Generative AI and Digital Literacies Workshop Series

About the workshop: For some decades, we have been working in the areas of literacy, digital literacies, and, more recently AI-supported digital learning. Frankly, we have been taken aback by the rapidity of developments in the past several years since the emergence and widespread use of Generative AI. The implications for education are enormous, and not all good. In this presentation, we will begin with our own linguistic-semantic perspective on Generative AI, arguing that it is a paradigm shift beyond symbolic and data-driven AI paradigms. Challenging questions arise for educators. What is the future of the written assignment, until now a crucial site for the demonstration of capacities we might call “complex epistemic performance”? What is the future role of the teacher when AI can offer more finely calibrated interaction and feedback than the teacher in the 1-n classroom? We will describe our attempts to address these questions in K-12 and higher ed applications of Generative AI since the beginning of 2023, including most recently the Cyber-Scholar workspace. We will conclude by questioning the very notion of AI, that it is an artificial replicant of human intelligence. Instead, we propose a paradigm where entirely different and complementary forms of intelligence interact, “cyber-social intelligence.” Upon this, we can build a paradigm of “cyber-social learning.” Generative AI will not displace teachers, but it will radically change the nature of teachers’ work. 

About the workshop: Discussions of AI are now commonplace – as we stalk it like vision-impaired people trying to describe an elephant that has just stepped into the room and is smashing the institutional and cultural furniture. Beginning from Plato, Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Anthony Wilden, educators John Dewey and BF Skinner - my talk starts from a core premise: that we live in era of ‘crises’ based on a coming apart of the longstanding settlement of print, capitalism, and the liberal democratic nation state.   Communications media and dominant modes of information, political economy/labour/government, and cultural/axiological values appear to be in unprecedented historical transition and, in cases, conflict and misalignment.  I draw upon speech act theory and systemic linguistics to propose basic categorical distinctions between generative AI’s semantic and pragmatic effects. I then turn to discuss the practical challenges and openings facing key educational institutions of schooling and universities, the bastions of print capitalism. I propose a transitional and momentary framework for teaching and learning with and around generative AI – and conclude by leaving the immediate future of species and planet with yet another dose of dystopian science fiction. 

About the speaker: Allan Luke is Emeritus Professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. After teaching high school in British Columbia in the 1970s, he attended graduate school at Simon Fraser University and taught at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. He moved to Australia in 1984 to join James Cook University, where he taught in the Aboriginal and Islander teacher education program for a decade. He was Dean of Education at the University of Queensland (1995-2002), Foundation Dean of Research, National Institute of Education, Singapore (2003-2005), Deputy Director General of Education for Queensland (1999-2004), and Professor at Queensland University of Technology (2006-2013). He was named the IBM/Bulletin Australian Educator of the Year in 2003 and has received: the American Educational Research Association Book Award, induction into the International Reading/Literacy Association Hall of Fame, the Educational Press Association of America Merit Award, Gold Medal of the Australian College of Education, and Hon. Doctorates from Simon Fraser University, Rajabhat University (Thailand) and James Cook University. 

About the workshop: This workshop examines digital literacies through the conceptual framework of ‘literacies of repair’ (Jones, 2025), moving beyond our usual preoccupation with technical and semiotic competencies to address the larger psycho-social and ethical problems that characterise our relationships with digital technologies: our sense that our students are increasingly ‘controlled’ by their devices, that they can no longer pay attention to the things that matter, that they are falling victim to internet induced mental health issues, and that they are no longer able to tell what’s true from what false and what’s right from what’s wrong. How can we, as literacy teachers, help to address these pervasive consequences of digital media use, particularly in the context of recent developments in Generative AI? Drawing on post-humanist and ecological approaches to literacy, I introduce methods to sensitise students to the ways technologies are changing the way they think, the way they feel, the way they interact with one another, and the way they experience reality.