Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Eleanor Ball, Information Literacy & Liaison Librarian and Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2025-26 year here at ACRLog. I’m about as anti-AI as they come. I’ve never used it, and I’m ethically
Digital plastic: a metaphorical framework for Critical AI Literacy in the multiliteracies era
How can educators critically engage with the affordances provided by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) while remaining committed to the core tenets of the multiliteracies project, such as ...
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming every facet of education, both for learners, educators, and leaders alike. In this time of great change, how ...
What AI Literacy do we need? — Civics of Technology
Civics of Tech Announcements Civics of Tech Parent Testimonials, by 11/1/24 - Read Allie’s blog post and click here by November 1, 2024 to submit your testimonial about how educational technologies are manifesting in your child(ren)’s schooling. Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 11/12/
Critical AI Literacy is Not Enough: Introducing Care Literacy, Equity Literacy & Teaching Philosophies. A Slide Deck
I’ve written a lot, on and off, about the importance of developing critical AI literacy, but I realize now that it is not enough, and I’ve recently started thinking about all of this wi…
Principles for the use of AI in FE colleges - Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is already transforming education, the workplace, and society. These principles have been created by Jisc in partnership with the Association of Colleges (AoC) Technology Reference Group. They are intended for colleges to adopt as a statement of intent, guiding strategic direction. They aim to help colleges navigate challenges and maximising the opportunities […]
Discussing Learner AI Guidance with the FE community - Artificial intelligence
On Tuesday 27th February, we had our third community meeting. We had a great group who joined us for an insightful discussion around how to provide learners with guidance around AI. The first half of our session was led by AI Technologist, James Hodgkinson, who began with a poll, asking whether their institutions had produced […]
Update on FE AI literacy working group - Artificial intelligence
AI is of course much more than just generative AI, and a full discussion around AI literacy would need to cover more traditional AI uses too, for example predictive models, adaptive learning, image recognition, recommendation engines and many other tools and techniques. Generative AI is the hot topic now though, so the groups discussion focused […]
If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’ve written about critical AI literacy, and as I’ve keynoted, taught, and workshopped this, I’ve been developing my model furth…
Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies
This study explores how discussing metaphors for AI can help build awareness of the frames that shape our understanding of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Given the pressing need to teach “critical AI literacy”, discussion of metaphor provides an opportunity for inquiry and dialogue with space for nuance, playfulness, and critique. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology, we analyzed metaphors from a range of sources, and reflected on them individually according to seven questions, then met and discussed our interpretations. We then analyzed how our reflections contributed to the three kinds of literacies delineated in Selber’s multiliteracies framework: functional, critical and rhetorical. These allowed us to analyze questions of ethics, equity, and accessibility in relation to AI. We explored each metaphor along the dimension of whether or not it was promoting anthropomorphizing, and to what extent such metaphors imply that AI is sentient. Our findings highlight the role of metaphor reflection in fostering a nuanced understanding of AI, suggesting that our collaborative autoethnographic approach as well as the heuristic model of plotting AI metaphors on dimensions of anthropomorphism and multiliteracies, might be useful for educators and researchers in the pursuit of advancing critical AI literacy.