Developing AI Literacy for Faculty and Librarians

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the CNI Interviews podcast. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE, and I'm highlighting conversations from the Coalition for Networked Information 2025 spring meeting. The CNI meeting is a venue for technology leaders in higher education, library administration, digital publishing and research to share and broaden their knowledge of digital information issues. On this episode, I feature a conversation with Leo Lo. He's Dean and professor at the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico. Lowe is also president of the Association of College and Research Libraries. In both of those roles, he works to prepare professionals and organizations for navigating the rapidly changing technological landscape. And in 2023, not long after the introduction of chat GPT, he did a study to get a sense of AI literacy among library academic workers and found that only a third of the people had any professional development in this area. He repeated the study in 2024 and found that the number had more than doubled to 60% receiving some kind of AI literacy training.

Leo Lo: So you can see a year later, a lot more people are paying attention to it, understanding maybe increased a little bit, but the people who have the highest level of either confidence or how familiar they are, are the people who have access to the premium subscription of these tools. So I decided to do a pilot program at my own university to upskill my librarians. Basically we developed a 12 week cohort based program and first two weeks just introduce them to the tools. And then the following eight weeks, people developed their own individual projects related to their work and use chat GPT to help them do that and see is it better or is it, what am I getting out of it, or how challenging it is or what are the benefits? And then the final two weeks got recap, put together a presentation to show the rest of the college, oh, these are some of the things we have done when we pay for the subscription.

Leo Lo: For those people now with a structured training with access to the premium tool, their increase in their understanding and confidence, it's a lot more than the people who have just either one of those things. So we decided that, okay, this is actually really helpful. So we expanded that in the following summer in 2024 to the rest of the university for faculty who wanted to use it for teaching for people who wanted to do lit review. And another one for people who wanted to develop open educational resources. We actually have a grant for OER. So we use some of the money to pay them to, Hey, use this to develop OER or enhance your existing OER so we can save students money basically. And those were successful. And I just finished another one for academic advisors, similar results. People have gained a lot more confidence. They understand the technology a little bit better. They are aware of all the ethical issues that comes with this new technology. So I would say that kind of format, putting people together as a community of practice, they talk, they share and they get to use it directly for their work and having access to the premium tool that is very successful.

Gerry Bayne: And do you feel like their fear level has gone down? I think some people are very scared of the artificial intelligence aspect.

Leo Lo: Yeah. We try to recruit people who have very different levels of understanding or even enthusiasm. Some were actually skeptical of it or some had absolutely zero experience. I think just going through it, everybody had gained some kind of just basically more awareness of all the potentials and challenges so they can make their own informed decisions on whether that is a good technology for them or not. That's what I really hope to achieve. I'm not pro or anti AI in these type trainings. I'm pro learning about AI or engaging with the technology so you can make your own individual informed decisions.

Gerry Bayne: That makes a lot of sense. How can technology leaders in higher education foster a culture that prioritizes ethical considerations and interdisciplinary collaboration in an AI initiative? It sounds like you've kind of answered this, it's awareness and it's training. Is there anything else that you haven't touched on that would contribute to people's ethical use of ai?

Leo Lo: Yeah, first of all, people have to, we want to teach people that we need to have our own understanding of what that means. I think that depends on not just a few people within the profession. I think it takes more than that and having more people learn about it, more engaged, we can have more robust conversation on what that really actually means because it is so new. Things are changing, all the laws are still catching up to it. A lot of other new ethical questions will keep coming up. So I think it takes a wider conversations for us to even determine what that means. I would say essential knowledge that we should pay attention to, like certain practical ethics principles that we can use to apply to something like ai. So that could be something that we can work with philosophers or people in the humanities to work on. And I basically look at AI literacy as more than just technical knowledge, more than just using the tools. And I take a more holistic view and ethical awareness. We need to work with people who are actually experts in those areas.

Gerry Bayne: Absolutely. So when you do talk about the ethical aspects of AI in these programs that you've launched, what resources do you use to reference and impart this knowledge?

Leo Lo: Right, actually, so for the most recent one, we keep refining those. At the beginning we were just talking. We just, okay, these are some of the things we have noticed. These are some of the lawsuits that are going on.

