It was great to bring in the New Year with our latest Reading Club on 8th January 2025. A big thank you to everyone who came along to join in discussions and share thoughts and ideas; especially to Xue Zhou and Lilian Schofield, the authors of our chosen paper, Developing a conceptual framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy in higher education, who were kind enough to join us and field questions from attendees! The popularity, relevancy and importance of the theme of the discussion was evident in the new and familiar faces who came along on the day.
Our discussions opened with a question on what sparked Xue and Lilian’s interest and approach in developing a framework for AI literacy. The authors expressed the framework was developed in response to their desire to support colleagues to integrate AI into their practice and the teaching of AI into the curriculum; which was in turn stimulated by responses from an internal institutional survey that outlined how staff were unsure how to approach this.
Next, as a group, we shared how we have used AI in our own practice both practically and pedagogically. Examples shared included: to produce summaries of books and articles; to help create handouts; abstract writing; curriculum design; data visualisation; to co-create solutions to problems. We then shared thoughts on how these approaches support or contradict what we tell students about AI use.
Another discussion point, was how AI can be used to support constructivist, active learning approaches when it is used as an aid or as another stakeholder in student learning. This was related back to the paper’s framework and the importance of breaking students’ AI use into chucks to help develop skills rather than to de-skill and replace students own work.
The next Reading Club will take place on Wednesday 12th March at 17:30.
Please book a free ticket via the JLDHE website. You will be notified in advance of the meeting with a selection of JLDHE articles for you to choose from. We will then confirm the piece with the most votes. The Zoom link, to access the meeting, is provided via your ticket.