On the occasion of National AI Literacy Day, Dr. Gunder reflects on a year of carrying the Dimensions of AI Literacies taxonomy across six continents: into conference rooms, classrooms and conversations with practitioners navigating AI from every angle. It also marks one year since the launch of AI Literacies Unlocked, the free, open course built in D2L Brightspace from her and her team’s longitudinal global research with UNESCO IITE. Here’s what the wilds of AI have taught her.
There’s a moment that keeps finding me, no matter what room I’m in or what corner of the world I’m presenting in. Someone chooses to be open, genuinely open, about what they’re doing with AI. Maybe it’s something that worked beautifully. Maybe it’s a spectacular failure. Either way, they share it, and the room comes alive with murmurs of recognition. Connections forming. Inferences sparking. You can almost see it, the light catching in ways that, ordinarily, would happen alone, behind a screen, in private.
That’s the moment I keep coming back to. And after a year of carrying this work on the Dimensions of AI Literacies around the world, I’ve come to understand something about it: those sparks aren’t about AI at all. They’re about us.
One year ago, Opened Culture launched AI Literacies Unlocked on Brightspace, a free, fully asynchronous course built on the findings of a longitudinal global research study commissioned by UNESCO IITE and Shanghai Open University. The course gave educators, designers and leaders a structured way to develop the interconnected mindsets and skillsets needed to navigate an ever-changing AI landscape. Hundreds of educators from around the world have completed it. And to mark its one year anniversary on National AI Literacy Day, we’re relaunching it with new updates and fresh research findings.
A year of presenting this work across conference rooms, classrooms and countless conversations with practitioners navigating everything from policy to pedagogy has all taught me a great deal. Not just about AI literacies, but about what happens when a taxonomy meets the world and gives people a vocabulary for what they’re already seeing and feeling.
Here’s what the wild has shown me.
Constellations Are Getting More Complex—and More Intentional
One of the core concepts underlying this work is what our team has named constellating AI literacies: the idea that the eight dimensions of AI literacies (cultural, cognitive, constructive, communicative, confident, creative, critical and civic) don’t operate in isolation. Rather, they appear in patterned groupings, or constellations, that shift across time, context, role and geography. Like stars in the night sky, they are most meaningful when we attend to the patterns they form together, and to what those patterns tell us about where we are and where we’re headed.
When we first introduced theDimensions of AI Literacies taxonomy, most educators were working with a foundational constellation: constructive literacies (how does AI work), critical literacies (how is AI helping or harming) and civic literacies (how can AI be aligned to good). A solid and necessary starting point.
But what we’re seeing now is that those constellations have expanded and deepened. Creative and confident AI literacies are increasingly present and the way educators engage with individual dimensions has matured considerably. Take communicative AI literacies as an example. A year ago, the conversation centered almost entirely on prompt engineering: the transactional back-and-forth of getting AI to do something useful. Today, educators describe something far more dialogic: a relationship with AI shaped by identity, positionality and purpose. The question has shifted from “How do I write a better prompt?” to “Who am I in this conversation, what role does AI play and what does that change?”
That is not an insignificant shift. It marks how we are simultaneously thinking, doing and becoming with AI.
Every Literacies Dimension Is Both a Use and a Gain
Our original framing divided the eight dimensions into four skillsets and four mindsets. It was a useful distinction at the time. But like all good lines of inquiry, our ongoing research has revealed something more nuanced: every dimension is both a skillset and a mindset. And more than that, every dimension represents something we use when we engage with AI and something we gain in the process of doing so.
This means that developing AI literacies is not a prerequisite to using AI meaningfully. The two happen together, in the doing. Every time an educator works through a complicated AI-generated output, their critical literacies deepen. Every time a student uses AI to push past a conceptual wall that previously stopped them cold, their confidence becomes something they own, and something the experience gave them, not the tool.
The machine is not the teacher. We are.
Students Are Being Welcomed to the Table as Partners, Not Just Focus Group Participants
One of the most meaningful shifts I’ve witnessed this year is how institutions are thinking about student voice in AI strategy. We’ve moved, both compellingly and not without effort, away from reactive policy writing aimed at restricting AI use, toward something far more generative: actually asking learners what they need, what they’re trying to accomplish and how AI can support a rigorous and meaningful path to new knowledge rather than bypass it entirely.
More powerfully, many institutions are now including students in the creation of AI guidelines and strategy. And not as a sounding board or an afterthought, but as genuine partners at the table where decisions get made. The research supports what educators have long known intuitively: when students have agency over their learning, that confidence is durable. It lasts well beyond the course, and well beyond graduation.
The Field Is Learning Out Loud
A year ago, sharing in-flight work related to AI felt risky, making us vulnerable to open shaming. Failures especially were kept quiet for fear of being called out and stigmatized on the public stage. This caused us to retreat inwards, leaving us isolated and feeling alone.
What we’ve witnessed most recently, however, has been a genuine opening up: educators, designers and leaders sharing what they tried, what didn’t land and what they’d do differently, with a generosity that has made our collective conversations richer and more honest. Those sparks I mentioned at the beginning? This is where they go. They don’t stay in the darkness. They move out where all of us can see them, lighting up the sky.
This spirit is showing up in our AI Literacies Case Example Database and in the community commentary being woven into the WCET AI Literacies in Practice Playbook, where practitioners from around the world are contributing their own stories before the final release. Silos are expensive. Openness, it turns out, is the better investment.
The Most Surprising Thing the Wild Has Taught Me
And here is what I keep coming back to: a machine has somehow made us more human.
Not because AI is empathetic or curious or joyful. But because by using AI, we keep finding ourselves. In comparing results with a colleague, both the good and the bad, there’s a moment of genuine connection, a recentering on shared goals and shared purpose. In watching a student break through to a concept that previously eluded them, I see something lasting take root: not just an answer they found, but a belief in their own capacity to find answers. And in the places where AI falls short, where judgment has to step in, where creativity has to carry the weight, where empathy is the only tool that will do, I see what we actually are, reflected back.
That’s what I mean when I say AI has become less of an answer bot and more of a mirror. It shows us where our curiosity lives, where our creativity is waiting and where our humanity remains not just relevant but essential.
That’s what the relaunch of AI Literacies Unlocked carries forward: updated findings, new stories from the field and the same invitation that started all of this: come explore, stay curious and bring your whole self to the table.
It’ll be great to have you join us to celebrate all the gains that we’ve made here in the wilds of AI in education for National AI Literacy Day. And enroll in the updated AI Literacies Unlocked course — still free, still open and ready for wherever your constellation is right now.
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