the Library, Organisational Development and Professional Learning, the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) and the LITE Incubator for Digital and Open Education, Curriculum Redefined and the Knowledge Equity Network.
Our aim is to explore the current landscape of how we as students use GenAI to support our studies, and learn from these examples, so we have set-up this open Pressbook project which is openly and freely available for anyone to read and share.
What is GenAI?
“Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that automatically generates content in response to prompts written in natural-language conversational interfaces. Rather than simply curating existing webpages, by drawing on existing content, GenAI actually produces new content. The content can appear in formats that comprise all symbolic representations of human thinking: texts written in natural language, images (including photographs, digital paintings and cartoons), videos, music and software code. GenAI is trained using data collected from webpages, social media conversations and other online media. It generates its content by statistically analysing the distributions of words, pixels or other elements in the data that it has ingested and identifying and repeating common patterns (for example, which words typically follow which other words)” (Fengchun and Holmes, 2023, 8).
A living book
Our book is your book. Even after it has been published, it will continue growing. We see it as a living book. Therefore, the invitation to contribute remains open. We invite all university students (undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral) to continue contributing. We are looking for examples that show how you have used or are currently using GenAI to support your learning, how you are learning with AI. We are looking for short contributions of about 500-700 words. We also welcome submissions that are slightly longer.
The call will remain open until the 1st of June 2028. All submissions will be reviewed, and you will be supported if your submission needs a little bit of extra work. To submit your entry please use this online survey link.
So far we have released contributions for 2024/25.
