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Theme B. Digital Information Literacies and AI Literacy
Header image created by Rokas Aleliūnas, taken from Pinterest
Theme 1. Digital Citizenship, Digital Information Literacy & Digital Safety
Theme 1. Digital Citizenship, Digital Information Literacy & Digital Safety
Materials
Materials
The videos address a significant question of modern times.
"How will we evolve from becoming online users to online citizens?"
The answer to that is Digital Information Literacy (DIL).
Organizations that help us safeguard our digital data
My reflections on the article "A taxonomy of digital learning activities for digital inclusion"
My reflections on the article "A taxonomy of digital learning activities for digital inclusion"
Prompt given for reflection: "Contemporary discussions have centered on whether technology use will bridge digital inequalities or widen the divide, with FAR LESS attention on the connection between digital literacy, the digital divide, and digital inclusion."
The main topic of this article was how the concepts of digital divide, digital literacy and digital inclusion are connected to eachother in correlation to digital learning activities and educational technology. To my understanding, those three gears are constantly affecting eachother, therefore they cannot be studied as standalone concepts.
In simplified thinking, we cannot study how technology bridges or widens the digital divide without addressing the need for people's digital literacy. Similarly, when talking about digital literacy in education, even though the relevant skills have been clearly defined for educators and learners, in order to bridge theory with practice, the digital learning activities should also be designed appropriately for developing those skills. Lastly, as mentioned in the article by Nguyen et.al. (2020), "the cooperation of digital divide and digital literacy determines the state of digital inclusion in society".
Therefore, collective and multidisciplinary discussion is needed to ensure that the standards of digital inclusion are met in modern education. This also applies to collaboration between educators and policy makers.
I think this article contributes to addressing this issue in a cross-disciplinary way, specifically using discrete mathematics. It was very interesting to see how a taxonomy can be defined as a discrete set because I hadn't thought about it in that way before. It helped me simplify the hierarchies in the concepts of digital inclusion, digital literacy and divide by figuring out which is a subset of which.
Theme 2. Content creation & Digital Storytelling
Theme 2. Content creation & Digital Storytelling
Materials
Materials
Reflections on the videos
Reflections on the videos
The video "The technology of storytelling" by Joe Sabia was really engaging and for me contained quite a lot of information for its short duration. It made me see the trajectory of storytelling, but also how old of an art it is that we humans use (6000 years!).
The use of the book as a primary example of storytelling device made a lot of sense and brought back childhood memories. Reading books nowadays has been widely de-normalized since media has completely taken over. That doesn't mean that books hold no value anymore, but the video I think highlighted the significance of the storytelling 'device', or medium and the necessity for change as humanity grows.
Refik Anadol in the video "How AI art could enhance humanity's collective memory" presents a really interesting utilization of Generative AI to visualize coral reefs, which are gradually vanishing from the planet due to climate change. As he says in the video, the purpose was to "create artificial realities while preserving disappearing nature". He then moves on to present other examples of visualizing nature, such as glaciers in Iceland, and Amazon rainforests.
This idea was amazing to me because I think Generative AI has largely polarized modern societies, to those accepting it and those opposing its existence in our lives. Specifically in the arts community, the debates are huge around ethical dilemmas, copyrights, stripping people off their creativity and "stealing" their ideas. I believe that this approach of using AI to enhance people's memories and knowledge around nature, and making effort to use original data in the process, somehow managed, in my mind, to take off the tension from all those ongoing debates and focus on something that we all humans can relate to very deeply and this was very empowering and refreshing. By capturing humanity's collective memories, such as nature, urban and culture to me this was an inspiring attempt to bridge people's thoughts and emotions on a really controversial matter of modern life. "How does it feel to be immersed by nature?" Do we remember? "How can we bring ancient wisdom to our society respectfully?"
These are questions that I believe touch the human experience very deeply. Combining this with a powerful emerging technology such as AI only proves that no technology can be characterized as "good" or "bad". It is the usage that matters. This proved that AI can really be used in the most human-centered way possible, if the people have the intention to do it.
The Memory Police, book by Yoko Ogawa
This video also brought my mind to a book I had read some time ago called "The Memory Police", by Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa.
This book presents a dystopian setting where people live in an island where things are suddenly disappearing. These things vary from objects, to species in nature, etc.
Most people are oblivious to these disappearances, but some people have the power to recall the lost objects. They experience this sudden loss while at the same time, they have to live in fear as they try to hold on to their memories because of "The Memory Police", a force in control of the island who is committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. They capture people who hold on to memorabilia and forcefully remove the disappeared objects from peoples' homes and lives.
Thinking of it in parallel to Generative AI, I think many people see AI kind of like "the memory police", something that is being imposed to them and that they fear wants to control them and forcefully alter the reality that they are in.
*Interestingly, by searching for this book now I also found out that it inspired a theater play in my home country, in Northern Greece in 2023.
https://www.ntng.gr/default.aspx?lang=en-GB&page=2&production=55998
Lastly, the video "Magic and Wonder in the age of AI" was very inspiring on a deeper level.
"Has too much technology robbed us of magic and wonder?"
"Have we traded magic and mystery for cold, hard logic and logistics?"
These questions posed in the video really touched me on a personal level. Before involving myself in education, I was studying in the field of Informatics, having strictly tech courses for over 3 years in my basic studies.
I was always interested in the analog world of media, either that was analog photography, analog collage, but as I was growing up and progressing through my studies I found myself wanting more and more to revolve myself with tangible things because I felt comforted by them. I felt that they opened worlds of creativity and wonder for me that this cold, rigid technology that I was studying about, could not do. After the 4th year of my bachelor studies, when I could finally make choices around my studies, I took upon courses that combined technology with media, such as Image Processing and Musical Computing. These courses made me see technology with new lenses and sparked my creativity.
Afterwards, and most importantly, when I decided to combine Informatics with Learning Sciences and explore the world of educational technology and technology-enhanced learning in general, those lenses became more permanent.
Therefore, it was when I questioned how I could connect my previous discipline to something creative that made more sense to me personally, that I again experienced wonder through technology. This leads me to believe that technology does not rob us of anything, it's our own viewpoint that matters.
As the speaker says in the video, "Wonder lies in the disconnect with what we think is possible, and what is happening. Wonder is questioning of what's possible."
"It's the questioning that's important. The beauty of something is in our seeing. When we approach the world with wonder, its not the answers that we find that ultimately give our life meaning, it is the questions. The meaning is in our asking.". These ending remarks were really touching and made so much sense in the current state of life that I am in, as a student here in Oulu. I am full of wonder, curiosity, uncertainty and this is a journey with multiple meanings.
However, besides the personal thoughts, this video highlighted very effectively how significant the role of humans is in all technologies, no matter how novel or sophisticated they are. Emerging technologies such as AI would be meaningless without the capacity of humans to ask the bigger questions. This is both literal and metaphorical when talking about LLMS such as ChatGPT, because the result literally depends on the question (prompt) that you give the tool, but metaphorically as well we are the ones who ask the bigger questions, we are the ones setting the intentions and this technology is a powerful means of achieving exactly what WE ask for.
Theme 3. Data- and AI Literacy
Theme 3. Data- and AI Literacy
Materials
Materials
My reflections on the article "Rethinking the entwinement between artificial intelligence and human learning: What capabilities do learners need for a world with AI?"
My reflections on the article "Rethinking the entwinement between artificial intelligence and human learning: What capabilities do learners need for a world with AI?"
Prompt given: "Reflect on what you believe are the strengths and weaknesses of this paper, and share what you agree or disagree with in their thoughts."
I believe that this article's main strength is that it examines the topic of the infusion of AI in human activity in a well-rounded way. The 9 authors address the issue from different viewpoints e.g, social, cognitive and propose diverse solutions. However, having that many authors in my opinion affected the cohesion of the article and also possibly stood as a limitation for the depths that the article reaches. Even though the approach is diverse and multidisciplinary, each author gives more of a general outline on their contribution that reflects their discipline and perception, rather than a specific proposal that is contextualized. This led to generalized suggestions that require a lot more in-depth research in order to have practical value and be implemented in educational settings.
For example, proposing self-regulated learning as a capability that learners need to develop and suggesting scaffolding as a method for helping learners achieve that, is of course a useful direction. However, it does not provide any insights on the situational factors, the tools, the environment and how do those affect this proposal. For instance, is the author speaking about individual regulation or socially shared regulation? In the context of technology-enhanced learning or not? How is the scaffolding going to be achieved? These are only a few questions, to demonstrate how generic this suggestion is, and how it maybe generates more questions than those that it addresses.
Also, I believe that some quotes that have been extracted from previous research and used in this article without further context, such as e.g that "Learners choose what to learn and how they will learn, in the context of external goals, resources and constraints" from Winne & Hadwin's article in 1998, might lead to misconceptions and misguidance in the direction of enhancing students' SRL skills. This specific quote for instance, might lead someone to thinking that they should leave their students freedom in choosing the topic or instructional method for their learning. This is analytically debunked in the article "Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education" by Kirshner and van Merriënboer (2013), in which the authors discuss around the myths surrounding learners and and how them choosing their preferred way of learning is not necessarily what is most beneficial for them.
To summarize my thoughts, I found myself generally agreeing with a lot of the proposals in the article, such as teachers’ critical engagement with digital tools or fostering creativity across different levels. However, it was "easy" to agree with them because they mostly remained at a surface level, therefore, even though they give promising directions towards the capabilities that learners need to develop to coexist with AI but also to collaborate, co-learn and maximize their productivity, each proposal needs to be further broken down and analyzed in a specific context.
References and Resources
References and Resources
Markauskaite, L., Marrone, R., Poquet, O., Knight, S., Martinez-Maldonado, R., Howard, S., Tondeur, J., De Laat, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Gašević, D., & Siemens, G. (2022). Rethinking the entwinement between artificial intelligence and human learning: What capabilities do learners need for a world with AI? Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 3, 100056. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2022.100056
Nguyen, A., Hong, Y., & Gardner, L. A. (2020, June). A taxonomy of digital learning activities for digital inclusion. In Proceedings of the 28th European conference on information systems (ECIS), an online AIS conference, June 15-17, 2020. Association for Information Systems.
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