so my name is uch mai I am a lecture in education here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education so I want to welcome all of you to today's conversation which is on media literacy and artificial intelligence something that I know um is probably on most of your minds and if not it's something that definitely probably impacts most of your work so we're glad that you're here and if you want to submit questions like I mentioned as people are coming in there is a Q&A button at the bottom of your sc
reen so feel free to submit questions there we'll try to add answer if we can in the conversation if not we'll try to follow up also when you're at the bottom of your screen you will see way to access captions if you do need those so um yeah welcome and let's get started so I want to jump in and welcome our guests so we have three guests for today first we've got Merv lapus MV is the vice president of Education Outreach and engagement at the nonprofit Common Sense education hi MV want wait how's
it great to see you great to be with everyone today great and then next we've got Sarah Newman who goes by Newman Newman is the director of Art and education at Harvard's meta lab which is part of the burkman Klein Center for internet and Society hi Newman hi excellent and last but not least we've got faith rogo faith is a longtime media literacy education leader faith is also an author her most recent book is media literacy for young children teaching Beyond screen time debates so thank all th
ree of you for being willing to jump into this conversation so I'm going to start out asking each of you maybe one question since we have about 30 minutes we're going to try to keep the questions and the responses short in the beginning and maybe we can pull some other folks in so first I want to come to you new you've researched AI artificial intelligence what should Educators be most aware of when it comes to artificial intelligence and common literacy issues great um hi everybody so happy to
be here I lead something called the AI pedagogy project which um we can put into the chat and it's basically resources for educators to equip them for this moment so I won't share too much right now I I encourage you to go there but I would say a really important thing is the fact that Educators from all different fields are capable of becoming knowledgeable and having ient command of this subject matter to engage productively and critically with their students on these topics in my view you do
not need to have a background in computer science um at this stage to be able to engage with think about um and teach with artificial intelligence in fact it's really useful to have people from wide wide ranging backgrounds it's actually essential that we have people from wide ranging backgrounds in this conversation um the other thing I I'll mention quickly is that this literacy can be a lever I mean there's different levers in society that we have access to regulation and policy are one we'll
probably talk more about that at least in the US that tends to be on the slower side and as we've seen with social media even when there are policies they're not always effective and a really good sort of additional lever that we have access to is learning about how the Technologies work learning what the risks are learning how students and others can use these tools responsibly while preserving things like privacy and I think it's really important and actually essential that all Educators be en
gaging with this right now thank you so much Newman um mer Faith anything you'd like to add kind of as a general what should Educators be aware of or thinking about I Ted you first please uh I would say probably from my perspective the most important thing is that Educators and students remember that AI is a media technology and so everything that we in inquiry based media literacy education have been applying so far we can apply and should apply to AI yeah I mean I love both what what shared I
it's also just an incredibly important reminder that AI technology in general you know there's there's a human centered purpose for why we might want to use it how it might be helpful to us and then once something is produced or whatever it creates from it we still make a decision around what we want to do with it whether we want to share it use it iterate from it so we we it's incredibly important to you don't like like Newman mentioned we don't have to be you know all CS Educators understand e
verything about computer science and use these tools but we it is important to understand the human connection behind the way that we are using these tools so that we can be critical about the way that we use it we don't have to just be cynical users of the tech and say oh it's all fake or it's you know potentially someone's trying to to ruse us up but you know if we can really think critically about it it impacts away receive it and also impacts the way that we use it um for ourselves excellent
thank you so much and thanks for um leading us with that response Newman because I was goingon to ask a follow-up question about there is a sense that people feel overwhelmed when it comes to AI but some of what we've heard is like it is a media literacy we do have some basic approaches and if we take an inquiry mindset to trying to learn and humanizing it it is something that there's an entry point for almost everybody um into it thank you so much I want to something that you mentioned Newman
um about kind of foreshadowing there are regulations and policies to try to address um Ai and media literacy in general so I know murv that you focus um they're like you your nonprofit actually focuses on curriculum and part of that is that I know I think it's in where is it in California like it's one of many states that actually are coming up with requirements at the state level for media literacy in the classroom so your nonprofit kind of response to that can you talk a little bit about your
thoughts on either legislation or having regulation around this and how organizations can respond sure I mean I think so I mean as a nonprofit and especially around the policy work you know the organization is really focused on on being kid partisan so what's right for our kids and the way that these tools are amazing opportunities but then also potentially um have some um issues or things that need to be addressed and like what type of political guidelines should we have in place and so in many
