Atla Annual 2024

“What do we do about AI?” Although we all wrestle with this question at some level, the need to address the issue of AI in the classroom is particularly acute. AI use for class assignments presents challenges far beyond the typical concerns about plagiarism detection, including issues with pedological, and moral and ethical implications. The faculty at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology reached out to library staff with a multitude of questions: What do I need to know? Is there an AI detector? Do we need a policy addressing AI separate from our plagiarism policy? Should seminarians be permitted to use it? Do I need to change my assignments? These urgent questions and more demanded action. This session will outline the steps taken by the library and seminary faculty to begin to address these questions, starting with a faculty development session and creating a LibGuide of “teaching with AI” resources.

Every librarian is a philosopher, and librarians have a worldview: a philosophy through which life is viewed. Philosophy propels lifestyles.

If philosophy drives all components of life, including professional endeavors, what does it look like if we desire to love our neighbor? Is it possible to develop a philosophy of professional activities such as cataloging or acquisitions so that librarians display love through them? Developing philosophies is critical for the profession and specifically for individuals aiming to love one another through librarianship.

If librarians are philosophers, should librarians develop their philosophy? A personal philosophy is an individual's thoughts, beliefs, concepts, and attitudes about everything. As God created each one uniquely, one's philosophy will be unique. A personal philosophy does not presume that no one will agree with your premises; it assumes that their application will be distinct based on context, experience, preferences, and other components. Taking this assumption, the presenter explores what a personal philosophy of reference may look like. To do this, one must ask: has any work been done in this area?

Examples of personal reference philosophies are nonexistent in LIS and works discussing a general philosophy of reference are limited. This gap needs to be addressed. This presentation provides a brief overview of the literature displaying that gap. It then develops three fundamental premises for creating a personal philosophy of reference: how one views knowledge, relationships, and people. While the literature touches upon these, their lack of development leaves more questions than answers. A philosophy of reference may further empower a librarian to use reference interviews to display love for their neighbor. The presentation will close with the presenter's philosophy of reference, arguing that this is critical for loving one’s neighbor through a reference interview.

The basis of this presentaion is a recently published article:

Radcliffe, B., & Trott, G. (2024) Reflecting Deeply: Why a Philosophy of Reference Services Should Direct Every RI. Library Philosophy & Practice, 8078. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/8078.

Authority is constructed and contextual. Thus spake the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy (2016), an assertion that rightly guides information and media literacy instructors as we form and inform students, empowering them to navigate an ecosystem rife with mis- and disinformation. Yet as danah boyd famously argues in her 2018 SXSW EDU keynote, how we teach media literacy can become an “assertion of authority over epistemology” that undermines skills we intend to sharpen by not recognizing and valuing fundamental differences among how individuals within communities make sense of the world(s) we inhabit. Just as authority is constructed and contextual, so also are evaluation and interpretation, sense-making constructs that determine how, why, and where we consume and create information. boyd asks, “How do we teach across epistemologies?” At ATLA 2024, Heath Rosser and Chris Rosser engage boyd and her critics to describe the mess of epistemology and ethics in media literacy instruction; we then suggest how instructors might leave the mess, offering seven pedagogical pivots that promote community and trust as exemplified by two gamified courses, a media literacy course called Eat, Play, Love and a course entitled Worldbuilding. Participants will: 1) identify current challenges for media literacy instruction; 2) encounter gameful design as a pedagogical strategy for navigating challenges; and 3) be challenged to attend to how we think about and encounter other minds, whether mediated digitally or face to face. We believe our use of media and of devices that mediate a tethering of self to a world of others can initiate among us generative orientations necessary for human (well) being, even across epistemologies.

As a hub for learning, the theological library facilitates the resourcing and delivery of academic material on campus. Within this setting, library staff serve at the forefront of curating content to support student objectives. The advent of Artificial Intelligence has led libraries to analyze anew the meaning of information literacy as students increasingly turn to this recent technology to research, analyze and disseminate their knowledge. Fundamental to this discussion are 1) the challenges and opportunities for information literacy in light of student AI usage and 2) library and institutional policies that will guide students to be information literate in an ethical and responsible fashion.

