About Us The Ai Literacy Lab

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 3, 2025, 6:32 PM

The AI Literacy Lab is an interdisciplinary community of educators and researchers dedicated to exploring how generative AI is reshaping higher education. We investigate the implications of AI for teaching, learning, and scholarly inquiry, with a strong focus on equity, creativity, and critical engagement.As part of our mission to foster collaborative innovation, we’ve established the Human-AI... This initiative supports networking, knowledge-sharing, and co-creation around generative AI, particularly within the context of higher education.Our work centres on understanding how generative AI can be thoughtfully and ethically integrated into academic practice, not... If you would like more information about HACKER or would like to join our network, please contact Dr Douglas Eacersall. For questions about this website, please contact Dr Lynette Pretorius. Sign up to receive an email when new AI literacy content is published.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info. Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription. The AI Literacy Lab, part of the Internet Democracy Initiative at Northeastern University, is a center for thinking, collaboration, and insight on communication in the age of AI. Our leaders are media, computational social science, and computer science faculty, working alongside media practitioners. Our research relates to public understanding of new media and AI-driven technologies, and the factors that contribute to public knowledge.

We want to bring scholars, journalists, and technologists together to understand the implications of new technology, communicate the work of technology development, and promote the responsible use of AI. Our mission is to foster a well-informed global society that is equipped to grapple with the promise and pitfalls of emerging technology — and to use AI in the service of democracy. Assistant Professor, Journalism and Media Innovation, Northeastern University Teachers are incredibly flexible, highly talented, and endlessly creative ... but they're strapped for time. They're overburdened with the day-to-day responsibilities of teaching.

Responding and adapting to a constantly changing new technology? It's just not built into their daily schedules. Students are just trying to survive classes they're required to take without getting in trouble. To get through irrelevant work, they'll turn to any means possible -- including AI tools -- to do the work for them. It's hard for them to see the big picture for their long-term success. School leaders have the best interest of their students, teachers, and community in mind.

They want students to become lifelong learners. But they're being pulled in all directions. They might not have the time -- or the insight -- to see where AI tech is heading and how to prepare their schools for it. As the faculty of The AI Fluency Lab -- Holly Clark, Ken Shelton, and Matt Miller -- we have facilitated top-notch professional development for decades. We've delivered keynote speeches, facilitated full-day workshops, spoken at virtual events, written books, and created online resources that have supported more than a million educators on six continents. We know what educators want and need in professional development.

They want it to be practical, relevant, inspiring, and engaging ... leading them to the next level of teaching to benefit their students, themselves, and the world. Republished from lynette.pretorius.com. Original post by Lynette Pretorius. I have recently developed and delivered a masterclass about how you can develop your AI literacy in your writing and research practice. This included a series of examples from my own experiences.

I thought I’d provide a summary of this masterclass in a blog post so that everyone can benefit from my experiences. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been present in society for several years and refers to technologies which can perform tasks that used to require human intelligence. This includes, for example, computer grammar-checking software, autocomplete or autocorrect functions on our mobile phone keyboards, or navigation applications which can direct a person to a particular place. Recently, however, there has been a significant advancement in AI research with the development of generative AI technologies. Generative AI refers to technologies which can perform tasks that require creativity. In other words, these generative AI technologies use computer-based networks to create new content based on what they have previously learnt.

These types of artistic creations have previously been thought to be the domain of only human intelligence and, consequently, the introduction of generative AI has been hailed as a “game-changer” for society.I am using... The AIs I use most frequently include Google’s built-in generative AI in email, chat, Google Docs etc. which learns from your writing to suggest likely responses. I also use Grammarly Pro to help me identify errors in my students’ writing, allowing me more time to give constructive feedback about their writing, rather than trying to find examples. This is super time-saving, particularly given how many student emails I get and the number of assignments and thesis chapters I read! I also frequently use a customised version of Chat GPT 4, which I trained to do things the way I would like them to be done.

This includes responding in a specific tone and style, reporting information in specific ways, and doing qualitative data analysis. Finally, I use Leonardo AI and DALL-E to generate images, Otter AI to help me transcribe some of my research, Research Rabbit to help me locate useful literature on a topic, and AILYZE to... The moral panic that was initiated at the start of 2023 with the advent of Chat GPT caused debates in higher education. Some people insisted that generative AI would encourage students to cheat, thereby posing a significant risk to academic integrity. Others, however, advocated that the use of generative AI could make education more accessible to those who are traditionally marginalised and help students in their learning. I came to believe that the ability to use generative AI would be a core skill in the future, but that AI literacy would be essential.

This led me to publish a paper where I defined AI literacy as: AI literacy is understanding “how to communicate effectively and collaboratively with generative AI technologies, as well as evaluate the trustworthiness of the results obtained”. Promoting an informed society around the uses and consequences of artificial intelligence. We study the intersection of media and AI. The AI Literacy Lab, part of the Internet Democracy Initiative at Northeastern University, is a center for thinking, collaboration, and insight on communication in the age of AI. Our leaders are media, computational social science, and computer science faculty, working alongside media practitioners.

Our research relates to public understanding of new media and AI-driven technologies, and the factors that contribute to public knowledge. We want to bring scholars, journalists, and technologists together to understand the implications of new technology, communicate the work of technology development, and promote the responsible use of AI. Our mission is to foster a well-informed global society that is equipped to grapple with the promise and pitfalls of emerging technology — and to use AI in the service of democracy.

About Us The Ai Literacy Lab

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