ways there are still a lot of work to be done um here in the US as compared to what's happening in Europe and others where we're setting some really strict regulation around the way that we're developed these tools to be truly um safe for kids in that experience and and and how they use it um but until that point it is incredibly important that we really uh Empower our kids to think critically about the way that we use media and Technology the way uh that informs uh uh Our Lives um as well as i
n our instruction and so having things in place that really uh allow for educators to make a priority with you know Tech in the classroom isn't just something that happens uh nowadays and just you know happen stance per grade room it's not something where there's just three computers in the back of the class like I had growing up in many case it's we're in onetoone schools and classrooms um and that's even minimum and so with that what's so much technology being kind of at the center of instruct
ion and learning and how we feed ourselves in many ways too just with delivery and all that it's incredibly important that we Empower our kids to think critically and behave safely and participate responsibly with media and Tech and providing those guidelines and Frameworks so that in schools we have some policies and things in place so that we know these will help our kids be stronger constituents stronger um conveyors of this work and effective participants um in the jobs of the future and as
well as just Community people today so having these guidelines are incredibly important ways to kind of set some lines in the sand where we're not too sure in many cases what do we do here where do we stand how do we set some of these things forward thank you can I pile on briefly to that yes so um just to say I feel like for educators and I know we have many Educators here maybe mostly Educators it is really overwhelming to know where to start and I think uch touched on this and Merv did too I
think one reason it's extra overwhelming is because there's so much hype on the internet and so many people that are talking in ways that are fairly alarmist and so a couple points I just want to make on this to sort of really make this concrete is number one experts don't agree AI experts do not agree about um the current risks the Futures we're expecting there's a lot of disagreement which is interesting but it also means we need to hold all of our opinions lightly and be comfortable um resear
ching more and seeing conflicting opinions and not to give it too much power even if you read something that sounds really alarmist um that doesn't mean it's true and the way the language we use to talk about these Technologies um is a way that often people are giving them too much power personifying them saying the large language model thinks this or it wants to do this they don't think they don't want they are they're not living entities and we're not close to that and so I think we need to be
really mindful of our language the last and there's a lot of great Educators that are writing about this uh the last thing I'll say just to make this mes point conrete in terms of where to start is you could probably spend one hour reading good content maybe have a book club with your friends to discuss it maybe join one of the online reading groups on the AI pedagogy Resource page uh which we can also put into the chat there's some really great online groups talking about Ai and education so i
f you have a community with which you can sort of vet content discuss it you could honestly spend an hour and level up significantly if you're reading good stuff thanks yeah I would follow up on the getting concrete with it to say you know in some ways this feels very new and a lot of what it's about isn't all that new um that it's not like before and and I would say when I encounter Educators when they say AI what they really mean is generative AI they're really talking about either writing ess
ays maybe constructing a lesson plan for themselves and and you know or art of some sort um so that's really the because AI as a whole is much bigger than that but that's really I think what's what uh most educators are dealing with and it's not like the kinds of things that kids are now encountering like oh it's really hard to tell the fake from the real now well you know from a media literacy education perspective even five years ago before anybody had heard of chat GPT we were certainly helpi
ng kids understand well you're going to see stuff scrolling by on your social media feed and some of it's going to be true and some of it's not and and you have to make that assumption and then learn to use inquiry based critical thinking questions to probe and to say you know do I think this is true why are there sources we teach lateral reading you know all of those kinds of things and the other side of it is from a production side for those who are using generative AI to create things that me
dia literacy has always taken those same reflective questions and said okay think about what you are producing and when you produce stuff online you are a media creator that brings with it certain responsibilities and ethics and so we ask those questions and from a a media literacy education perspective we want to make sure that instead of just teachers asking the questions that they're teaching students to ask the questions that if teachers are the only ones asking the questions then it's the t
eachers who are doing all the learning work and we want the students to do the learning work so we have to teach students to ask these questions yeah know and something that's Faith said is actually incredibly important about where we're at now is historically it's been folks like faith and others who have been focusing on media literacy or our Librarians or our tech leads that primarily we're doing this kind of instruction but now because we're using Tech in every class and in many ways are usi
ng the new generative AI tools and other resources it's it's incumbent on all of us to have a general idea of what that means then in the discussion with our with our kids or with uh the folks that we're supporting so it's not just that silo or that that group of individuals who's historically done the the instruction it's up to all of us to reinforce these conversations in practice uh because it's a part of all of our classrooms especially for the K12 Educators here but in general we all use Te
