Tag: Critical Literacies

Bookmarked Where are the crescents in AI? | LSE Higher Education (blogs.lse.ac.uk)

For me, being critical goes beyond critique and scepticism: it includes subscribing to critical theory and critical pedagogy – developing awareness of social justice issues and cultivating in learners a disposition to redress them. The elements of critical AI literacy in my view are:

  • Understanding how GenAI works
  • Recognising inequalities and biases within GenAI
  • Examining ethical issues in GenAI
  • Crafting effective prompts
  • Assessing appropriate uses of GenAI

Where are the crescents in AI? by Maha Bali

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Maha Bali discusses the need for cultivating critical AI literacy. She reflects on ideas and exercises that she has used as a part of her course on digital literacies and intercultural learning. After unpacking each of the areas, with elaborations and examples, she ends with a series of questions to consider:

I think we should always question the use of AI in education for several reasons. Can we position AI as a tutor that supports learning, when we know AI hallucinates often? Even when we train AI as an expert system that has expert knowledge, are we offering this human-less education to those less privileged while keeping the human-centric education to more privileged populations? Why are we considering using technology in the first place – what problems does it solve? What are alternative non-tech solutions that are more social and human? What do we lose from the human socioemotional dimensions of teacher-student and student-student interactions when we replace these with AI? Students, teachers, and policymakers need to develop critical AI literacy in order to make reasonable judgments about these issues.

Where are the crescents in AI? by Maha Bali

This discussion of critical, more than just critique, reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s digital literacies:

  • Digital literacies are about process as much as product
  • Lets move beyond good and evil and focus on choice and consequence
  • Literacy starts with you, curate rather than be curated

In Search of an Understanding of Digital Literacies Worth Having by Aaron Davis

As well as my piece on Cambridge Analytica and the need to critically reflect and ask questions.

I think that the most important thing we can do is wonder. This helps go beyond the how-to to the how-do-they-do-that.

Secret, Safe and Informed: A Reflection on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Collection of Data by Aaron Davis

Liked Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies (yourlogicalfallacyis.com)

A logical fallacy is a flaw in reasoning. Logical fallacies are like tricks or illusions of thought, and they’re often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people. Don’t be fooled! This website has been designed to help you identify and call out dodgy logic wherever it may raise its ugly, incoherent head.

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Bookmarked Australian author Morris Gleitzman says adults shouldn’t censor controversial kids’ books (ABC News)

Children’s authors are now writing about dark, complex and controversial issues. But is that what kids should be reading?

Morris Gleitzman and Jo Lampert spoke as part of a panel discussion for Latrobe University’s Bold Thinking series. It was recorded and broadcast by RN’s Big Ideas. In it they discussed the place of literature to tackle complex topics. For Gleitzman, this has included homosexuality, refugees and the holocaust. Lampert explains that one of the challenges with topics that are considered taboo is that they are often heavily mediated before they reach the child,

There’s the author, but there is the publisher and there’s the editor and there’s the publicist and there’s the librarian and there’s the parent and there’s the teacher.

The challenge is that although we can seemingly protect children from such ideas, they are bombarded with them on a daily basis through the media.

Watched
danah boyd discusses concerns about the weaponising of media literacy through denalism and says that there is a need for cognitive strengthening. This includes:

  1. “Actively taking things out of context can be helpful for analysis”
  2. “help students truly appreciate epistemological differences”
  3. “help students see how they fill in gaps when the information presented to them is sparse and how hard it is to overcome priors [confirmation bias and selective attention]”

Benjamin Doxtdator raises the concern that focusing on the individual:

Would boyd’s cognitive strength training exercises have helped here? No. Turning inwards to psychology, rather outwards to the political context, is precisely what gives us ‘lone wolf’ analyses of white supremacy.

Instead Doxtdator suggests considering the technical infrastructure. Interestingly, she does touch on platforms in the Q&A at the end:

One of the things that is funny is that these technologies get designed for a very particular idea of what they could be used for and then they twist in different ways.source

The original text that the keynote was based on can be found here, while a response to some of the criticism can be found here.

Bookmarked Critical Digital Fluency Revisited by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)

I had the chance to talk to the kind folks from Middlebury about digital fluency Friday. I’ll probably do a better job getting into the depth of things with this as I was moving pretty rapidly for the 20 minute presentation. It’s also super-meta in a way that’s hard to articulate verbally so I…

Tom Woodward presented at Middlebury on the topic of ‘digital fluency’. These notes capture his thinking as he walks through different aspects associated with the topic. One thing that interested me was his discussion of the URL:

I started with the idea of the link/URL. It’s a uniquely digital capability. I used the Wikipedia structure to point out that the various flavors move you between languages for the same article. You may or may not notice something like that but knowing it gives you a bit of power, it opens an avenue of consideration, and it becomes a tool you can use with or without the web designer giving it to you directly.

I also turned a part of the text into a visual graphic which was included within a post on coding.

URL and Travel

“URL and https://readwriterespond.com/2018/01/hidden-code/Travel” by mrkrndvs is licensed under CC BY-SA