Filling the Gap: The Library Starts the AI Conversation
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation
Conference Strand
Media Literacy
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
Higher Education
Relevance
Our proposed session is directly related to teaching and learning because it discusses our approach to teaching students about generative AI chatbots.
Proposal
As generative AI finds its place in classrooms and academia, librarians have responded with workshops, webinars, and more to help our faculty and students orient themselves in a new landscape. Librarians and information professionals were and continue to be inspired to help address the various knowledge gaps and uneven adoption of policy or procedure about artificial intelligence at our institutions. As librarians at Georgia State University, we noticed that our students were in one way or another left out of conversations about AI, even though their knowledge and use of this technology is critical to their success, and directly informs their information literacy needs.
To improve the conversations around AI at our institution, we created a series of online workshops, titled AI Chatbots & You, targeted towards first- and second-year college students. These workshops addressed such topics as the data privacy and accessibility concerns of chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, safe academic uses of these technologies, and the challenges and variability of generated results. The workshops’ conclusions focused on GSU’s Academic Honesty Policy, the only official policy we could see directly affected by these technologies at that time. Quickly, these workshops created a university wide conversation, in which we were invited to speak with individual classes, honors students, and faculty from across the institution. Interestingly, similar anxieties and curiosities were shared across audiences.
In this proposed presentation, we will discuss our approach to intentionally include students in the conversation around AI, in the absence of official policy or guidance, at our institution. We will address why, as librarians, we were uniquely positioned to address this need, and how we chose to do so. We will also discuss the feedback we received from students and the impact of our work.
Presentation Description
In the midst of the collegiate rush to adapt to the new and rapidly changing AI landscape, students are often left out of the conversation. In this presentation, we will discuss our approaches to inform and include students and why, as librarians, we are uniquely positioned to do so, and student feedback to our efforts.
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Law, Jennie; Burnham, Stephanie; and Madden, Leslie, "Filling the Gap: The Library Starts the AI Conversation" (2024). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 19.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2024/2024/19
Filling the Gap: The Library Starts the AI Conversation
As generative AI finds its place in classrooms and academia, librarians have responded with workshops, webinars, and more to help our faculty and students orient themselves in a new landscape. Librarians and information professionals were and continue to be inspired to help address the various knowledge gaps and uneven adoption of policy or procedure about artificial intelligence at our institutions. As librarians at Georgia State University, we noticed that our students were in one way or another left out of conversations about AI, even though their knowledge and use of this technology is critical to their success, and directly informs their information literacy needs.
To improve the conversations around AI at our institution, we created a series of online workshops, titled AI Chatbots & You, targeted towards first- and second-year college students. These workshops addressed such topics as the data privacy and accessibility concerns of chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, safe academic uses of these technologies, and the challenges and variability of generated results. The workshops’ conclusions focused on GSU’s Academic Honesty Policy, the only official policy we could see directly affected by these technologies at that time. Quickly, these workshops created a university wide conversation, in which we were invited to speak with individual classes, honors students, and faculty from across the institution. Interestingly, similar anxieties and curiosities were shared across audiences.
In this proposed presentation, we will discuss our approach to intentionally include students in the conversation around AI, in the absence of official policy or guidance, at our institution. We will address why, as librarians, we were uniquely positioned to address this need, and how we chose to do so. We will also discuss the feedback we received from students and the impact of our work.
