Greetings, All,

Sharing several noteworthy readings that caught our team’s attention this week…

We’ll start with the the White House’s Executive Order on “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” issued Wednesday, the impacts of which are sure to reverberate through the American educational system in the coming year. It’s worth us considering individually and together how our work is positioned in relationship to the educational imaginary offered here.

There’s been a tremendous interest in “frameworks for AI Literacy” over the past year, and, since the release of the EO above, some pushback from circles of critical scholars of the very notion of AI literacy: is it a tool to create the conditions for acceptance? Does it presume too much about how central AI will be to educational and knowledge systems going forward? What are the costs of such a framing to other literacies?

As an introduction, here are three approaches to AI Literacy Frameworks published in the past year in EDUCAUSE. More guidance on frameworks, including some meta analyses, are in our Zotero library. The first is the product of an EDUCAUSE working group, and offers “literacy” recommendations by institutional role within higher education. The second is offered by Patricia Turner, of UC-Davis, and offers a slightly more critical perspective. And the third is a “critical AI literacy framework” from Maha Bali, which puts AI literacy into a pedagogical narrative.

Also of note: see this interesting and provocative study in the Journal of Marketing, which found that lower AI literacy predicts greater AI receptivity (should be accessible through your campus library journals database).

Extending the question of literacy, imaginaries, and the role of marketing, Audrey Watters writes this week at Second Breakfast about Matter and Space, a new startup from Paul Leblanc, the former president of Southern New Hampshire University (knowns for its expansive online programs), George Siemens (educational theorist of “connectivism,” who helped lay the groundwork for the Massive Open Online Course movement), and clinical psychologist Tanya Gamby. There’s nothing to see from their company other than a slick website and two slick videos, but as Watters notes, those three products tell us plenty about the world as these visionaries imagine it being, and becoming.

The labor impacts and risk for misleading generalization are, after environmental impact, the two most commonly expressed concerns when it comes to AI. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker last week about the implications of the “A.I. Revolution” on labor, looking back to the Luddites for understanding and perspective. And John Ross cites an upcoming paper in the Royal Society Open Science from Uwe Peters and Benjamin Chin-Yee finding that “when summarizing scientific texts, LLMs may omit details that limit the scope of research conclusions, leading to generalizations of results broader than warranted by the original study.”

Two “interventions” (in the framing of danah boyd) that inspired us this week are Data Workers Inquiry, a participatory action research initiative to better understand the labor conditions of data work across the world, and “Slow AI,” a project led by Dutch designer and researcher Nadia Piet which imagines alternative narratives for AI to the ones that emerge from Silicon Valley. The Slow AI group has organized a festival in Amsterdam next week which promises to offer some really beautiful, challenging, and inspiring approaches to working with, against, and on AI.

I’m sure we all agree: slowing things down would be very helpful.

Best,
Luke

—

Works Referenced:

The White House. “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” April 23, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/.

EDUCAUSE. “AI Literacy in Teaching and Learning: Executive Summary.” Accessed October 17, 2024. https://www.educause.edu/content/2024/ai-literacy-in-teaching-and-learning/executive-summary.

Turner, Patricia. “Mapping a Multidimensional Framework for GenAI in Education,” April 2, 2025. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2025/4/mapping-a-multidimensional-framework-for-genai-in-education.

Bali, Maha. “Where Are the Crescents in AI? – LSE Higher Education.” LSE Higher Education – Enabling Dialogue and Sharing Different Perspectives in a Changing HE Landscape (blog), February 26, 2024. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/2024/02/26/where-are-the-crescents-in-ai/.

Tully, Stephanie M., Chiara Longoni, and Gil Appel. “Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity.” Journal of Marketing, January 13, 2025, 00222429251314491. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491.

Second Breakfast. “Matter and Dystopia,” April 21, 2025. https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/matter-and-dystopia/.

Cassidy, John. “How to Survive the A.I. Revolution.” The New Yorker, April 14, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/how-to-survive-the-ai-revolution.

Ross, John. “AI Research Summaries ‘Exaggerate Findings,’ Study Warns.” Inside Higher Education, April 24, 2025. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2025/04/24/ai-research-summaries-exaggerate-findings.

Peters, Uwe, and Benjamin Chin-Yee. “Generalization Bias in Large Language Model Summarization of Scientific Research,” n.d. https://philpapers.org/archive/PETGBI-4.pdf.

“Data Workers Inquiry.” Accessed April 24, 2025. https://data-workers.org/.

AIxDESIGN. “Slow AI.” https://aixdesign.co/posts/slow-ai.

Greetings, All,

Sharing several noteworthy readings that caught our team’s attention this week…

We’ll start with the the White House’s Executive Order on “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” issued Wednesday, the impacts of which are sure to reverberate through the American educational system in the coming year. It’s worth us considering individually and together how our work is positioned in relationship to the educational imaginary offered here.

There’s been a tremendous interest in “frameworks for AI Literacy” over the past year, and, since the release of the EO above, some pushback from circles of critical scholars of the very notion of AI literacy: is it a tool to create the conditions for acceptance? Does it presume too much about how central AI will be to educational and knowledge systems going forward? What are the costs of such a framing to other literacies?

As an introduction, here are three approaches to AI Literacy Frameworks published in the past year in EDUCAUSE. More guidance on frameworks, including some meta analyses, are in our Zotero library. The first is the product of an EDUCAUSE working group, and offers “literacy” recommendations by institutional role within higher education. The second is offered by Patricia Turner, of UC-Davis, and offers a slightly more critical perspective. And the third is a “critical AI literacy framework” from Maha Bali, which puts AI literacy into a pedagogical narrative.

Also of note: see this interesting and provocative study in the Journal of Marketing, which found that lower AI literacy predicts greater AI receptivity (should be accessible through your campus library journals database).

Extending the question of literacy, imaginaries, and the role of marketing, Audrey Watters writes this week at Second Breakfast about Matter and Space, a new startup from Paul Leblanc, the former president of Southern New Hampshire University (knowns for its expansive online programs), George Siemens (educational theorist of “connectivism,” who helped lay the groundwork for the Massive Open Online Course movement), and clinical psychologist Tanya Gamby. There’s nothing to see from their company other than a slick website and two slick videos, but as Watters notes, those three products tell us plenty about the world as these visionaries imagine it being, and becoming.

The labor impacts and risk for misleading generalization are, after environmental impact, the two most commonly expressed concerns when it comes to AI. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker last week about the implications of the “A.I. Revolution” on labor, looking back to the Luddites for understanding and perspective. And John Ross cites an upcoming paper in the Royal Society Open Science from Uwe Peters and Benjamin Chin-Yee finding that “when summarizing scientific texts, LLMs may omit details that limit the scope of research conclusions, leading to generalizations of results broader than warranted by the original study.”

Two “interventions” (in the framing of danah boyd) that inspired us this week are Data Workers Inquiry, a participatory action research initiative to better understand the labor conditions of data work across the world, and “Slow AI,” a project led by Dutch designer and researcher Nadia Piet which imagines alternative narratives for AI to the ones that emerge from Silicon Valley. The Slow AI group has organized a festival in Amsterdam next week which promises to offer some really beautiful, challenging, and inspiring approaches to working with, against, and on AI.

I’m sure we all agree: slowing things down would be very helpful.

Best,
Luke

—

Works Referenced:

The White House. “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” April 23, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/.

EDUCAUSE. “AI Literacy in Teaching and Learning: Executive Summary.” Accessed October 17, 2024. https://www.educause.edu/content/2024/ai-literacy-in-teaching-and-learning/executive-summary.

Turner, Patricia. “Mapping a Multidimensional Framework for GenAI in Education,” April 2, 2025. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2025/4/mapping-a-multidimensional-framework-for-genai-in-education.

Bali, Maha. “Where Are the Crescents in AI? – LSE Higher Education.” LSE Higher Education – Enabling Dialogue and Sharing Different Perspectives in a Changing HE Landscape (blog), February 26, 2024. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/2024/02/26/where-are-the-crescents-in-ai/.

Tully, Stephanie M., Chiara Longoni, and Gil Appel. “Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity.” Journal of Marketing, January 13, 2025, 00222429251314491. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491.

Second Breakfast. “Matter and Dystopia,” April 21, 2025. https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/matter-and-dystopia/.

Cassidy, John. “How to Survive the A.I. Revolution.” The New Yorker, April 14, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/how-to-survive-the-ai-revolution.

Ross, John. “AI Research Summaries ‘Exaggerate Findings,’ Study Warns.” Inside Higher Education, April 24, 2025. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2025/04/24/ai-research-summaries-exaggerate-findings.

Peters, Uwe, and Benjamin Chin-Yee. “Generalization Bias in Large Language Model Summarization of Scientific Research,” n.d. https://philpapers.org/archive/PETGBI-4.pdf.

“Data Workers Inquiry.” Accessed April 24, 2025. https://data-workers.org/.

AIxDESIGN. “Slow AI.” https://aixdesign.co/posts/slow-ai.