Syllabus

This class will help you design and build a digital portfolio of your creative work that will help you get a job in the industry(ies) relevant to your kind of creativity. You will be using AI to help you do it, while learning more about how to use AI effectively.

Unless you've been hiking the Appalachian Trail these past 24 months, you've heard and read a lot about Large Language Model Text Generators. I've been reading up on Artificial Intelligence for a few years now, much more so in the last 12 months. I could explain what a Large Language Model is, but it would take me an hour or so to write all that down, so I decided to ask OpenAI's ChatGPT (the most common AI Text generator) to write the explanation for me. In under a second, it gave me the following paragraphs. Note that I gave it an audience to address. You will be using ChatGPT and Claude and Bard in this class, as a knowledge resources and thought processors, to help you think about how to get your foot in an industry's door. Your goal is to create a portfolio, a collection of your creative work, artfully displayed, that demonstrates your digital skill sets.

To create a successful portfolio (yourname.com, perhaps), you need to know who you want to show your creativity to (your primary audience) and what you are trying to demonstrate about who you are and what you can do. Really Pullman, you're asking, "What do you want to do when you graduate?" like you're some rando at a BBQ? Yes, I am. If you have no clue what you want to do next, that's ok -- for this class at least. You can explore a few different kinds of industries to see what clicks. If this is you, we should tailor the assignments for your situation. If you know where you want to land post graduation, you can just start grinding on the assignments as they are.

So this class is partially about using AI text generators to learn about an industry and its jobs and partially about designing and building a portfolio as you digital "Hellp world!" moment. This class is also my first attempt to make LLMTs central to the learning experience. I welcome your feedback along the way.

This class has no textbook, but you will need at least $30 for a Web hosting account if you don't already have one. You should Google "web hosting accounts" and do some comparison shopping, but if you don't want to do that, I suggest you use Reclaim Host. Although you could (and after this class is over might like to) make a portfolio using Wix or Carbon Made or Square Space or Adobe Portfolio or WordPress, which you will be using in this class anyway, I want you experience hand-made web-culture (old school, admittedly).i

1. How to write AI prompts to learn about professionalizing the skills you've been building in college.
2. How to design a portfolio to catch the eye of employers
3. How to write using HTML and CSS

Every week there is a graded assignment. See Assignments on the menu bar. You will find your grades and feedback on iCollege.

Because this class is asynchronous online, please email me any questions you have as they occur to you. We can always set up a webex meeting if face-to-face or screen sharing will be helpful.

Email address: gpullman@gsu.edu -- please don't use iCollege's email to contact me

Webex address: https://gsumeetings.webex.com/meet/gpullman

Office phone: I don't answer it.

According to the GSU Student Handbook

Your professor expects you to:

• Be informed about instructors' policies, which are presented in the course syllabus, as well as the policies of the Georgia State University on-campus Student Handbook.
• Attend all classes, except when emergencies arise. If health and weather allow, your instructor will be present and on time for every scheduled class meeting. You should be, too.
• Be an active participant in class, taking notes and asking appropriate questions. Your involvement will benefit you and your classmates.
• Treat the instructor and fellow students with courtesy. Refrain from any behaviors that may distract others. You expect to be treated with tolerance and respect and to enjoy a learning environment free of unnecessary distractions. Your classmates deserve the same.
• Cultivate effective study strategies. Being an effective student is not instinctive. Use your study time wisely, seek help from the instructor when you need it, and avail yourself of resources provided by the university.
• Study course material routinely after each meeting. Stick to a regular study schedule and avoid cramming. Submit finished assignments on time and do not postpone working on them.
• Accept the challenge of collegiate studying, thinking, and learning. Anticipate that the level and quantity of work in some courses will exceed your prior experiences. If you have significant responsibilities besides your studies, such as work and family, set realistic academic goals and schedules for yourself. Select an academic load whose work demands do not exceed your available time and energy.
• Let no temptation cause you to surrender your integrity.

• Student code of conduct
• Academic honesty policy
• Disability services
• AI policy for this class is that you are expected to use AIs as learning and knowledge tools. Anything you write you might have an AI vet -- for editorial, grammar, and spelling suggestions, for example -- but what you turn in should be primarily your own work. Always remember that AIs can generate authoritative sounding nonsense. As with everything in life, don't trust blindly.

This section is intended as a brief on motivation theory in general rather than as an effort to motivate you to do well in this class. Ultimately motivation comes from within, so if you want to do well, you will need to self-motivate. From a rhetorical perspective, if you need to motivate long-term behavioral change, in yourself or someone else, the information below will prove useful.

