Middlebury Community Updates
Clifford Symposium Videos
All the session videos are now available. Use the password Clifford2025 for access.
- Opening Session: President Ian Baucom in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke
- Faculty Panel: AI in the Middlebury Classroom
- Keynote: Melanie Mitchell on The Past, Present, and Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence
- Ian Stewart: AI and Global Security
- Parker Harris (’89): Building the Future Workforce: An Industry Perspective on AI and Human Potential
- Middlebury Alumni Share Their Experiences with AI in the World
- Laura Biester: From Words to Numbers and Back Again
Middlebury Tool Updates
What’s going on with Middlebury’s enterprise AI tools?
NotebookLM
NotebookLM has gained traction on campus because it constrains AI responses to the sources you upload and provides links to the content you uploaded for verification.
Flashcards and quizzes
Google’s release of NotebookLM/OpenStax textbooks alongside the new quiz and flashcard features frames NotebookLM as an educational tool. Google’s article, Learn Your Way: Reimagining textbooks with generative AI, expands on the concept.
Customize overviews and reports
By clicking on the pencil icon, educational users now have increased control over the content of audio/video overviews, flashcards, quizzes, and reports.
Google Gemini’s Gems are now shareable
Google Gems are custom AI assistants (like OpenAi’s custom GPTs) you create by combining specific instructions, prompts, and prioritized reference materials. Gems allow for complex prompt interactions and consistent behavior and knowledge across conversations.
The new sharing capability allows Gems to move from personal productivity tools to collaborative resources. You can now distribute a carefully crafted writing coach Gem to students across multiple sections, share discipline-specific research assistants with colleagues, or create tools to help automate certain tasks. Sharing eliminates the need for everyone to recreate similar custom assistants. Learn more about creating Gems.
AI in the world
AI Browsers
AI-first browsers like Comet and Dia represent a new category of tool. They integrate AI at their core, offering context-aware assistants that use data from your open tabs and browsing history. They also offer custom prompts, and task automation.This deep personalization and data access raises significant concerns. Perplexity faces criticism for explicitly marketing to students and similar issues are occurring with AI integration in traditional browsers. A critical problem is that AI browsers and AI agents can submit work in learning management systems like Canvas which is open additional concerns around academic integrity.