ch in some shape or form it's incumbent on us to better understand what that means and how we're role modeling that to our kids or to our uh our students yeah there's not a PD that I give now where I don't say this is the job of everyone in the building I think that's a really fabulous Point MV and you just underscored it that it reminds me of that saying the future is here just not evenly distributed and there have been some people who have had to focus on media literacy whether gust out's thei
r domain or they were thinking maybe a little bit ahead and now that it's something that's in the water that we swim in it's just there it's all of a sudden coming on everybody and perhaps in saying that we have these mechanisms that some people have been creating over time that may still have some applicability so that may help people step back and maybe not be as overwhelmed is I think that's kind of a theme that I'm picking up from this conversation is that accurate or is there something that
I'm yeah I mean I I see Newman also like ready to chime in on something I think I think some of the things that we also kind of almost skipped not skipped but just kind of gave some insights to also is you know in many ways we're already addressing these things if you're an educator who in charge of a policy around how to address these types of issues if you're already addressing academic Integrity uh privacy um you know the way that social media can be used effectively or not these generative
versions of AI into that you've already done most of the work now it's applying it to the to the new ways that these tools are um able to present new information and the speed in which they can do it so you've done a lot of this pre-work it's about seeing how it applies to kind of the newest Innovation side of it it's not something new but it is an iteration to things we're already addressing um so if you have those things in place you're actually U many steps um in the direction that you hope t
o be uh but new I that's end it over to you I see something bubbling in there uh no I'm just I'm so enthusiastic about these points and I wanted to underscore a couple things that Faith said because well actually everybody said because they're so important and one of them is the historical context and seeing the Emer these emerging Technologies as new and scary and different as they feel historically and part of a historical Trend uh as Faith mentioned a lot of times when Educators or others are
talking about AI they're really talking about generative AI there's a lot of uses of other forms of AI in our lives that we're not curious about we're not questioning we're not scared of and as these there's the new applications that people are noticing now um but all of these things we need to approach critically and that's our best that's going to best situate us through question asking of questions through seeing the historical context through engaging um with the Technologies directly is be
cause they're not always going to be separate like the the Technologies generative AI Technologies included are going to become more and more embedded into the platforms we're using I mean they already are um but even more so into the tools we're using so it's not going to be like oh well I'm gonna do this over here because it's not Ai and I'm and I don't like Ai and I'm gonna do this because or sorry I'm not gonna do this because it is AI and I don't like Ai and I'll do this it's it's GNA be mu
ch it already is much much harder to te it's like the number one strategy isn't it for every tool that's out there is where does AI now yeah yeah so everything's getting embedded and I I think the other thing I wanted to underscore that I think media literacy historically has done really well around all of these topics is just call out the fact that it's not you can't have the good over here and the bad over here or I don't remember where my good and bad were these are the there there two sides
of the same thing so um you can't say like well I like these good applications of AI so I'm GNA do these These are the bad applications the good ones can be used for harm the bad ones can be used for good it's the same technology and I think we're diluting our eles if we're thinking that we can avoid all the bad and and we haven't seen this historically ever work and just have the good I think it's about learning how the Technologies work so we can mitigate the harms as best we can while leverag
ing the power that they do have um okay one of the themes that I'm also picking up in addition to we do have these tools and these un precedents in terms of structures and ways to engage with generative a I is that it's embedded in everywhere it's just embedded in how we live how we work so faith I want to maybe ask you about a focus area of yours which is media literacy education for young schools young kids even starting in preschool so if it's so embedded now and specifically AI because I kno
w there's some people who are hearing us saying it's okay we have these tools but this time it's different and I'm sure you might want to respond so Faith what what are your thoughts about when to start engaging with um kids even as young as preschool with media literacy around AI or anything we're talking about yeah at least um as soon as they're verbal kind of May maybe even before uh and the reason for that in all seriousness is because whether it's AI or not to really thrive in the digital w
orld that is our current culture what we need uh is is for everyone to develop certain kinds of habits and routines of inquiry and effective expression so it's never about is this good or bad it's is this effective for what I needed to do um and and looking at all of that and I'll I'll just I'll give an example because I don't want to be flip about this where you know in in the for the youngest kids it really is just about helping them develop the habit of recognizing what media are in their env
ironment um and then attaching that so that their brains kind of automatically attached to that questioning and one of the concepts The Core Concepts of of anyone who's media literate is understanding that all media are constructed when we explain that to young kids what we say is people make media the people who make media make choices about what to include and exclude now we all know as adults there are a lot more choices than that but for little ones you know they get like from The Hokey poke
i thing of inside and outside and stuff so they they can get they they make choices about what they include and exclude as they get a little older we can add and that they make choices about how to present what they include um and that what they include in exclude influences how we um understand their work the messages that we take away so it it affects us we can get pretty young kids to just understand that concept and if you're going to apply that um well well what we would say is apply it to
everything including AI so as kids would get older they'd already be in this habit of I understand people make meting and AI isn't some magical voice that comes out of a box AI also is people created whatever system you're using somebody chose what data it was going to be trained on right somebody chose to design particular kinds of interfaces so right and on and on and on um that they see that and so they would never use it without coming to some sort of understanding of do I understand who cre
ated this and why right what were the choices they were making about what to include and what to exclude and then how does that affect my interaction with it so that habit of questioning starts when you're reading aloud in in you know a child in a parent's lab can start that kind of questioning of you know what do you notice or what do you think's going to happen next and why do you think that and pointing out that they think it because there's certain evidence there that they're already seeing
and identifying those processes if they've been doing that for three or four years before they ever hit school um then then we're doing our jobs in media literacy education and that's what we're hoping to do with all these State you know you mentioned the legislation before that's happening in increasing numbers of States that's what we're talking about integrating this infusing school curriculum with this culture of inquiry so that teachers and Librarians are equipped to help kids become increa
singly sophisticated inquirers never too soon and it's never too late I think that's important for educators to know because oftentimes you're like oh yeah if we get to them early I think it's incredibly important it's a part of their lives so getting to them in a way that makes sense for their developmental learning stages at that point makes a ton of sense but also it's never too late we know we hear it all the the time that students are actually reaching out for some of that Insight but it's
it's the way we interact with them to address these types of insights if we're addressing it in a way it's like we're truly want to support learn about how you're using it what are your concerns how do you want to use it versus I want to try and catch how you're doing it like if we come into it cynically they they reciprocate that right as as you're just kind of want to work with youth and so it really is about providing some um we're talking about like habits so habits of mind so there's a skil
l recognition how do I use this how do I get it to work for me and then there's Rec izing the real dispositions and and emotions behind the decisions that we make when we use this Tech and how it helps us you know uh what it makes us feel and why we want to use it and so if we can provide thinking routines for for kids that it's just a part of the way they they see something they pause they reflect on it and then they make a decision that's truly reflective of of how they want to use it that goe
s for generative AI but that goes for media literacy that goes for any way that we use media and Tech and I know that there was a question on where can we find some of these types of resources the organization I work with has a number of TurnKey lessons that you can start using already around AI literacy as a specific topic to what we're talking about but then also um we've got a whole news and media literacy one um also that's across all grade bands so the way that we talk about like how does c
ertain you know uh U information make us feel when we access it it can it can look different from kindergarten to you know high school but the outcomes of like the real really thinking about what's appropriate for me and how do I vet to make sure that it's the right kind of information for me and how I want to use it those are things that can scale up agent stage right so we'll share those links on the chat so that you have things to kind of reference through yeah think I noticed in the chat uh
we already shared a link to um a set of question categories that resides and is downloadable for free on the project looksharp website which is a media literacy integration project um so that's one place I also think it's it's important that we understand this as developing habits and routines that this isn't if if you're a teacher and you're getting back a lot of cynicism you need to check your own methods because cynicism is the absolute opposite of critical thinking right cynicism is easy not
hing is true everybody's trying to fool me every you know everything's a gotcha moment everything is fake you don't need to do any kind of thinking and so we talk about in media literacy teaching students to investigate not doubt this isn't education about doubting media sources it's about investigating and thinking about media sources so I love everything I'm hearing and I want to like ask three or four follow-up questions and have you all just probe each other's amazing Minds there is as I'm s
kimming through the Q&A there's maybe one line of questioning that's perhaps was implicit that I want to pull out the general question is will AI increase this gap or will it close this Gap but I'm gonna ask the one specific question that was asked by um a listener educators are experiencing change fatigue student attendance decline overburden schedules low pay shorter tenures context how can we change how we approach and support Educators and students in this technical transformation to lead to
more Equitable education future so question of like we buy into the importance we buy into the priorities we buy into the ration now we want Equity a separate question about the actual tool but then how do we actually do this given the context that we're in so we only have about three minutes so I'd love if you can just give us some quick pieces and then pass it to the next person I'm happy to do quick quick one is um something that great question complicated question um one thing that I think
