Project on Open and Evolving Metaliteracies (POEM) Call for Resources

Civics of Technology Announcements

Next Tech Talk: The next Tech Talk will be held on September 2 at 8:00 Eastern Time. Register on our events page. Come join our community in an informal discussion about tech, education, the world, whatever is on your mind!

Next Book Club: We’re reading Culpability by Bruce Holsinger! Board Member Erin Anderson will host on October 14 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Sign up here or through our events page.

Latest Book Review: The Mechanic and the Luddite, by Jathan Sadowski (2025).

By Nicky Agate

POEM, or Project on Open and Evolving Metaliteracies, is designed as an intervention: a tool to help students attain what Paolo Freire calls “not just the acquisition of technical skills but also the emancipation achieved through the literacy process.” A bilingual, peer-reviewed collection of flexible open educational resources for the use of high school and college instructors and librarians that focuses on AI, data, and media/disinformation literacies, the project that sits right at the intersection of critical thinking, access, equity, and fluency, which are at the heart of what we in libraries talk about when we talk about information literacy[1] and the way we approach AI.

When access to information is restricted not by paywalls but by previous interactions, likes, purchases, and browsing habits; when we are trained to favor the ease of the set menu over the adventure of the à la carte, we steadily lose agency over the inputs that shape our understanding of the world. As communication scholar Michelle Amazeen said of a 2024 report on media literacy education in the US, “Just when we need trusted information more than ever, our media ecosystem is poised for a tsunami of deliberately false content intended to mislead, supercharged by the use of generative artificial intelligence”[2] — what the New York Times described as “the ability to create talking digital puppets,”[3] and the Guardian as “disinformation on steroids.”[4]

As early as 2017, David Lankes, Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas, said “unless there is an increased effort to make true information literacy a part of basic education, there will be a class of people who can use algorithms and a class used by algorithms.”[5] The goal of POEM, then, is to curate and provide access to teaching and learning materials that can help students gain the skills not only to understand the contemporary knowledge landscape but to critically evaluate it, take control of their own engagement with it, and work within it as informed actors rather than passive consumers.

POEM is an open educational resource, or set of resources, in English and in Spanish, the content of which is licensed in a way that allows anyone to reuse, build upon, translate, and transform them to suit their classroom or their needs. The project is edited by a collective of 25 educators and librarians each responsible for curating and writing an overview of ten educational resources that help students understand the dimensions of a given keyword from a critical perspective.

Those keywords, which vary from authority to equity to ownership, are organizing concepts for the collection, and the open resources grouped under them may address any aspect of the keyword as it pertains to data and computation; media and misinformation; or algorithms and AI. A resource can be anything: an assignment, a rubric, a syllabus, an in-class exercise, a digital project, an executable notebook, a video or podcast… the goal is to provide a wide range of multimodal formats that allow for different learning and teaching styles and are adaptable for any kind of learning environment.

The call for resources is open through September 17, and contributors can submit their resource in English or in Spanish.

Footnote

Up until April this year, the Project on Open and Evolving Metaliteracies was funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Then came the swath of cancellations. This particular grant was designed to pay people for work that is usually uncompensated in the academy: writing, editing, peer review, and without it, I wasn’t comfortable asking them to volunteer a significant amount of time and expertise. Some members of the editorial collective chose to step away and I respect their decision and am grateful to have worked with them for a short time. And two-thirds of us have chosen to continue, not because we don’t believe in compensation or the essential nature of the IMLS (we absolutely do!))

Sources

[1] https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework

[2] https://www.bu.edu/com/articles/media-literacy-skills-important-to-counter-disinformation-survey-says/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/technology/artificial-intelligence-training-deepfake.html

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/ai-deepfakes-disinformation-election

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/02/08/theme-7-the-need-grows-for-algorithmic-literacy-transparency-and-oversight/