Online information literacy expert Mike Caulfield will be the Simmons Center for Information Literacy keynote speaker this fall!
This event will be held in Helen G. Drinan Hall C-220 at Simmons University and livestreamed on Zoom on November 12 at 5pm. In this talk, “Critical Oversight: How AI Enhances Thinking, How It Hinders It, and How Education Can Respond,” Mike will detail the ways that AI is augmenting cognition, ways it is hindering it, and what sort of education will help students embrace use which expands capability and agency. Particular attention will be given to the role of the liberal arts and professional education in a world infused with AI.
Read more about Mike's work:
Mike Caulfield’s work focuses on how students and citizens can use AI as a tool for reasoning and critical thinking, learning to tap into the power of LLMs to discover and contextualize evidence, and to model and critique arguments. He is currently manager of Academic and Collaborative Technology at University of Washington Bothell.
Caulfield has spent more than a decade working on how to use search to contextualize artifacts, events, and claims. With Sam Wineburg, he wrote the definitive book on using internet search for sensemaking (University of Chicago Press, endorsed by Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel Prize for her advocacy of press freedom). There are features delivered on every Google search result that are inspired by his work. His SIFT method is used in hundreds of universities, and over the past decade has become one of two primary ways that information literacy is taught in U.S. universities and around much of the world. The Google Super Searchers curriculum he co-developed with Google has been translated into a dozen languages and is one of the most successful information literacy initiatives in history.
Caulfield is also considered the founder of the digital gardening movement, and his work with Ward Cunningham on federated wiki (and his writing and talks about it) has been credited by the founders of Notion and Roam as being an inspiration for their work, and was a major impetus behind the "re-wikification" of the personal knowledge management space in the mid-2010s. His work has been covered by The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the MIT Technology Review. His recent essay in The Atlantic outlines his current vision for AI.