Pre-Literate, Multi-Literate, Post-Literate: Expanding Horizons for LLMs

While digital technology (pre-GenAI) has been considered controversial as an enabler for preservation of First Nations cultural knowledge, AI is positioned to unleash new futures in ‘engineering of intelligent human-technology
ecosystems that support learning’. For researchers committed to honouring First
Nations culture and knowledge, Generative AI (GenAI) now needs to consider
how to support a ‘post-literate’ paradigm that weaves in the ‘pre-literate’. As society recognises the existential crises that result from the present consumption, the integration of old ways is crucial in our learning and our practice. The new frontiers of knowledge sharing in AI are looking at oral communication, a tool used at a highly sophisticated level by First Nations. The trajectories of change since the beginnings of the digital revolution demonstrate a broadening of accepted dimensions of literacy. This term is now co-opted in public discourse and appears alongside ‘media’, ‘information’, ‘financial’, ‘digital’, ‘data’, etc. The construct of ‘multi-literacies’ captures this. We consider why it is significant to honour the ‘pre-literate’ for the knowledge they bring, and to support them to engage beyond the multi-literacies of contemporary educational curricula with this post-literate environment. Simply, while much has been lost, it is the resilience of First Nations cultural knowledge that has made it survive. Moreover, there is the issue of first language and the knowledge it encodes. There is already plenty of debate concerning the biases that LLMs embed and lack of support for low resourced languages. What about the bias against first language knowledges? In this paper, we report on the efficacy and evolution of GenAI-assisted teaching and learning at a remote Australian University.