The academic library I work at has been talking a lot about how we want to approach the topic of generative AI, so I looked a little at both these environments for this module. Two articles I saw as being somewhat related were Mairn and Rosengarten’s article “Helping Students Navigate Research With AI Tools” (2024) and Deitering and Rempel’s article “Sparking Curiosity – Librarians’ Role in Encouraging Exploration” (2017).
Like many others I’m sure, I have a lot of concerns about generative AI for various reasons. In the library I work at, one of the conversations we frequently have is that despite our hesitations, AI doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Students use it frequently and this is a concern for instructors. Deitering and Rempel’s article was really insightful for its emphasis on the paralyzing prospect of finding research topics for first-year students. Many of them have not had to engage in research on the level university instructors are asking for. After reading that article, it made me think, “No wonder students want to resort to AI!” I think it’s easy for some folks to want to accuse younger generations of being lazy or uncaring, but it’s important to remember how drastically the technological landscape has changed. I graduated from undergrad in 2018 and it’s already so vastly different for me.
A lot of libraries are emphasizing information literacy as part of their instruction on AI tools, but I think incorporating structures for developing curiosity are just as important if our goal is to facilitate learning and skill-building. It requires a considerable amount of risk on students who may not have been shown how to develop research questions all while having a grade on the line. As Deitering and Rempel note, “To build an environment for curiosity in the first-year composition classroom, librarians have to work collaboratively with the faculty designing the curriculum, the GTAs teaching the sections, and the students doing the work.” Applying this framework to how we might talk about AI in the library can be extremely helpful. We may not be able to stop students from using AI, but we can create environments where curiosity is encouraged, and maybe in time students will be willing to take the risk of engagement all on their own.
Deitering, A-M., Rempel, H G. (2017, Feb 22). Sparking curiosity – librarians’ role in encouraging exploration. In The Library With The Lead Pipe.
Mairn, C., Rosengarten, S. (2024, Sep 28). Helping students navigate research with AI tools. InformationToday.
@diamondpatrick I think that AI can be a good and bad thing… depending on how it is used. Many students at my local campus are using it to totally write papers and create most of their “ideas”, so to combat this our library shows them how to use AI tools to help with research, but the work still be all their own. The AI tools we use are ones like Research Rabbit or Elicit, which are just research assistants. These types of AI tools help spark ideas for writing, help lead to other sources based off of current ones, or help summarize main points of journal articles that are relevant to your writing. Like you said, AI isn’t going away any time soon, so we might as well embrace it and teach how to use it in an ethical way.
Thanks for your comment @inabookbind. I’m not sure I’m personally ready to embrace generative AI with open arms — I still have concerns about its larger environmental impact and the exploitative labor practices some platforms use. That’s not to say I think all AI is bad, just that I think it’s important to approach the use of AI tools with thoughtfulness and curiosity (both on librarian’s and student’s parts).
@diamondpatrick so glad you took on this topic. It is very interesting to see how quickly AI is evolving and our views are evolving along with it. We had a presentation by the University writing center for all the 200 instructors on how the writing center is encouraging use of AI in certain situations and discouraging it for others. It seems it can be most useful for brainstorming, but it cannot really write a research paper without all sorts of weird stuff happening such as fake citations, etc..