Weekly learning journal

One short entry a week, due Thursday night

The journal is a record of what you tried. Each week you set out to learn something with AI (see Learn it with AI), and the journal is where you write down how it went. It takes about 30 minutes. It is marked complete or incomplete, and it gives you something to bring to Friday’s small group.

The course director reads your journal. Nobody else sees it unless you choose to share it. If an entry is a few days late, that is fine.

Weeks 1 to 3: the entry

Answer five questions. A few sentences each is enough. There are no right answers, and “it did not help” is a useful thing to write.

1. What I chose to learn, and why
   The topic, and how it connects to the goals I wrote in week 1.

2. How AI helped, and where it did not
   Which tool I used and what I asked it to do.
   One time I felt I needed to check the AI: what made me want
   to check, how I checked, and what I found.

3. What surprised me
   Something AI did better or worse than I expected, or something
   about how I reacted to it.

4. What changed for me
   One or two of these: how I understand AI, how I will use it, or
   how I would talk about it with a colleague or a patient.

5. What I used, and whether it was worth my time
   One line each: what it was, its link, and whether I would
   recommend it to next year's class.

Ways to start

If a question is hard to start, borrow one of these. They are suggestions, not a form to fill in.

  1. What I chose to learn. “I wanted to learn how to … because …” “On my goals list I wrote … This week I tried …” “I am going into …, so I picked …”
  2. How AI helped, and where it did not. “It saved me time when …” “I got a better answer once I …” “It was no help with …, because …” For the check: “It told me … I was not sure, because … I looked it up in … and found …” If nothing made you doubt it, say why you trusted it, then check one thing anyway. Sometimes the AI will be right, and sometimes it will be confidently wrong. Both are worth knowing.
  3. What surprised me. “I expected …, but …” “I did not expect it to …” “I was surprised that I felt …”
  4. What changed for me. “Before this week I thought … Now I think …” “Next time I …, I will …” “If a patient asked whether I use AI, I would now say …” “If a co-resident told me …, I would say …”
  5. What I used. For example: “Prompting lab chapter, https://aim.seandavis.net/chapters/enrichment-prompting-lab. Yes: Part A gave me a prompt I used twice more this week.”

About question 5. List the chapters and talks you used, and anything else you found: a paper, a video, a podcast, a news piece, a tool, a post. Aim for about three things a week, with at least one you found yourself. Anything related to AI counts, medical or not, so follow your own interest. For example, what do data centers really cost the places where they are built? Give the link so someone else can find it. Keep this part short: one line each is enough. The course director uses your answers to improve the course, and the best finds go into the starter resources for future students.

Week 4: what you will keep

No new topic. Write a short piece, roughly 300 to 500 words:

  • the two or three ways of using AI you will keep using in residency, and why,
  • one place you decided AI does not belong in your work, and why,
  • what you would tell an incoming intern who is nervous about these tools.

Draw on your weeks 1 to 3 entries. Prepare a five-minute version for your Friday small group on November 6. Slides optional. If you cannot come that day, submitting the piece is enough.

Submission

In Canvas, as a text entry under that week’s module, by Thursday night: October 15, 22, and 29, and November 5 for the week 4 piece. Plain text is fine. If the Canvas assignment differs from this page, follow Canvas.

Using AI to write the journal

You may use AI to help you think, organise, or tidy your writing. The experiences and the judgments must be yours. One sentence at the end saying how you used AI on the entry, if you did, is enough. That is the same disclosure journals and residency programs now expect.

Optional: keep an AI-use ledger. When you use AI to make something, such as slides for your week 4 talk, keep a ledger as you go. A ledger is a running list, one line per step, of what you did and what the AI did. Use your university ChatGPT Edu or Copilot account, and keep real patients out of it. At the start of the chat, type:

Keep a ledger of our work in this chat: one line per step,
saying what I did and what you did.

At the end, ask it to turn the ledger into a short statement of how the work was made. Read the statement and correct it, because the chatbot can get its own part wrong. The result says much more than “AI was used to draft and edit.” This book keeps one: see the AI ledger.