Shaping AI Literacy and Understanding for Students and Educators: A Technical and Professional Communication Perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the way scholars teach, collaborate, and research. Its widespread use has also led to a stereophonic chorus of advice and guidelines that have made these activities challenging as educators navigate local, national, and international frameworks for how to engage with AI. In this paper, we describe the AI policies at Hofstra University, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Limerick in an effort to streamline suggestions for not only using AI successfully for teaching, but to also model for technical and professional communication educators what they can do within the classroom. Specifically, we recommend that educators ask students to analyze global AI policies to teach rhetorical situation, genre conventions, and ethics in more robust ways that also integrate discussions of appropriate AI use in the global workplace.