This year’s 2025 European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) hosted in Bamberg, Germany featured an international panel that presented on Humans in the Loop: Advancing Metaliteracy for Generative AI Learning Environments. The presentaton took place on Tuesday, September 23, 2025 and explored how metaliteracy provides a holistic framework for responding to the global opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI).
Framed around the idea of learners as “humans in the loop” (Wu, et. al., 2022), the session highlighted diverse case studies that offered practical strategies for empowering individuals to engage with AI critically, ethically, and collaboratively.
Representing the team in person were Matt Moyo (North-West University, South Africa), Kristine N. Stewart (Zayed University, United Arab Emirates), and Tom Mackey (Empire State University, USA), (all pictured above). The panel also drew on the important contributions of Brenda Van Wyk (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Megan Eberhardt-Alstot (Pepperdine Graduate School of Education and Psychology, USA), and Kristen Schuster (University of Southampton, UK).
The case studies showcased during the session reflected a wide range of perspectives and areas of inquiry, including Generative AI and the Metaliterate Learner, Responsible Use of AI in Postgraduate Research, Misrepresentation in AI, Inclusive Curriculum Design, and the Ethics of AI in Digital Media Arts. Together, these themes underscored the value of metaliteracy as a framework for engaging with AI while emphasizing the human capacity for metacognitive reflection, ethical responsibility, and collaborative knowledge construction.
As part of her Information Literacy Weblog, Sheila Webber blogged about our session: Humans in the Loop: Advancing Metaliteracy for Generative AI Learning Environments.
The conference also featured a second panel related to AI and Metaliteracy based on a paper co-authored by the IPILM Project Team, entitled “Combining Information Literacy and Metaliteracy to Advance Transnational Group Learning about AI. Learning Process and Learning Outcomes, Results from a Case Study.”
If you would like to share your own explorations with AI and Metaliteracy, feel free to reach out to us and we would be happy to share via our Metaliteracy.org blog.
Tom and Trudi
Reference
Wu, X., Xiao, L., Sun, Y., Zhang, J., Ma, T., & He, L. (2022). A survey of human-in-the-loop for machine learning. Future Generation Computer Systems, 135, 364–381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2022.05.014
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