Several State Departments of Education have published guides for understanding issues around AI in education, including privacy, security, transparency, accessibility, and keeping humans at the center of learning. These and related resources are being curated on the #GoOpen Hub and are freely available and openly licensed.

Generative AI has forced universities to contend with complex ethical and social questions—namely because writing is so deeply entrenched as an institutional gatekeeping. For many students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds or for whom English is not a first language, the pressure to translate ideas into “proper” English contributes to attrition rates and exacerbates feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and exclusion from many academic communities.

From an equity and inclusion perspective, AI has the potential to disrupt institutional barriers by offering accessible tools that level the grammatical playing field. By functioning as virtual tutors or co-writers, AI systems can assist students in producing more polished and coherent prose, thus challenging the traditional hierarchies that privilege certain grammatical and stylistic norms. Instead of attempting to ban these tools (which is, to say the least, impractical), I side with a growing number of technology scholars who argue that we should focus on teaching students how to use generative AI responsibly and effectively. However, I do so with the caveat that teaching responsible AI use means critically engaging the complex and often messy processes that make AI what it is.

In this presentation, I draw from Indigenous theorists and authors to situate generative AI and large language models (LLMs) within a long colonial history of extraction. Just as colonial states declare Indigenous lands terra nullius, allowing settlers to exploit resources through mining, clear-cutting, and other forms of extraction, generative AI similarly depends on the unchecked extraction of data, including Indigenous knowledge and cultural resources, often without consent. The late Gregory Younging refers to this process as gnaritas nullius, the colonial rendering of Indigenous knowledge into public property. The unchecked extraction of writing, including, but not limited to, Indigenous knowledge, represents a new frontier for colonial capitalism, where cultural and intellectual property are commodified by those with the most access and power. As Nando de Freitas notes, the future of AI development depends on scale: those who control the largest datasets will have the greatest advantage and profit the most from AI.

The numerous high-profile copyright cases against companies like OpenAI and Meta show that how this data is collected is treated as a secondary issue. This unbridled, dehumanizing race for data mirrors the extractive practices that have driven capitalist-colonial expansion for centuries. Building on these ideas, I mobilize the insights of Indigenous authors like Younging, Scott Lyons, and Cherie Dimaline to highlight strategies for resisting colonial extraction and challenging capitalist systems through rhetorical sovereignty and the concept of incommensurability. The goal is not to discourage the use of generative AI but, in the Faustian sense, to reveal the costs of embracing it, especially when it is employed to subvert oppressive institutional structures. The speaker was introduced by Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian, UBC.

World Education's AI for Learning and Work initiative is dedicated to exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and education, and how it can shape the future of the way we live and work.  This blog post discusses the ways in which AI can support ELL programs for Adult Learners.

On January 4, 2024 the Curriculum Services Team delivered a 2-hour webinar titled "Using the Magic of AI to Innovate Professional Learning" to a national audience.  Based on a presentation delivered at the AESA National Conference in December 2023, this webinar was a deeper dive into the ways that the WIU Curriculum Services Team leverages AI to develop professional learning activities to support the school districts in Westmoreland County and beyond.

The Northeast OER Summit is a gathering of Open Educational Resources practitioners from the Northeast region of the United States.  Initiated in 2017, the planning committee consists of OER advocates (administrators, librarians, instructional designers, faculty and staff) from the Northeast.  This resource is a session presentation that discusses the intersection of OER and AI.