The SHAPE project Digital literacy and machine learning has, in close collaboration with researchers from the Centre for Computational Thinking and Design, explored how practical digital technology courses with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support active citizenship, creativity and digital literacy in an increasingly digitalised society. More specifically, the project has investigated how AI and ML skills and competences can be developed among academics in professions where digital developments are creating new opportunities and challenges for a wide range of tasks, especially for knowledge workers working in areas such as communication, marketing, copywriting, translation, and case management.

"Advances in artificial intelligence present a need for fostering AI literacy in workplaces," Magnus Høholt Kaspersen and co-authors Peter Dalsgaard, Line Have Musaeus, Karl-Emil Kjær Bilstrup, Ole Sejer Iversen, Marianne Graves Petersen and Christian Dindler open their recent research paper, "From Primary Education to Premium Workforce: Drawing on K-12 Approaches for Developing AI." To explore how these competences can be developed, they have conducted an explorative case study in collaboration with DM - Danish Association of Masters and PhDs, where members of DM participated in workshops on AI and ML to build concrete experiences with the tools.

"For the past 5 years, we've been working on teaching AI in schools because we could see it would have a huge impact on our future. With the advent of the big language models, such as ChatGPT, the impact is here - and here to stay. That's why working in schools are no longer enough - if we don't make a big effort to upskill and empower the labour market, we risk, as with the first wave of digitalisation in the 80s, that digitalisation will happen solely on the terms of employers. Therefore, we have been very interested in how our experiences from the school world could be transferred to a professional context.

With this work, we show great potential for doing just that, but also that many of the challenges from the school world - especially around empowerment - also apply to the labour market. The article harks back to the Participatory Design movement of the 1980s, which is very much rooted in Aarhus University, and which also pointed to the role of trade unions in digitalisation at the time. We hope that our research can help inform how the trade union movement can strengthen and upgrade workers' participation in the workplace when it comes to artificial intelligence and digitalisation in general, including through continuing education and training," says Magnus Høholt Kaspersen. 

The project has drawn inspiration from the field of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI), and the research team has, among other things, investigated whether and how approaches from there can be used to strengthen competences and empowerment among academics across different professions. The results of the case study show a statistically significant increase in participants' self-reported knowledge of ML after participating in a workshop, but they do not show an increase in confidence and empowerment according to either AI or ML. Therefore, based on the study, the research team concludes that AI empowerment is a timely and important topic to address in the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and that the approaches from CCI show promise for developing AI education and empowerment in the workplace. Finally, they point to the possibilities of involving professional organisations such as trade unions in the building of new AI networks among academic professionals and having interested members act as ambassadors for AI literacy.

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Read more about the project and its results in the research article here:

Kaspersen, M. H., Musaeus, L. H., Bilstrup, K.-E. K., Petersen, M. G., Iversen, O. S., Dindler, C., & Dalsgaard, P. (2024). From Primary Education to Premium Workforce: Drawing on K-12 Approaches for Developing AI Literacy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642607