11: AI literacies

How do the arguments for moving from computational thinking to computational literacies map onto AI?

Fieldnotes due.

Send suggestions for the Week 13 topic (in your discussion report, by email, or in office hours) by the end of this week.

Weekly update

This video covers office hours, discussion groups, the Week 13 topic, and the draft teaching statement, then introduces this week's readings on AI literacies.

Outline

• 0:09 Logistics.
  • Office hours have been filling up, and I'll keep posting more times on my page. If none of them work for you, let me know and we'll find a time. Happy to talk about your teaching statement or anything else in the course.
  • This week I'm catching up on feedback for everything that's been submitted.
  • 0:48 Discussion groups. Facilitators: check in with your group ahead of time about which readings you'll discuss and what you'll focus on.
  • 1:03 Week 13 topic. Please send suggestions this week (in your discussion report, by email, or in office hours): topics to return to, or things we haven't discussed yet. I'll decide by the end of the week.
  • 1:21 Draft teaching statement: next week. A draft can mean many things, but I'd love something I can give you feedback on in time for you to use it before the course ends.
• 1:42 Proctor and Rish (2025), "The Song Need Not Remain the Same." A chapter co-written with Ryan Rish, a literacy scholar.
  • 2:08 A note on genre. A book chapter gives authors more room to set the agenda and develop an argument than a journal article, which has to attend more closely to what the journal looks for.
  • 2:40 The same old song. Every time a technology comes into education, we hear the same refrain: it's changing everything, and if we don't give every child this new literacy now, some will be left behind. The argument draws on scholarship from the 1980s, which shows how long this pattern has been recognized.
  • 3:36 Don't assume we know ahead of time which skills will be needed to be powerful with AI, or that one set of skills will work for everyone. As with music, expect AI practices to emerge from context and look different for different people, and expect AI to be far more powerful for some than others depending on social position, resources, and access to capital.
  • 4:47 Two authors, two perspectives. Ryan and I differ in how optimistic or cautious we are about AI, and in our focus: me on the technology, Ryan on how technologies come into human communities of practice.
  • 5:21 As you read, keep in mind the move Yasmin Kafai and I made earlier in the course from computational thinking to computational literacies; this chapter argues for something parallel for AI.
• 5:37 Long and Magerko (2020), "What Is AI Literacy?" Many articles define what AI literacy is and what everyone needs, exactly what the previous reading criticizes, but this is a thoughtful, readable, comprehensive, and widely cited one.
  • 6:12 A different field. It comes from human-computer interaction (HCI), which studies how people interact with technologies, how to design them to be easier to use, more powerful, more accessible, and more inclusive, and how they affect people. That's exactly the expertise needed to think about how AI is changing our work, communication, and thinking, and what educators should do about it.
  • 6:51 An echo of diSessa. Like Andy diSessa's approach to computational literacy, which we read earlier, HCI treats technology as something that can be designed, whereas many literacy scholars take it as fixed and imposed from outside. What AI is and how it presents to us may keep changing profoundly, and it's something we can take part in designing, not just choose between products.
  • 7:58 Designing with school communities. I'm putting together research grants to work with school communities to design the AI tools they want, the social structures and policies around them, and where (or whether) they want AI tools at all. It's a high bar to ask people to help design something they may feel unqualified to shape, but they have a stake in how it shapes their children's lives.
  • 8:38 Competencies organized around verbs: evaluating AI technologies (recognizing when AI is present, deciding whether to use it, and choosing among a flood of products), communicating and collaborating with AI, and using AI as a tool.
  • 9:41 A good counterpoint to the first reading, and another echo of how computational literacy was discussed earlier in the course.

Readings

Long, D. & Magerko, B. (2020). What is AI literacy? Competencies and Design Considerations. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–16). doi:10.1145/3313831.3376727

Proctor, C. & Rish, R. (2025). DeHart, J. D., Abas, S., Mora, R. A., & Pyles, D. G. (Eds.). The Song Need Not Remain the Same: AI Literacies in the Lives of Youth. Reimagining Literacy in the Age of AI: Theory and Practice (pp. 135–151). CRC Press.