This project emerged from a combination of factors. One was preparing for a presentation on “Exploring our ever expanding maps of adult development” for the LUME (Formerly Growth Edge Network) community gathering in Seattle, June 18-22, 2025. My role was to expose the community to an overview of the range of thinkers who I knew had made contributions to the field of adult development. I also wanted to make my session interactive and make use of the broad knowledge and expertise within the community – a long presentation of names and ideas would guarantee putting people to sleep.
Another significant factor was my ongoing learning of how to make good use of AI. I had been training myself in this for a few months and getting a better sense of how to collaborate with several AI tools. Many things arose from this. One was the surprise inclusion of a name I had never heard of in a list I had asked for that was not in the source text, but upon digging around, I found was someone who had done a lot in the field. This prompted me to continue my use of Gemini (my tool of preference at the moment) to expand my own horizons.
To be efficient, I developed a basic template for how I wanted Gemini to present summary descriptions of each theorist and their contribution. I have no time, nor enough knowledge to write an adequate text for each theorist myself. Thus the text that is in this website is completely generated by Gemini Advanced 2.5 Flash, including the background introductions to each category. I also used it to think through who else, outside my range of knowledge, should be included in a given category. (Note that a few theorists appear in more than one category for various reasons). Finally, I also used Gemini Alpha to generate the various categories, organize the structure of the project and guide me through using coding tools (including generating prompts for Kilo Code, the AI inside the coding program Visual Studio Code).
Maybe this project can be taken as a small probe into how we can collaborate with AI to expand our knowledge and resources.
No theorists found for this category.