David White‘s career began with online innovation for the BBC Natural History Unit and has led to his current role as Dean of Academic Strategy at the University of the Arts London (UAL). He has taught and researched at the University of the West of England and managed the development of the University of Oxford’s first online courses. In his current role David is responsible for leading thinking on emerging technologies, such as AI. He is also the academic lead for UAL’s new fully online Postgraduate courses. Through this work he supports the university to constructively respond to the educational opportunities and risks of digital technologies. David is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and President of the Association for Learning Technology.

Address title: What is even real anymore? – The case for personal agency being at the forefront of what it means to be literate

In the context of information seeking AI can be thought of as an amplification of the ‘Wikipedia problem’ which caused academic distress a few years ago. When a believable answer requires no effort (or thinking) to find, what has been learned? The information literacy response to this is to teach the mechanism by which the answer was generated, to critically deconstruct the validity of the answer. However, we are now entering an AI era where most answers have no discernible provenance. There is very little ‘tracking back’ with AI because it is based on probability and not on cross-checking with reality. In this talk I will suggest that we need to amplify the importance of personal agency in our concept of literacy. Fundamentally we should be asking students and staff to seriously consider what they are cognitively offloading and what they must hold onto to retain their agency as citizens, students and researchers.  I will explore frameworks such as the ‘AI Learning Gambit’ and approaches to teaching which highlight the importance of personal agency in the AI era.