AI Literacy

AI Literacy is a set of competencies that enable individuals to use and understand artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including online, at home and in the workplace.

There are at least two ways of educating teens about AI, and each have their advantages and disadvantages.

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) explains why students should create with AI tools saying that for today’s students to become empowered creators, they'll need a deeper understanding of how AI works, and changing their relationship to it from consumers of content to designers and artists. This is a formal in-school program under the computer science discipline where certified teachers teach K12 students. For students, ISTE has seven standards:

1. Empowered learners - Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
2. Digital citizens - Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.
3. Knowledge constructors - Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.
4. Innovative designers - Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.
5. Computational thinkers - Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.
6. Creative communicators - Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.
7. Global collaborators - Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.

ISTE offers free practical guides for engaging students in AI creation, including an elementary, secondary, elective courses and computer science educator guides. All are available for download at no cost at the ISTE site.

1. Primary school
   1. What AI does well and does not do as well
   2. Training data and machine learning
   3. Senses vs. sensors
   4. Navigation and AI
2. Secondary school
   1. AI chatbots
   2. Developing a critical eye
   3. Using AI to solve environmental problems
   4. Laws for AI
3. Elective courses
   1. Create an AI expert guessing game
   2. Design an AI agent
   3. AI and art
   4. AI-powered vs. human translators
4. Computer science educators
   1. Programming with machine learning
   2. AI-powered players in video games
   3. Using AI for robotic motion planning
   4. Machine learning as a service

ISTE offers teachers rich resources such a guides on Teaching Kids What AI is (And Isn't) and 3 Unplugged Activities for Teaching About AI ISTE also offers resources to the teachers that do not have access to tech tools like chatbot creators or virtual personal assistants in the classroom. Two of the unplugged activities it recommends are The Turing test and Facial Recognition. ISTE believes that not only will today’s students need to become adept at using AI tools, but to become truly empowered creators they’ll need a deeper understanding of how AI works — and their changing relationship to it as designers and artists.

The main advantages of using a more formal technology and coding oriented approach to learning AI literacy is that teens will have a more thorough technical understanding of AI under the tutelage of a professional educator. Their technical knowledge and understanding may encourage them to consider choosing an AI-related career field. However, less than half (45%) of America's high schools teach computer science, and low-income students and students in rural areas are among the least likely to attend schools that offer computer science and of the schools that teach computer science, only a small fraction of their students take a computer science course. While schools should teach students about AI, there are so few secondary schools that offer classes that focus on AI that an estimate is not publicly available. Adding to the problem, a survey of more than 2,000 teachers found that only 10 percent of K-12 teachers “feel confident incorporating higher-level technology into student learning. This ... held true across grade level, school affluence, and teacher experience level” according to EDSCOOP in a September 2018 article.

AI Literacy (part of a nonprofit called Net Literacy that blogs about AI ) offers a curriculum for parents teaching or homeschooling their children, for non-technically-oriented teachers and for teens in high school or attending university. It's the first website designed to support parents show their teens how AI is affecting their world and their lives through engaging short videos. It uses easy-to-understand “learning blocks” that enable most parents to guide their children through the materials after only 15 minutes of preparation. The site also helps non-technically-oriented teachers prepare lesson plans about the benefits, challenges and impact of AI. It has links to hundreds of curated “good practice” articles, engaging videos, simple online experiments and interactive online games. It includes resources that demonstrate how we are using AI today, explain ethical AI, discuss deepfakes, offer career guidance and explain how AI is being used for good and to help solve the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. Net Literacy is a 501(c)3 digital inclusion and digital literacy nonprofit (an NGO) established in 2003. There are no costs or fees associated with any of these programs. AI Literacy is comprised of three main sections:

1. A Parent's Guide to discussing AI that uses "learning blocks" and each have discussion questions with video answers and optional curated resources for the curious parent and teen.
   1. Getting to know AI
      1. A simple way to explain AI to teens and preteens
      2. Myths and misunderstanding about AI
      3. But I don't use AI - how we use AI in our everyday lives
      4. Exploring AI with fun and easy hands-on experiments
   2. When seeing is no longer believing
      1. The history of fooling people with fake pictures
      2. Amazing real-looking pictures of fake people
      3. How to tell if a picture is fake
      4. Which face is real? Take the AI-generated fake picture challenge
   3. Don't let deepfakes fake you out
      1. What are deepfakes
      2. How to tell if a video has been manipulated
      3. How hard is it to make a deepfake?
   4. Ethical AI - why the thoughtful development of AI is so important
      1. What does ethical AI mean?
      2. Why is it so important?
      3. Why is it so difficult to develop ethical AI?
      4. How can we work together to build ethical AI?
   5. AI for sustainability and good (how AI is helping to address the UN's Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs)
      1. A list of all 17 of the UN's goals is here
2. Search Good Practices and Resources - hundreds of curated short videos, online games, articles, websites, hands-on experiments reviewed by AI practitioners with graduate degrees in data science.
3. Teacher Curriculums and Resources - a dozen good practice and mostly free K12 curriculums and resources that help teachers teach AI students.

The main advantage of using a parent-guided AI literacy program is that it is accessible via the Internet and available to all interested parents, teachers and teens. Especially for parents, the training is in learning blocks that take about 15 minutes of preparation for the average parents. Parent's don't explain AI, the embedded short (most are 2-4 minutes) videos do the explaining in an engaging manner. According to AI Literacy, parents felt that their teens understood most of the content from 94% to 81% of the learning blocks depending upon the subject matter that was covered. Parents felt that depending upon the learning block's subject matter, they understood most of the content from 94% to 85%, depending upon the learning block.

Other ways of learning about AI literacy. Besides these alternatives, parents, teachers and teens can Google "AI literacy" and choose articles to read or videos to watch, they can research taking an online course that will teach them about AI literacy, or they can go to a boot camp to learn about AI literacy. Some of the more popular AI course aggregators include Class Central and SimpliLearn. Some of the more popular boot camp aggregators are Course Report, Career Karma and Switchup, among others.

References

This article "AI Literacy" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:AI Literacy. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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