From AI Skeptic to AI Tinkerer: Claire Drolet on Libraries, Critical Thinking, and Rethinking Assessment
In this episode of The Smarter Campus Podcast, Zach sits down with Claire Drolet, Access Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at Delaware Valley University, to talk about her journey from being an AI skeptic to finding practical ways to use the technology without abandoning the values that made her skeptical in the first place.
Claire shares the project that changed her perspective: a diversity audit of her university library's roughly 900-book leisure reading collection. What traditionally required librarians to manually sample a fraction of a collection became an opportunity to combine her own expertise with AI. Using ChatGPT and custom bots in BoodleBox, Claire developed a workflow that helped her analyze books in minutes rather than hours while still requiring her judgment and information literacy throughout the process.
The conversation explores why using AI well can actually demand more critical thinking, not less. Claire discusses prompt refinement, verifying outputs, understanding where models fail, and why educators don't necessarily need to embrace AI to recognize the importance of understanding it.
Claire and Zach also explore what assessment should look like in an AI-enabled world and whether traditional assignments like the 12-page term paper are still the best way for every student to demonstrate learning.
For educators who remain skeptical of AI, Claire's story offers a different path forward: you don't have to become an AI evangelist. You can experiment, question the technology, maintain your standards, and decide where it genuinely makes your work better.