is important to note is that you don't need to use AI in order to teach about AI or to teach s critical thinking about these topics and so I think especially as we're thinking about lower resourc areas um or people that have other reasons to be concerned about the use of the AI Technologies there's a lot of ways you can teach conceptually about how these Technologies work and teach a critical approach without without actually using AI in your teaching the second point is um I think this is a gre
at opportunity for educators it's despite all the fatigue around making the classroom a place to explore together with your students rather than being like we are the Educators and we have the answers and you students don't have the answers and we're going to give you the answers what about coming together with your students and exploring together like what is most challenging about this what have you seen so I feel like that takes some of the pressure off the Educators to be the experts and say
like even the experts don't know and I'm not an expert either let's let's explore together I feel like there's a lot that students are interested in in kind of joining together with their Educators and exploring this thank you so much yeah I I'm now a few lives removed out of the classroom but I I remember just as an as an educator in the classroom there's so many things I need to try and achieve in that limited amount of time that I have um and in many ways there are a lot of processes to get
to that point so if these tools can help circumvent some of the time and even the effectiveness of some of those processes to give you what you really enjoy connecting with your with with your kids and really understanding and and and Diving deeper into uh ways uh that these tools can be helpful I mean that's that's one of the things I mean it sounds very easy oh this is going to save you so much time it also means you got to kind of dive into it a little but and really see where does it save me
time where does it give me real credible support um and so addressing it as let me test it out let me see how this is helpful and finding what works for you um you can learn from others obviously but I think find out what works for you and that'll really help shape the way that the classroom might be supportive using these tools thank you and I'll I'll just add start with where you're at and and start so I've been told by the powers to be so we can take about a minute or two more I want to ask
you to if you can leave the audience with a word of advice whether it be specifically for educators I think we've been talking to people in the classroom direct people who are doing the actual work if we're thinking about principles School leaders District leaders people who may be able to play around with resources restructure things to support the direct service providers anything that you would say let's go backwards and start with faith you want to go first yeah focus more on the inquiry stu
ff than the um specific tools and tricks because those interface kinds of things you know give by the time the middle schoolers that you have now graduate from high school all those things will be different right so spending lots of time on them now and worrying about that is probably not the best use of District resources so so do that um kind of inquiry thing and also realize uh media including AI is kids culture they love talking about it if you do this and do it in a way that is not about gu
ilt tripping them about parts of their culture engagement skyrockets so this is a great way to engage students thank you murf oh hope is not a strategy as much as we hope they're all going to be okay we need to set the pathway for that with them and I think it's also just recognizing that we're no longer in this in the place where we can just hope also that a single educator focusing on these issues across all of your uh you know classrooms is going to develop transferable skills if we really wa
nt to see value in this we've got to really build a culture in our classrooms where these are common conversations they're not just a conversation when something hits the fan or there's a problem it's a conversation of all right we're going to use this tool remember what are the three things that you know we're setting as a priority and how we communicate whatever whatever those Norms might be um those those things have been defined already again academic Integrity privacy appropriate communicat
ion reinforce them as you're using these tools and we can dive deep in other places where we have the affordance of time and those Educators to really get into the conversations but if we're not all addressing it it's not going to be transferable thank you Newman I would add um I sort of come back to something I said at the beginning which is around where the power is and challenging the power dynamics um the society we live in but specifically not giving the AI too much power and one way to do
that is to take some power back um as Educators as others as the general public and think how do we want these Technologies to be integrated into our lives or not how do we want these Technologies to support our education or not and social media is different but I think we've learned a lot from the ways in which social media which is also owned by companies uh whose incentives are not the same as you know necessarily what's in the public benefit to um learn about how to use these Technologies an
d where they could be really risky and and spread the word and so I think um Educators participating actively in this is a really really important part of that and what we do at the a pedagogy project is combine the creative and the critical so we always try to incorporate sort of a criticality to the way we're approaching technology so we're not just celebrating them and say these are wonderful this is so exting it's like there's aspects of it that are and at the same time we need to be critica
l and I would say that would be my advice to others is try to do those things simultaneously the CR the critique and sort of the joy that you might you might have in in using some of these um that would be my advice to everybody here thank you so much Faith MV and Newman for your just being so generous with your expertise your experience and it's clearly your passion and how you talk about this um so thank you all so much for joining in this conversation and to the listeners thank you for joinin
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