New online course! October 13 – November 23, 2026
AI is becoming integrated into many of the tools we use, but how we use it and what we choose to use it for is not inevitable. Library workers can help shape the direction society takes with these technologies.
Rather than treating AI as either a miracle or a menace, we’ll take a balanced, hopeful, and hands-on approach. We’ll take inspiration from solutions journalism, an approach that examines how people, communities, and institutions respond to problems and investigates which responses are making meaningful differences.
We’ll go beyond chatbots to explore emerging forms of AI, including vibe-coding, agentic AI, and other ways AI can help people work with information. You’ll leave with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and inspiration for using AI in ways that strengthen human judgment, creativity, accessibility, and learning.
Week 1: Technology foundations & AI in library databases
- Distinguishing between generative AI and other types of AI
- How generative AI works
- Grounding AI with scholarly search
- AI in library research databases
- Understanding open source or open weight models
- Projects, system prompts, and memory
- The importance of context
- Preserving privacy
- Preserving cognitive abilities
Week 2: Thoughtful investigation of media claims about AI
- Hype in the media (both positive and negative)
- History of technology panics
- Experts don’t agree (sorting them into categories)
- Fact checking and context gathering with AI
- Public opinion about AI worldwide
- “Highbrow misinformation”
- Inspiration from solutions journalism
- How to stay current & recommended sources
Week 3: Environmental impacts of AI
- Individual use vs global use (in context)
- Training vs. Inference
- Data centers
- Electrification of everything
- News media getting things wrong
- Efficiency improvements for AI tech
- AI technologies for mitigating climate change
- The cleantech revolution
- What to advocate for with data centers
Week 4: AI for accessibility
- Accessibility features in AI chatbots and everyday tools
- Blind and low vision access
- Deaf and hard of hearing access (involving the deaf community)
- Physical disabilities and speech access
- Language translation
- Neurodivergent and cognitive accessibility
- The importance of disabled people’s leadership
- Why accessibility should be part of conversations about AI use policies
- What libraries can do
Week 5: Multimedia AI
- Generative AI tools for images, video, speech, and music
- How the technology works
- Tools and techniques: beyond just “typing a prompt”
- Examples of beneficial uses
- Artists, designers, and architects who use generative AI for good
- Copyright debates and tradeoffs for individual artists
- Artists training their own models
- Solving for bias: ways to generate diverse images
- Investigating whether an image was AI generated
- Ideas for creative, educational uses of AI generated media
Week 6: From chatbots to agentic AI
- Vibe-coding for non-coders
- Beyond chat: models working for you
- Understanding agents & agentic AI
- Running a small AI model on your own computer
- Importance of experimentation
- Considering the future of knowledge work
- Staying sane: moving slowly in a world focused on speed
Time commitment
Each week there are a set of short videos to watch, and then several options for hands-on activities. Feel free to pick and choose the activities that look most interesting and valuable to you.
Expect to spend 3 to 4 hours per week on the course: about 1 hour for watching several short videos, and the rest of the time doing hands-on activities.
Who this course is for
This course is for library workers in any type of library, with particular relevance for those who teach information literacy.
Requirements
You’ll need to create free accounts on several AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Notebook. Links to the necessary accounts will be provided in the course. No coding or technical background is needed. You can complete the activities using free tools or tools you already have access to.
Participate from any time zone
This course is totally asynchronous, so you can participate from any time zone. Each week you’ll watch videos, do some activities, write about them in the class forums, and discuss with other participants.
“We’ve consistently found these to be some of the clearest, most practical training we’ve encountered on artificial intelligence. Your ability to make complex AI concepts accessible has genuinely shaped how we think about this work. As librarians, we particularly enjoyed how you included reputable sources that we could follow up with to create your courses. We like how you dispel myths and focus on facts.”