MYFest Schedule: All Years

Join us for a low-key session dedicated to baking and cooking. Bring your own recipe to bake/cook in your kitchen and share with other participants. Recipes can be also be shared via Padlet or the Slack baking-cooking channel before the session so that others can buy ingredients to try out a new recipe during the session. Feel free to join and leave at any time during the 90-minute session, and of course, family members are very welcome! Even if you don’t want to bake or cook during the session, we encourage you to come and chat with the group. If participants find the session enjoyable, we’ll be happy to organize a second baking and cooking session.

For details, see the MYFest Readers Theater website https://sites.google.com/view/ccreaderstheater/myfest24 All ages welcome!

Who are we and how do we show that in our writing? That is one of the big questions that surrounds how AI might be used in writing assignments and professional publications. How do we ensure that our voices and ideas are shining through and how do we determine when to acknowledge AI’s help in bringing our ideas to the page. This session will look at some of the discussions around ethical, responsible, and transparent AI use in writing assignments. There will be time allotted for questions, so please come ready to engage in discussion on these ideas. Session recording now available!

Students often struggle to engage with academic writing, expressing feelings of disconnection, discomfort and even dislike. Such feelings may lead some students to turn to AI, often employing it uncritically in order to complete their writing assignments, thus losing their voice. Humanizing the writing classroom through centering the element of voice may offer a great way to address these concerns. In light of AI concerns in particular, voice takes on even more importance as one of the aspects to writing that may distinguish human writing from AI writing. Focusing on voice may allow students to connect more meaningfully with academic writing as a mode of communication because it can make writing more personally relevant to them and expressive of their identities. Thus, it is our belief that by humanizing the writing classroom through centering voice, students may be less likely to rely solely on AI, and rather develop more critical approaches to their writing. However, providing effective instruction for students to develop their academic writing voice can be challenging. In this session, we will provide a brief background on voice in academic writing, and then share several activities that the presenters have tried with their students to help them (a) explore voice and its importance, especially in the age of AI, (b) reflect on their own developing voice constructions, and (c) develop more ownership over their writing. Session recording and slides now available!

In this three-part session series, we use the metaphoric structure: AI as a Growing Child. So in this first session we will describe AI’s impact on democracy as the “adolescent phase,” where it can be rebellious and unpredictable. Just as it would be irresponsible to let a young child adolescent play with a firearm, AI and elections are a volative mix. From deep-faked images of politicians to more subtle threats that can disable government infrastructure, this session demonstrates how AI tools can help saboteurs destabilize democracy. Participants will learn the weaknesses of commonly proposed solutions like AI watermarks as well as other solutions with a greater chance of safeguarding the democratic process. Session recording now available!

What is trauma? How can we shape our pedagogical practices to support students in their learning despite being impacted by trauma? We’ll explore these questions in this interactive session about Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track. Session resources now available!

Join us for an hour of supporting each other's writing... quietly... where we will kick off with 5 minutes of inspiration, give everyone about 50 minutes to work on what is important to them right now, and have 5 minutes to celebrate what we've accomplished today. This group is dedicated to anyone who is working on a writing project of any kind: you can work on a peer-reviewed paper, grant application, syllabus, even a really tricky email, even your creative work, a poem you want to capture, lyrics for your next song 🙂

Sometimes caricatured as mere regurgitators of online content, tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are more like a growing child that is facile at fabricating fresh ideas and novel imagery. A peek under the hood of these models will equip participants to grasp their special brand of creativity, along with their limits in representing diverse perspectives and potential for disinformation. Session recording now available!

In this interactive session, we'll test out various forms of targeted AI writing feedback. How can AI feedback be incorporated to support students' development of their own voice and ideas and also to give students practice questioning plausible AI advice? Can we put AI in a limited place where it supplements the responses of human readers and stimulates student thinking without telling them what to write? We'll explore student comments on how it felt to use AI feedback from recent pilots of the teacher-created app MyEssayFeedback.ai. Session recording and resources now available!

A Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Circle, is an opportunity for individuals to come together virtually to share their love of reading. Unlike a traditional book club, where everyone brings a commonly read book, these BYOB circles invite anyone to come with any book that they have read, or are currently reading, based on a central theme. With the support of a facilitator, these events are meant to create community, inspire new reading and learning, and engage with one another in fun and unique ways.

Maturity, whether in childhood development or in AI use, means knowing when to trust instinctual responses and when to check their unimpeded influence. Drawing on a range of sources from the mathematics of probability to Roman history, this workshop proposes a framework for sifting appropriate uses of AI from those that can cause undue harm, be they in healthcare, business, or education. (Spoiler: it's not high- versus low-risk tasks!) Session recording now available!

This interactive workshop encourages participants to critically examine how and why generative AI tools were designed and what that means for their use in education. Topics of exploration include: Bias, Hallucinations, Exploitation of Human Labor, Data & Privacy, Digital Divide, Academic Integrity, and Intellectual Property Rights. As participants explore each of these topics, they will consider how to bring these critical issues into their practice and how to help prepare students to become critical AI users. Session recording and resources now available!

From time immemorial, human beings have reached out to the world with words, hoping to connect and communicate. But in a world where the machine can do some things more effectively and efficiently, how do we now reckon with the art and science of writing? This conversation about AI is an invitation to brainstorm together about how to center our humanness in a increasingly automated world.

Trigger warnings can take many forms. If used alone to warn about sensitive material, they may have no effect or even be harmful. A broader, preventive approach and a careful response for when triggers do occur are explored in this interactive session. Session resources now available! This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track.

We’re devoting our Wisdom of Fools synchronous session to stories about donkeys. We’ll read some folktales about donkeys and collaboratively adapt and write up the ones participants like best in a readers theater script starring donkeys. After the session, participants can continue working on the script asynchronously as little or much as they wish, and we’ll definitely read the finished script together in a future MYFest24 readers theater session. This is a low-key, fun, and creative session for all ages. Family members are very welcome!

"Indigenous students can have their learning especially impacted by trauma. Non-Indigenous teachers may not be aware of the effect their teaching approaches can have on Indigenous students. This interactive session intends to shine a light on ways to better support Indigenous learners. This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track."

In this interactive workshop we will survey a range of AI-enabled research assistance apps that aim to help us find and analyze sources. We'll look at general-purpose ones like Perplexity, ChatGPT4o, and Gemini as well as apps geared to academic research such as Elicit, Consensus, Keenious, ResearchRabbit, SciSpace, Scite_, and Undermind. In what ways do they facilitate source retrieval and analysis, and how can they also mislead us? What does wise use of these tools look like? Session recording now available!

Join Maha Bali & Mia Zamora in deepening their equity/care research to integrate the importance of authenticity in Socially Just Distributed Care. We will invite you to share your own stories and reflections on our model, and hopefully incorporate some of your voice in our upcoming writing. Note: This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track.

How many of us are stressed, frazzled, frequently overwhelmed and are going about every day in that state? I know! I see you and I feel you! Life is way too fast paced now. During this wellbeing session where we will dedicate an hour to our selves, we will start with discussing how you manage to get things done and achieve your goals/tasks now. Afterwards we will start to pinpoint specific techniques that would solve your own individual challenges, which we will call “friction points.” We will end with creating a system that works for you and that is kind, gratifying and enriching so you can try to reduce your day to day stress.

How can we respond to the terror of AI? Laughter. Play. Let's explore the possibilities and pitfalls of this platform with playful activities to help you dream up uses of AI that expand your creativity.