Our Highlanders are using their education to do extraordinary things. In this column, we highlight some notable mentions from local, regional, national and international news media. Whether our students, alumni, faculty and staff are featured as subject matter experts in high-profile stories or simply helping make the world a better place, we’ll feature their stories.
Block party central
If you didn’t get a chance to stop by the Radford Community Fest on Saturday, Aug. 23, you missed a great time. But here’s some solace: A quick overview of the event is available via WDBJ-7’s recent piece on it.
The downtown fair, which for one day each August fills East Main Street from Third to Tyler avenues, offered more than 100 local vendors, about a half-dozen food trucks, live music and more, acts as a link-up between two local entities.
“The most important thing about this festival, honestly, is the partnership between the city and the university,” Radford’s Associate Vice President for Student Life Tricia Smith said in the piece.
“This is just a really special place, and not every university has a relationship with the city in the way that we do here in Radford,” Smith added. “That’s what makes all of this energy happen, and that’s what makes this event possible.”
Channel 7 also spoke with junior Jordynne Wicker, who said the city and school collaborate with each other, including with Greek life and sorority and fraternity councils: “We all support each other.”
Technical writing
Fall classes are kicking into gear, and educators continue to consider the effect artificial intelligence can have on the learning process.
An Aug. 19 spot by WDBJ-7 reports that 90% of students use some form of AI, and the story ponders the generative technology tools which, just for starters, are capable of answering complex questions, summarizing books and articles, and composing essays on a virtually infinite range of topics.
WDBJ spoke with Radford Associate Professor of Economics Can Dogan, who studies AI, about the implications of students’ usage.
“AI is a great tool in terms of transferring one skill to another level,” Dogan said, but added, “In terms of feeding AI everything necessary for the assignment, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good practice.”
The most productive use of AI, he explained, is when students collaborate with the technology, rather than when they simply copy and paste assignments into sites like ChatGPT and ask it to complete their work.
“If they assign all those tasks to AI, then they are missing some initial components like understanding and applying,” Dogan said. “It’s going to be extremely difficult for them at later stages in life to synthesize and create new ideas.”
Datacentric
A recent article by Cardinal News grapples not only with some surprising technological figures – that Northern Virginia, for example, is home to 35% of the world’s data centers – it also gives scale to the level of data being created and the mammoth vaults of computers and networking equipment that make artificial intelligence and cloud storage possible.
And given that these massive facilities are signposts of things to come, yet may one day be obsolete themselves, the story also considers how they might be viewed sometime in the future, in much the same way archeologists today consider significant sites from our past.
Jake Fox, professor of Anthropological Sciences and the chair of that department, weighed in on the forecast, surmising that “an explorer approaching groups of large, uniform buildings filled with stacks of metal, plastic and cables would likely be perplexed at first.”
Even in a high-tech future, anthropologists-to-come would likely puzzle over their find, he said, but he believes they’d recognize the significance of such imposing structures.
“[C]uneiform tablets didn’t make a lot of sense for a long time, but we pieced together bits and pieces from different things,” Fox said.
“Over time, presumably we could figure [data centers] out, based on written records we recover from other locations, and things like that would give reference to help us understand, and as we track the electrical connections between it and power plants and … fiber-optics … that would actually be trackable and mappable.”