On Saturday, April 29, 30 past editors of The Griffin joined members of the current staff to celebrate the newspaper’s 90th anniversary. President Steve Stoute gave opening remarks, Patrick Healy ’23 presented a summary of his recently published history of The Griffin, and Adam Zyglis ’04 delivered a keynote address on how The Griffin started his Pulitzer Prize-winning career.
Afterwards, editors visited The Griffin office, where they shared stories about their time on staff. Though it was the first Griffin reunion since 1992, all hoped these reunions would become a more frequent occurrence.
Submitted by: Patrick Healy ’23, managing editor, The Griffin
We have faced some challenges with parking in the last couple years but the Science Hall lot should be open for use soon. As we look towards Fall semester, an ad hoc committee of faculty, staff, students, and administrators has been meeting to discuss possible changes to parking on campus, both in terms of policies and allocation of lots to different categories. The committee is preparing several proposals for Dr. Harold Fields, VP for Student Affairs, to review and choose a recommendation for next year.
The parking committee has prepared a short survey to help us measure current preferences and usage patterns. This survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete – you will need to make sure you are logged into the portal and that your google drive is opened to your Canisius account, not a personal account.
The ITS Help Desk will begin its summer hours schedule next Monday, May 15. The Help Desk will be open Monday – Friday from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. These hours will be in effect until Friday, August 25.
On Fridays, from May 26 until August 11, the Help Desk will close at 1:00 p.m.
The Biology and Environmental Science programs at Canisius are sponsoring this exciting event that will be held at the end of the month. If you are interested in environmental health and conservation, we strongly encourage you to attend.
On May 25, the Western New York Land Conservancy is hosting world-renowned author Tony Hiss, one of the strongest advocates for land conservation in the United States, to discuss his seminal book Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth. His book discusses the importance of land protection in environmental health and wildlife conservation.
This event is free, open to the public and will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 25 at the Montante Cultural Center.
To attend, you must register in advance as seating is limited. For individuals unable to attend in person, the event will also be livestreamed but registration is required to access the link.
You can use the link below for more information or to register.
Large Language Models which use trained AI systems to mimic human writing pose a wide range of challenges and opportunities. Of particular concern in an academic environment is the use of these tools to mimic human essay writing. This was made evident by the release of ChatGPT in November of 2022, swiftly followed by a host of competitor systems. Tools to auto-generate prose will only become more streamlined and common place to all. For example, Grammarly added an AI writing function this week, and a beta version of an AI tool is now available in some versions of MS Office products. These tools are good at basic, repetitive writing tasks or to critique existing written narratives. Several faculty have already begun use of these tools in curriculum planning, survey evaluation and other phases of their work. Our students have also begun using these tools in a variety of ways with both positive and negative implications.
A college wide collaboration jointly sponsored by the School of Education and Human Services, the Canisius Writing Center, the Center for Online Learning and Innovation, and the Canisius Center for Analytics and Data Ecosystems will be developing a set of workshops for our community on the challenges and opportunities posed by Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT. The goals is to develop some online resources (short videos, blogs, a discussion forum) to support a series of face to face workshops in August 2023. This would incorporate speakers and/or panel discussions as well as informal opportunities to network and discuss both the uses and challenges these tools pose. We would like to ask members of the Canisius Community to self-nominate themselves to an organizing committee to work on the development of both the face to face and online portions of this effort. Interested members of the community are asked to contact Mark Gallimore (gallimom@canisius.edu), Tyler Cron-Piatek (gallimom@canisius.edu), Graham Stowe (gallimom@canisius.edu) or Dave Sheets (sheets@canisius.edu).
Submitted by: School of Education and Human Services
