Questions about Open. Questions about AI.

I remember thinking around this time last year that once everyone stopped freaking out, the “pivot to AI” might just be seen as the beginning of a new era for librarianship. Or rather, the end of a period that has lasted most of my career, where the profession seemed to have given up on ever having anything to say on its own behalf, with professional bodies and institutional leaders retreating to a position of merely claiming that whatever the powerbrokers of the world wanted, we could help them either deliver their goals or clean up the mess they left behind them. I'm still feeling confident about that prediction, but maybe ask me in another year and we'll see where we landed.

Whose ethics? Whose AI?

Helen Beetham has a great newsletter called Imperfect Offerings, and she's delivered some real doozies lately. This is the first offering for 2024, and is a kind of reply to the replies to a keynote speech she gave. Whilst Beetham is speaking to a presumed audience of university educators, she has a lot of interesting things to say to librarians.

I feel we should probably avoid ‘prompt engineering’ as a term, and definitely stop selling it as an important skill. I think it will be about as relevant to graduate employment as writing html code, and for the same reasons. Alongside all the ‘100 best GPT prompts’ you can cut and paste from the internet, the ability to call up ChatGPT (or another model) is already being integrated into search engines and browser extensions and thousands of intermediary apps. They offer drop-down lists or push-button choices, or helpfully assume what it is you need to know. What I think we probably should do, working with our colleagues in libraries and study skills centres, is to update our support for search skills. Help students to understand what the algorithms are hiding as well as what they are revealing, how to search when you know what you are looking for as well as when you don’t, the business models as well as the algorithms of search, and how search online is being systematically degraded both by commercial interests and by these new synthetic capabilities.

Generative Artificial Intelligence: 8 Critical Questions for Libraries

A team from Oregon State University have put together this great paper which is to some extent an example of the sort of thing Beetham is talking about: finding the right questions to ask about machine learning and automation, rather than a series of “one weird trick”. In this case the questions are for librarians:

  1. Why AI?
  2. How can libraries make informed decisions without undue urgency?
  3. How can libraries engage in ways that align with library values?
  4. What policies are in place?
  5. How can libraries support the exploration of AI tools by staff and users?
  6. How does AI fit into library information literacy instruction?
  7. Moving forward, how can libraries lead conversations and collaborate?
  8. So what?

A Genealogy of Open

Betsy Yoon provides a history lesson, an interrogation, and ultimately a challenge regarding what we call Open Education. I hadn't realised until I read this that this is not just a rhetorical link between Free & Open Source Software, and Open Educational Practice, but also a more direct connection. And as Yoon shows, all the arguments between and dynamics of the Free Software movement and Open Source advocates are applicable to Open Education. It's definitely worth a read for anyone working in the Open Education space.

Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every week by Hugh Rundle.

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