What’s of interest? A Framework for AI Literacy | EDUCAUSE Review
Tell me more!
Academic and technologies teams at Barnard College developed an AI literacy framework to provide a conceptual foundation for AI education and programming efforts in higher education institutional contexts.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
If of interest, the Barnard College authors of this AI Literacy framework are guests on a Future Trends Forum live event 2024-12-06T19:00:00Z→2024-12-06T20:00:00Z
Well, there’s more to add on, via @dajbelshaw whose dissertation (openly published) centered on an in depth examination of digital literacies. Doug today published a note arguing convincingly that AI literacy as a singular construct is almost simplistic.
I see a lot of AI Literacy frameworks at the moment. Like this one. From my perspective, most of them make similar mistakes, thinking in terms of defined ‘levels’ using some kind of remix of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There’s also an over-emphasis on cognitive aspects such as ‘understanding’ while more community and civic-minded aspects are often under-emphasised.
Doug is in conversation with Angela Gunder on this yet another framework, Dimensions of AI Literacies framed by “understanding literacies as plural and contextual”
The Dimensions of AI Literacies were developed to address the growing need for educators, learners, and leaders to navigate the complexities of AI in education. Remixed from the work of Doug Belshaw’s Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, this approach recognizes that AI literacies are not a binary of literacy vs. illiteracy, but rather consist of a diverse and interconnected set of competencies. By considering AI literacies as a plurality, this taxonomy enables a deeper understanding of how AI can be leveraged to improve the impact of teaching and learning across various sociocultural contexts.
The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies is explicitly not a framework (I usually refer to it as an ‘anti-framework’) as it focuses on the things you need to pay attention to, and define, when thinking through the context of literacy-based initiatives.
Definitions of literacies, including frameworks, are a power play. That’s because they’re presuming to decide what counts, and what doesn’t count, as ‘literate behaviour’.
It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t at the Future Trends Forum event as I would have had ‘some questions’
Thanks much for this, Doug, and I admit I reached for the “framework” word in my writing, without having really done a deep read of your work. I am okay with making mistakes, rather than asking machines to do my summaries!
I am intrigued (and not doubting) the power play description of literacy defining-- but why is it important to make a play for this power? Should we focus more on our practices and acts than setting up definitions? Is there a cost of we do not have suched fixed definitions?
And I always count on you to get those questions out there.
I’d welcome more conversations about the interplay of the elements of digital literaces and the interests, practices of open educators.
All good @cogdog. I’d argue that definitions do matter – and the confusion around microcredentials is a good example of what happens when words stop meaning anything specific. They either become vague (i.e. massively underdefined) or what Richard Rorty would call dead metaphors (i.e. massively overdefined).
A heads-up that WAO has updated ailiteracy.fyi today. It’s still a placeholder but a bit tidier than before. Ideally we’d get some funding to do some work around this, including convening a community – much as I did when at Mozilla around Web Literacy.
Finally, we’ve submitted the draft of a 7,000-word article for Friends of the Earth around AI Sustainability Principles. That will be coming out in January 2025. You can get a preview and view the recording of the roundtable event we ran in this blog post.
As ever, interested in other people’s work in this area. Especially if you’d like to collaborate and do something better than some of the absolute drivel that plagues LinkedIn