The last decade has seen major shifts in culture, the information landscape, and library instruction. For most of that time, librarians have focused on helping students question information sources, in part a reaction to the rise in misinformation and disinformation, and in part in response to specific requests from our communities who look to the library as a source of “good” information. Yet, students are still not critical enough of external information that aligns with previous beliefs, and hypercritical of external information that does not, reinforcing polarized thinking. This session will contend that there has been a paradigm shift in the information environment and among our students, specifically that our students’ struggle with evaluating authority may stem from over-critical approaches to research and increasing lack of trust in expertise. If this is true, continuing to teach heavily deconstructive approaches is not only unhelpful, it may contribute to the issue.
This session will invite attendees to consider specific trends in cultural discourse and in higher education and how they might be creating such a paradigm reversal. It will explore the philosophical ramifications of hypercritical approaches and demonstrate how they result in behaviors similar to but not quite the same as a lack of critical thinking. Finally, it will offer a generative approach to information literacy instruction that:
-Offers understanding to students who are seeking neatly packageable answers to complex questions while navigating information overload and resulting cognitive fatigue in a polarized information environment.
-Considers whether we can position the library as a place to pursue understanding rather than an arbiter of ultimate authority, and how this might help students ask more generous (and information literate) questions.
-Activates wonder and curiosity to curate a more stable and sustainable approach to learning for comprehension rather than correctness.

In this presentation we will go over some practical uses of Generative AI for classrooms and for the library. We will begin by discussing prompt engineering and then move to uses in the classroom and, lastly, for the library.

Politics and religion: two topics we’ve been taught to avoid discussing at the dinner table. And they are certainly fraught with risk in educational settings, as well. New headlines break daily on the consequences of educators saying the right thing (or the wrong thing); too much (or too little) around these subjects. This supercharged environment leads those who are paying attention to steer clear of such topics. Ironically, the continued avoidance of these matters helps to ensure a future that is just as fraught and supercharged, as yet another generation of college students is left to navigate these topics on their own without guidance from the very faculty to whom they’ve entrusted so many other areas of their personal and professional development.

Religion continues to hold a central role in American society despite the academy’s efforts to render it peripheral in American higher education. Furthermore, college campuses have seen religion resurge, with campus student religious associations enjoying higher numbers and more diversity than ever before. Students are integrating their beliefs into their college experience outside of the classroom; why should they not be invited to do so in the classroom, as well?

Growing evidence points to an opportunity lost when faculty fail to harness closely held epistemologies that can potentially lead students to higher-level thought work and academic performance. This paper strives to bolster the efforts made by teaching and library faculty to make the most of this opportunity.

As technological advancements continue to shape the landscape of information management and access, theological librarianship faces the imperative to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) responsibly. This study explores the intersection of theology and AI, making a compelling case for the responsible use of AI in theological librarianship. It examines the potential benefits, ethical considerations, and challenges associated with implementing AI technologies in the context of theological libraries.

Today, there is a high demand for engaging and interactive teaching materials in academic library instruction to engage students and give them an opportunity to practice their learning in a self-paced learning environment. Instructional librarians strive to leverage innovative tools to captivate and educate our library users effectively, however, these often require specialized tech skills or high cost.
H5Ps (short for "HTML5 Package") can provide a free and low-tech solution to any librarian who would like to create engaging learning objects, such as interactive videos, timelines, presentations, quizzes, drag-and-drop activities, simple games, and more, without any programming skills. H5P activities can be used for active information literacy sessions, self-paced tutorials, online textbooks, and research guides.
The primary objective of this presentation is to demonstrate the process of creating an OER using H5Ps to empower the participants with the skills and knowledge needed to develop captivating teaching materials that enhance user engagement and foster a deeper understanding of information literacy concepts.
Note: If you want to work hands-on with the H5P tool in a guided environment, you will be invited to register for a follow-up ATLA workshop in early Fall 2024.

The emergence of artificial intelligence presents an unprecedented disruption to both the present and future of learning. In theological education in particular it presents a unique opportunity to embrace tendencies and capacities that have long been essential to our work but have been limited by the power of our tools and time.

In this presentation we will take a deep dive into what is described as "ensemble" tools. These are artificial intelligence tools that leverage both the generative and computational capacities of AI to transform the way that we access, understand, leverage, and innovate from the nearly immeasurable ocean of learning and expertise that is already with us.

Understanding how these tools can and should be strategically incorporated into our research and learning, particularly as we learn to expand into non-adjacent areas of inquiry (e.g., religion and medicine, religion and law, religion and political science, etc.), is essential to the future of theological education and theological libraries.

This workshop presents a framework for this kind of engagement, initial recommendations about policy for institutions, and an introduction to "stacking," a methodology by which user's can cultivate the compounding power of AI tools in their work. This workshop will also build upon the insights and presentations that are shared during the regular portion of the conference.

There is but a brief window for theological education not only to reach its full potential as a transformative force in higher education and the world, but also for shaping the future of human learning and expertise far beyond our disciplinary boundaries.

The philosopher Eric Hoffer captures this beautifully: "In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

This is our moment.