Digital Literacy

Thoughts: Digital literacy for me within my job is the concept of designing an effective, ethical, safe and high-quality online research strategy. 

 This is how I began my career in Librarianship as a reference and instruction librarian.  I loved it.  I got asked the most obscure and interesting question almost everyday.  It was a wonderful job for a life-long learner.  I got paid to figure out how to most efficiently answer a question.  Awesome.  First, I worked at a four-year liberal arts college and then landed my dream job.  A four-year arts college - the student body was magnificent - creative and energetic and just plain cool.  I got to watch them come in as freshman - so sure they knew everything and then get into a major and realized they only had touched the tip of the knowledge available.  By the time they graduated they had matured and grown as people and as artists. 

 It was also the dawn of web research: remember either learning or teaching the online research concept of CRAAP.   Then the days of Web 2.0 and social media.    After 14 years in public schools I wonder if I could run a reference desk anymore.  I miss it, and when a 3 year old sneezes all over me I really miss it.  HAHA  

I am passionate that learning to do research is learning how to teach yourself anything.  If you do it well it will help you make better decisions throughout your whole life.  In school it is how you show your teacher how well you can teach yourself.    For many it is stull drudgery but I hope they can see the possibilities for this being a life-long skill.  

I became very interested in AI and worked to learn as much as I could about it  by taking classes, reading and talking to anyone willing to share their knowledge, being parts of several PLCs and participating in state-wide task forces.  I taught through both the beginning push of digital literacy and the failure of schools to see what the impact of social media would have on our students.  I wanted to personally get in front of this emerging and ever-changing technology and prepare my students for this new technological landscape.   As a result I developed my own AI objectives for my curriculum and have been pulling lessons from ai4edu, ISTE, Day of AI and AIedu and Curiosity Machine. to address my objectives.   I expect this curriculum, as with all my others, to constantly change and be updated.  So please check back and see any changes that occur.

Tools:  

Useful Links:  

AI Literacy Objectives

1  Impact: Influence on society

1.a  Where do we see it

1.b  How people are using it

1.c  Environmental impact

2 The Mechanics: How it works

2.a  History - why is it happening now

2.b Types

2.c What is it good at and bad at

2.d What is a dataset/LLM

2.e Neural networks

3 Bias/Equity: Looking Closely At Results

3.a What is it

3.b Why it happens

3.c How to combat

4 Human-Centered: You are the human and you are in charge

4.a What does your own knowledge tell you about the result

4.b Question, Question

4.c Check for accuracy

5 AI Safety: Protect yourself

5.a What should your expectation of privacy be and how to protect 

your privacy

5.b  Be aware of what you put into AI bots

5.c Images and AI - fakes and safety

5.d AI companions and what students should know about them

5.e AI in gaming