Posted on behalf of Dr. Jennifer Dean, Director of the Thompson Library.
Over the past year, our use of AI and various AI tools has increased for many of us in higher education, whether we are learners, teachers, or both. My first foray into using AI was using ChatGPT to help me write an article for this very newsletter. If you read that piece, you know that I disliked the result and wrote my own piece. Yes, the writing was polished and hit all the right notes. The piece did not require references, so I didn’t have to concern myself with made-up citations–referred to as hallucinations. Still… how did I know the writing wasn’t plagiarized, even if unintentionally? How did I know all the facts were right? I just didn’t feel I could trust it. I also enjoy writing and like my own writing.
This realization led me to look for AI tools for tasks I struggle with, like analyzing documents and creating graphics and charts to help visualize complex information. Though I may be using generative AI for these tasks, I’m not necessarily asking AI to create something totally new, but to take the information I give it to help me discover themes and use the information in new ways. As an academic librarian, the idea of information literacy–or as I oversimply it, the idea that we know we need information and can find it, evaluate it, and use it ethically and responsibly–is never far from my mind. I have often said that basic information literacy is exactly what we need in the AI age, and I do believe this.
I have also wondered whether “information” is a large enough term when we are talking about the types of literacy we need now. Turns out, others are thinking about this idea, and have been for a while. Like any good administrator, I look for ways to be efficient and synthesize competing ideas so that I can help others understand. Like any good academic, I argue with myself about whether efficiency should be the goal and if my attempt to simplify an idea is leaving out important distinctions. For now, we’ll set those competing parts of my persona aside! Information literacy, media literacy, and digital literacy, three types of literacy you may be familiar with, have the similar root of literacy, but are practiced differently depending on the discipline. Do we need a new literacy for AI? AI certainly fits in the aforementioned types of literacy–yet, perhaps it does need its own category. As I was exploring these ideas, I discovered the idea of metaliteracy in Zarei and Adivi's 2024 article for health educators, which led me to the original 2011 article by Mackey and Jacobsen.
Metaliteracy attempts to bring literacy, ethics, and action together, much as the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL, 2016) continues to do in refining the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Yet another take, inspired by ACRL’s Framework, simply uses the phrase “beyond information literacy education" (Dong, 2023) to encapsulate a broader discussion within the realm of open science. Reading these works, I admired the nuances detailed by the authors, and this reminded me that there really is no easy way to simplify some information if we are seeking to fully understand it. Yet, if we are to bring others along with us, we must find a way. This is the kind of thing our librarians can do so easily, and why I see a leading role for librarians as partners as use of AI technology continues to grow. I’ll continue to use the term information literacy in my day-to-day work while I also continue to follow others who think about these ideas.
I’ve shared links to the ACRL Framework and the papers I’ve mentioned above for those who may be interested in learning with me.
University of Michigan-Flint
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