Teaching older people about AI

[Terence Kuch]

I'm a resident of a senior living community and teach classes in Introduction to AI. Most of my fellow seniors use email and Google, not much else. Any ideas from others with experience in this area would be very welcome.

(Intro: I spent 52 years as a computer specialist, from trainee mainframe operator on a Univac UFC-1, to VP of an IT consulting firm. I find AI compelling, and have outsourced much of my thinking to it.)

[Christopher MacLellan]

Hi Terence,

Nice hearing from you!

Are you interested in AI education for the people in these communities (teaching them about AI topics) or about how they might use AI services effectively (more of what I would call AI literacy)?

There has been some interesting work in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) space on this topic. Mainly, most HCI folks are not AI experts, so there has been several efforts to find ways to make AI accessible to people in HCI. There  may be potential to leverage these frameworks for your use case.

This Long and Magerko (2020) paper does a reasonable job of highlighting several AI competencies that could be targets for instruction: https://aiunplugged.lmc.gatech.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2020/08/CHI-2020-AI-Literacy-Paper-Camera-Ready.pdf

There is a body of work on teaching AI to designers that frames AI as a "material" that can be used to like other design materials (e.g., like concrete or wood). They specifically try to make AI accessible through examples and high-level frameworks for articulating capabilities and affordances of AI through examples. They also provide some design kits for running workshops using their framework. See these materials for more info:

• Yildirim, N., Oh, C., Sayar, D., Brand, K., Challa, S., Turri, V., ... & Zimmerman, J. (2023, July). Creating design resources to scaffold the ideation of AI concepts. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 2326-2346). (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563657.3596058)
• Their design kit: https://aidesignkit.github.io/AI_Brainstorming_Kit_v1.pdf

Hope this helps! 

Chris