This AI Literacy Review covers AI literacy for nurses and diplomats, preparation for the EU AI Act, New York libraries’ AI curriculum, surveys on Gen Z’s use of AI and students in emerging countries’ perspectives on AI, a manifesto for teaching and learning, 6 big questions for schools about AI, UCLA’s controversial AI literature class, Common Crawl training data, Google and Microsoft’s AI literacy investments, and more!
General
EY and TeachAI, with support from Microsoft, publish the results of their global survey How can we upskill Gen Z as fast as we train AI? which finds a gap between Gen Z’s reported levels of AI knowledge and their actual knowledge, and finds that Gen Z have a less developed ability to critically evaluate and identify shortfalls with AI.
Eversheds Sutherland associates begin a global series on the EU AI Act. Their first episode Global Insights: Illuminating your EU AI Act compliance needs explains the definition of AI literacy under the Act and contextual information about compliance.
Law firm William Fry stressed that AI literacy is no longer optional in its end-of-year seminar titled In the AI of the Beholder: Complying with Subjective AI Literacy Requirements under the AI Act about the implications of the EU AI Act in February 2025.
Google awards CUNY Graduate Center $1 million toward AI literacy curriculum and materials in a project titled Disciplinary Frameworks for Critical AI Literacy.
Microsoft launches an AI skills initiative to train one million people in Australia and New Zealand by 2026 via new and existing platforms.
Russia’s AI strategy states that 80% of workers should obtain AI skills by 2030.
Natasha E. Bajema from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies explains why diplomats and policymakers need to develop AI literacy in a primer paper about how Gen. AI relates to the WMD domain.
Steven Johnson creates an interactive adventure game based on his latest history detective book The Infernal Machine using Gemini Pro 1.5 and a prompt on how to host the game.
Michael Stelzner posts that he set a new mandate during a company-wide meeting that all employees are expected to use AI to improve their work, and he spent 90 minutes training his team on why and how to do so.
Robert Walters’ blog Upskilling in AI for the new year: Your guide to developing AI literacy summarizes actionable steps to upskill in AI, including online courses, AI tools, and communities.
In The AI Skills Job Seekers Need, Blake Snow writes about how Gen. AI is changing the landscape for job seekers across different fields.
In Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich: Common Crawl’s Impact on Generative AI, Stefan Baack and Mozilla Insights discuss the Common Crawl web data from 2008 that was designed to make data more accessible to smaller businesses and researchers, but has since been used to train AI LLMs. The article draws attention to how Common Crawl does not represent the entire web and has limitations and gaps.
In Near future academic publishing – a speculative social science fiction experiment, Ben Williamson, Felicitas Macgilchrist, and John Potter speculate on the past and future of the Learning, Media and Technology journal and how academic publishing might change in response to AI.
In Māori Perspectives of Data Jurisdiction, Online Identity and Privacy, Karaitiana Taiuru writes how most Māori with a website or email use international providers and do not follow Māori Data Sovereignty principles or consider New Zealand legislation, raising questions about the relevance of these principles after nearly ten years.
In When Real Problems Light the Signal: The True Entry Point for AI Adoption, generativEDUCATION suggests that rather than following traditional tech implementation of introducing a new tool, organizations should start with problems and then see how AI can help with solutions.
Google releases a more technical 5-Day Gen. AI Intensive Course covering foundational models, databases, agents, LLMs, and machine learning ops.
Healthcare
In the journal article The role of artificial intelligence literacy and innovation mindset in shaping nursing students’ career and talent self-efficacy [paywalled], Boshra Karem Mohamed El-Sayed et al. study the AI literacy of nursing students in Egypt and find that the students’ career and talent self-efficacy were significantly predicted by their innovative mindset and AI literacy. They believe that AI literacy should be integrated as a core competency in nursing curricula.
In Generative artificial intelligence (AI) literacy in nursing education: A crucial call to action [paywalled], Rachel C. Simms explores the urgent need for integration of Gen. AI literacy into nursing education.
Libraries
The School Library Systems Association of New York releases a curriculum to empower students with skills in AI literacy, critical thinking, and information seeking practice. Using four strands (Why AI, How AI Works, AI in Society, and AI in Practice), the curriculum is aligned with state standards in computer science and library skills. There is a recording of presentations from leadership, as well as resources and slides under a Creative Commons license for librarians to use to start their AI literacy journey at their institution.
Education
The World Bank’s brief on 100 Student Voices on AI and Education reports on focus group discussions from students in 10 emerging countries (Cameroon, Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Indonesia, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, and Rwanda) about their perspectives and concerns about AI’s impact on education.
The Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a Time of Generative AI: A Critical Collective Stance to Better Navigate the Future by Aras Bozhurt et al. critically looks at Gen. AI in higher education and calls for evidence-based research and decision-making.
EducationWeek publishes a special report on The Transformative Potential of AI: 6 Big Questions for Schools which are: Will AI transform standardized testing? How will the technology change school operations? What should PD on artificial intelligence look like? What measures are needed to curb AI “deepfakes” and bullying? Can AI improve special education? And, how can schools use the technology to help English learners?
UCLA College Division of Humanities announces that its Comparative Lit class will be the first course to be built around AI, with an AI-generated textbook, lesson plans, and writing exercises, although the announcement didn’t address the problem of students not reading the textbook in the first place, regardless of how it’s developed. There was widespread criticism on social media sites about what this means for teaching staff.
In the article How to dance with the AI devil, English/language arts teacher Susan Carney explains how attending a workshop on Gen. AI from the New Jersey Education Association and other programs enabled her to shift her thinking about AI and see it as a useful tool that students could use to develop critical thinking, and that AI literacy and prompting skills need to be taught.
In Coding Education With AI: Can English Teachers Show The Way? Nisha Talagala suggests that coding education could learn a thing or two from English teaching in terms of similarities in reading comprehension, famous works, canons, and writing.
The Research Ireland Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology in partnership with Google launch an online 90-minute training course called AI Literacy in the Classroom designed for post-primary educators.
The University of Waterloo launches an online AI literacy course and workshop on Gen. AI in K-12 education called Artificial Intelligence and Society with 11 self-paced modules that examine the ethical, social, and economic dimensions of AI.
Queen Mary University launches the Centre for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence to help integrate AI literacy into teaching and learning.
Founder of The AI Education Project Alex Kotran is interviewed by Greg Toppo about AI readiness, the digital divide, ethics, and other issues in AI and education.
In Center on Education and Training for Employment Leads Ohio in Advancing AI Literacy, Marcie Kamb details how the Ohio State University research center has helped prepare Ohio communities for AI through professional development sessions, conferences, journal articles, and community engagement.
In Generating AI Literacy MCQs: A Multi-Agent LLM Approach, authors Jiayi Wang, Ruiwei Xiao, Ying-Jui Tseng discuss their approach to generating high-quality multiple-choice questions for AI literacy assessments aligned with Bloom’s Taxonomy that K-12 teachers could use.
Phillip Alcock publishes an Is It AI? learning pack for students to solve a challenge about AI-generated content, with a teacher’s guide, rubric, and other materials.
Ryan Tannenbaum suggests that deeper AI literacy should take into account things like how a simple choice of words can significantly affect an LLM’s output (see Ryan Tannenbaum’s LinkedIn post).
Michelle Kassorla and others discuss the topic of AI in admission essays in an MBAWaves video on YouTube titled Essays, AI, & R2 – Have Your Cake & Eat it Too.
