LLM Resources for Faculty
A few colleagues have asked what I use and recommend for working with large language models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT — in research, writing, and teaching. This is a running, informal list rather than institutional guidance; treat it as one colleague’s notes, not a policy statement.
AI or Me
I found it useful in my work to create a table of tasks and identify whether or not I want to delegate them to an LLM or do them myself. Your own table may look different.
Organization tasks
| Task | LLM |
|---|---|
| Organization | Delegate |
| Extraction | Delegate |
| Finding passages | Assist |
| Paper searches | Assist |
| Summarize a paper I haven’t read | Caution! |
| Evaluate paper’s contribution or importance | Me first |
| Identify and define conceptual categories and frameworks | Me first, maybe AI react |
| Development of theoretical framework | Me |
| Summarize a paper I have read | Delegate |
AI Log
I also have found it useful to keep a running log of my own AI use in my scholarly work so I can track what I did so that I can retrace my work and share if necessary.
Getting Started
- Anthropic’s Claude — the assistant I use most for research and writing tasks.
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT — the most widely used alternative; useful to know if students are using it.
- The Bullshit Machines — a free short course on how LLMs work and where they mislead; a good starting point for critical, informed use.
- Claude Academy course catalog — structured video courses on AI fundamentals, using Claude, and AI fluency for various professional roles.
Using LLMs in Research and Writing
- My Claude skills — a collection of skills I use in my own research and writing workflows.
- Lawve — a hub for legal professionals to discover, download, and share AI agent skills for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
- Beaver — an AI research assistant integrated into Zotero, with sentence-level citations for searching your library and reading papers.
- Andrej Karpathy: append-and-review knowledge bases — a pattern for having an LLM incrementally read sources and maintain a compounding wiki, instead of re-retrieving raw documents each time.
Using LLMs in Teaching
- LegalEd.AI — explorations in using AI to teach and learn the law, with news, articles, and tool guidance for law students and educators.
- AI Fluency for Educators (Claude Academy) — a course on applying the “4D” AI Fluency Framework (Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence) to teaching practice and course design.
Further Reading
- CSU Generative AI — the CSU system’s generative AI initiative and resource hub; useful for CSU-specific guidance.
- One Useful Thing — Ethan Mollick’s newsletter on the implications of AI for work, education, and life.
- AAC&U: AI — resources, events, and initiatives from the Association of American Colleges & Universities on integrating AI into teaching, learning, and institutional practice.
Have a resource you think belongs here? Feel free to email me a suggestion.