Generative AI and Information Literacy: Authorship and Authority

Students can complete the activities in this guide on their own or as part of a course assignment. 

For each section of the guide, there are several activities and reflection questions, most of which are highlighted in bold. These can be used as part of your instruction in several ways: 

• Individual assignments: Assign any or all of the activities and reflection questions to your students to complete on an individual basis and have them submit their work to you through Brightspace, e-mail, or in physical form. 
• Group discussions and presentations: Assign any or all of the activities and reflection questions to your students to complete in groups and have them present their work to the class.
• Class discussions: Use the activities and reflection questions as the basis for a full class discussion, either in-person or in Brightspace. 
• Adaptation: Adapt any of the activities and reflection questions to your specific class. (If possible and appropriate, please credit the original guide as part of your adaptation.)
• Library presentation: Invite a librarian to class to lead a discussion with your students about the topics covered in this guide. (Contact Allison Hosier for more information: ahosier@albany.edu)
• Participation points: Contact Allison Hosier (ahosier@albany.edu) to set up a simple form that your students can complete to show they have completed any assigned parts of the guide. This form can be embedded or linked in Brightspace and can be set up so that submissions automatically send to you for grading or participation tracking purposes. 

If I use the activities in this guide for an assignment, can a librarian grade the assignment for me? 

No. This is not a service that we offer at this time. 

If I ask for a simple form to be created to track student responses, can a librarian do the tracking for me? 

No. The form will be set up so that students responses will send directly to your e-mail address. However, if a specific student claims to have completed a form but you do not have a record of their completion, we can check on our end to confirm whether the work was submitted. If this happens, the best person to contact is Allison Hosier (ahosier@albany.edu). 

Can I invite a librarian to teach a specific AI tool to my students? 

At this time, it is up to an individual librarian whether they will teach a specific AI tool to a class. Generally speaking, if there is a specific tool you would like your student to use, you may be the best person to teach them how you would like them to use it. However, a librarian may be able to speak to your class about the considerations related to using generative AI for their research. If you would like a librarian to teach a session for you, on this or any other topic, you can fill out our instruction request form, contact Allison Hosier (ahosier@albany.edu), or contact your department's subject librarian directly. 

I would like to learn more about considerations related to generative AI when assigning student research. Can someone in the library help with that? 

We are all still learning about the effects generative AI is having on academic and scholarly life. As librarians, we do not have any hard and fast answers but we can offer consultations to help you think through this issue in more detail. Contact Allison Hosier (ahosier@albany.edu) for more information. 

Who authored the information on the "Why is authority important?" page? 

The text on that page was generated by ChatGPT. All other text in this guide was authored by Allison Hosier, Head of Information Literacy.