If you are going to succeed at learning something that takes time and effort to learn (the guitar, long distance running, Go or Chess, rhetoric or philosophy or a second or third language), where time is measured either in months of intense effort or years of sustained, high-level effort, you need 7 things: Desire, conviction, persistence, opportunity, sacrifice, a coach, and a plan.

1) Desire: you have to want it. Typically desire comes from identity and identification. If you think you were born to run marathons or read Homer in the original, success will be a more natural path because you will be affirming your identity by pursuing your goal. You will practice for hours on your own because doing so makes you feel more yourself than anything else does. In addition to feeling like a butterfly at larval stage, you need to have a vivid image of what kind of butterfly you desire to become. You need to identify with someone who already is: a hero, a mentor, a close family member. If you have no role model, you won't have a clear sense of how to be what it is you want to become, and thus your learning will lack focus down range. So get a role model. If you don't know one personally, imagine you do while you look around for a real one. Your imaginary role model might be a famous person who you want to meet and maybe even compete with some day.

2) Sacrifice: If you have a casual interest in something and you meet with immediate success, you may imagine you are "naturally" good at it and since being good at something is pleasant, you will likely continue, thinking that you have found your way to be. Early success, however, can be misleading. When you don't understand how something is done it looks easier than it is. Novices often confuse luck with skill and mistake a success for talent. The transition from novice to expert takes a long time, even for the gifted. Inevitably joy becomes work. Performance plateaus exist. Once you cease to improve, once you experience your first loss or setback, you have to decide whether to embrace the pain and frustration and the fear of failure or cut your losses and move on. You are more likely to embrace the pain if you can't imagine alternative ways of being. Thus, oddly enough, a lack of imagination, a one-track mind, can be crucial to success. But tunnel vision doesn't guarantee success. For every success there are many couldbes and wannabes toiling forever on the precipice. I think this existential dilemma, should I stay or should I go, is why so many people are content with good enough. To become great so often means giving up too much while risking getting nothing in return.

3) Conviction: you have to want to succeed, but you also have to believe you can succeed. Identity is critical here as well. If your identity is wrapped up in the pursuit of success, and your identity isn't fragile, you will focus intensely and test yourself without fear or hesitation because you fervently believe you will succeed in the end. A role model who seems to have come from circumstances like your own helps. "They did it; so can I." This is (partially) why entering the family business is a time honored form of education. And why poverty is so often inherited.

4) Persistence: for every person who succeeds at something difficult there are many who showed equal promise and desire who failed. You have to overcome performance plateaus, adversity, boredom, and compelling distractions. Don't confuse smart with quick. Learn to embrace tedium, frustration. Learn to question each apparent accomplishment and then raise the bar. Never settle. Never rest. Keep putting yourself out there. Fall, get up, fall again.

5) Opportunity: Among those who don't succeed are also the merely unlucky. Luck plays a far greater role in success than we care to believe. It isn't enough to be good; you need the opportunity to show someone whose attention matters how good you might get given the necessary resources and support. As someone once said, "no one remembers your name just for working hard."

6) A plan: low initial bar, measurable outcomes, near-term incremental goals on an unbounded path. If you wake up one day and your jeans don't fit and you say, I'm going to get fit, chances are you won't because the goal is vague (what's fit really mean?) and you don't have a plan (what do you do to get fit?). Even if you set a specific goal, lose 5 pounds, you still need a plan, a path to the goal. You will succeed if as you suck in your tummy and pull at your jeans you say, "Today I'm going to walk up three flights of stairs." If you do, and the next day you say, "I'm going to make a healthy low-call lunch and eat that instead of going out," and you also walk up three flights of stairs, you are on your way. Fewer calories, a few more flights, day by day. Drop a few pounds; get a bit stronger (5 flights of stairs). Once your jeans fit, set a new measurable goal that will help keep your jeans fitting.

7) A coach: timely, vivid feedback. A good coach won't let you fail but won't let you luxuriate in success either. He or she will always be encouraging and correcting you. Eventually you may internalize a restlessness, a deeply felt need for continual improvement. For high achievers, good is never good enough. Happy high achievers are inspired by that drive. Miserable high achievers are plagued by it. Focus on the process of improvement and let the outcome be what it will be.

Take aways

• Question your identity: what kind of butterfly does your caterpillar become?
• Set specific, measurable, obtainable goals: set the first bar low, but raise it quickly, always just almost out of reach; don't accept limits; don't treat setbacks as existential threats.
• Get an idol, an image of the perfection you seek (likely a person, but perhaps a specific performance, or even a thing)
• Get a coach / mentor
• Learn to focus intensely and fearlessly over longer and longer periods of time
• Abandon FOMO: you have one goal; nothing else matters