Gerry Bayne: There probably wasn't much material out there,

Leo Lo: Not really, right? But now there are a bit more, and I have formulated my own view on it is that I do want to use philosophical principles to look at it. Is it consequentialism, the ontology? So things like that that we can apply to it and then maybe look at certain cases to think about, okay, what are some of the ethical dilemmas here that we need to figure out and how do we feel in terms of how does that align with our own values? A lot of people, especially in our profession, really care about different aspects of how AI is impacting society. For example, the environmental impact, that's a huge thing and that's a huge ethical question as well. Are we getting more benefits than harm or the other way around? Or does it even matter to certain people? So these are some of the cases we'll use to discuss it.

Gerry Bayne: Given the rapid integration of AI in various academic operations, what role do you envision for academic libraries in leading AI literacy efforts and how can they effectively partner with other departments to implement comprehensive AI training programs? You've kind of answered this already, so if you just want to expand on that a little bit.

Leo Lo: Yeah, so earlier in that question, you even talked about interdisciplinary collaboration. I think libraries, we work with everybody cap same as it actually, it works. So I think it makes sense for IT and libraries to cap collaborate at that level because we work with different people in different ways and we have different expertise and they're both important for this new technology. I think there's a huge potential for IT and libraries to work together on this. Now, I mentioned that AI literacy should be more than just technical knowledge. And so I got define AI literacy as the ability to understand, use, think critically about AI technologies and their impact on society ethics, everyday life. So that's a lot. So I have a conceptual paper on the AI electricity framework, and I see five key components of that. One, it is technical knowledge. We do need to understand a little bit about the mechanism behind, let's say generative of AI or a large language model that it is a statistics machine.

Leo Lo: It is predicting the next token or words, therefore it does what it does. So knowing even just that will help people understand why it hallucinates and other things, right? Second, I mentioned ethical awareness. With this new technology, there will be new ethical questions and we need to be aware of 'em even, I mean more immediate ones. People talk about environmental impact, data privacy, biases, copyrights, and all of that. Those are the immediate ones, but that will be new ones. Critical thinking. We need to be able to apply critical thinking to use or to evaluate the AI's output, to verify things, information literacy. This is the area where I think the libraries can play a very important role in promoting or supporting AI literacy. And then practical use, which is using the different tools. There are all these new tools. I just came from another conference and at the exhibit hall, every company is pushing AI new products basically.

Leo Lo: And so there will be so many for us to evaluate to think about how to use them or learn how to use them. So that's another part of being AI literate, to be able to use whatever tools that you need to use. And then finally, societal impact. That's longer term. If we compare AI to the internet or social media, we did not feel the impact or see the impact until years later. And there are some long-term implications that will probably dropped displacement. There will probably be different ways of life as we move forward at different laws and environmental impacts another one. So we need to think about those. If you look at all these different components, no one person can in experts in all of them. So that means we need to work with different experts within the academia, ecosystem, humanities, social sciences, computer scientists, all of that. So I think the libraries and it can work together and get these different people together and be able to teach our both students and administrators, staff and faculty, everybody to be AI literate.

Gerry Bayne: Wonderful. Those are great points. Last question, is there anything we haven't touched on in terms of your work with artificial intelligence, awareness and knowledge that you'd like to share?

Leo Lo: So those are the main things I'm most interested in doing research on AI literacy and upskilling. And if you look longer term, what is the future of work? What are some of the necessary skills besides being AI literate? What are the necessary skills that a person will need? Because ai, for example, now they can write papers for you. I mean, we have used writing as a proxy for thinking or demonstrating knowledge for so many years. All of a sudden it may not be as important, or is this still should be important? I don't know. These are some of the big questions I've been thinking about moving forward. Do we need to develop a different set of skills? Will certain skills that have been very valued in the past for somebody to be a good student, for example, will be less important moving forward? And some of those that were not as important, like creativity imaginations will be a lot more important moving forward on how can we cultivate those things.

Gerry Bayne: That's a really great point to make because I saw a meme the other day. I don't know if you've seen this meme where it says, I want AI to do my washing, cleaning bill paying, and I want to do the creative writing art, et cetera, instead of the other way around. (laughs)

Leo Lo: I know, I agree with that. Yes. Where's the robot that can do my laundry for me?

Gerry Bayne: Right, right. So it's interesting that we're sort of using it for the more creative aspects, which is what we like to do, rather than the more practical. Anyway, thank you so much for your time. This is very informative, Leo. I appreciate it.

Leo Lo: Thank you.