Sharing skills, tools, and resources for librarians and faculty to combat misinformation in the face of constantly changing technology 

How can you cultivate critical thinking skills in students when artificial intelligence does the thinking for them? Sage’s Critical Thinking Bootcamp returned Tuesday, August 8 for a day of insights, guidance, and resources to help librarians and professors promote critical thinking in the digital age. In each of the webinar’s three sessions, a panel of librarians and social and behavioral sciences will share techniques and perspectives on the challenge and potential of generative AI in higher education.

Sage’s fourth annual Critical Thinking Bootcamp provided insights, guidance, and resources to help librarians, professors, and other staff encourage critical thinking in and out of the classroom. In the three sessions, panelists addressed the impact of tech trends on our media ecosystem and discussed tactics useful for educating students.

Experienced librarians, faculty, and students spoke on:

• “Asking the Right Questions: Prompt Engineering as a Tool for Critical Thinking” with Dr. Jonathan Michael Spector, Dr. Madeleine Mejia, and Dr. Raymond Pun

  As some faculty and schools prohibit the use of generative AI in completing assignments, others embrace it. The key to doing this successfully is revamping assignments to encourage students to engage in an active, iterative dialogue with the tools rather than passively accepting their output as a one-and-done outcome. How can faculty and instructional librarians:

  • help students ask better questions to get at what they intend;

  • refine their prompts in response to shortcomings in the output;

  • fact-check the results and, crucially, situate them in their broader context;

  • and decide which pieces are actually useful to make their point or achieve their goal

  Participants will share how they are using AI in class and assignments to foster, not replace, critical thinking skills in their students. Can AI support critical thinking instead of help students skip it, thereby hindering its development? How?

• “Fact-Checking the Hive Mind: Detecting Mis- and Disinformation” with Dan Chibnall, Dr. Richard Wood, and Dr. Brooklyne Gipson

  Many tools used by students to assess the accuracy and bias of information rely on knowing where, and who, that information came from: Who funded the study? What is the political position of the news outlet? Is that a reputable journal? Others, often applied to less scholarly concerns like scam emails and fake online reviews, sometimes involve spotting spelling and grammar errors. But in the era of large language models that don’t share the details of their training data, it can be impossible to tell who originally said the authoritative-sounding information being presented as fact in flawless, or at least technically proficient, prose.  Without those cues, how can students best learn to identify signs of AI “hallucinations” or bias in the training data – or, more subtly, bias in what was omitted from the training data --- especially as more of the available material to check it against may have been generated by the same tools? Panelists will share their techniques as well as their real-world experience adjusting to this new normal.

• “What Your Students Want from AI, and What They Want You to Know” with Sarah Morris, Dr. Brady Beard, Anne Lester, and Will Lam

  Hear from a panel of students and researchers on how they do and don’t use AI tools and why; how they learn about them and what they learn from them; what classroom and institutional policies feel useful or out of touch; and how they feel the advent of AI is changing their education—and what they want out of it. If AI doesn’t turn out to be the next metaverse bubble, the jobs that still need to be done by humans will likely center on critical thinking while also including the use of AI tools: what do students want from higher ed to best prepare them for that future?

Dr. Leo Lo, dean of the University of New Mexico’s College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences, will provide a keynote address—What is the future of teaching critical thinking skills when AI can do the work?  

A recording of the webinar and a copy of all slides will be distributed to participants after the event. Participants will also receive a comprehensive toolkit of resources designed to help them combat misinformation and encourage critical thinking in and out of the classroom. 

Speakers: