Περιλήψεις Κεντρικών Ομιλητών - Keynote Speakers' Abstracts

Mary Kalantzis

Professor, Department of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Literacy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

The latest mutation of Artificial Intelligence, "Generative AI," is more than anything a technology of writing. In a world-historical frame, the significance of this cannot be understated. It is a technology in which the unnatural language of code tangles with the natural language of everyday life. Its form of writing, moreover, is multimodal, able to not only text as conventionally understood, but "read" images by matching textual labels and "write" images from textual prompts. Within the scope of this peculiarly machinic writing is mathematics, actionable software procedure, and algorithm. This presentation explores the consequences of Generative AI for literacy teaching and learning. In its first part, we speak theoretically and historically, suggesting that this development is perhaps as momentous as Bi Sheng's invention of moveable type and Gutenberg's printing press—and in its peculiar ways just as problematic. In the second part we go on to propose that literacy in the time of AI requires a new way to speak about itself, a revised "grammar" of sorts. In a third part, we discuss empirical interventions—ours and others—that put Generative AI to work in support of literacy and learning.

[He] allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera