AI as Literacy: Rethinking How We Prepare Campus Communities for an AI-Native World

Speaker: Doug Langille

Institutions are treating AI adoption as a software problem: procure, deploy, train, repeat. It's a familiar playbook and it's producing familiar results. People complete the training, return to their desks, and keep working the way they always have. AI isn't another tool in the stack. It's becoming a baseline cognitive competency that shapes how people find information, structure thinking, and produce knowledge. Treating it like a feature rollout means you'll keep solving for the wrong thing.

This session makes the case that digital fluency frameworks need to be rebuilt around AI literacy as a first-order concern, not an appendix to an acceptable use policy. Drawing on three years of documented practice, we'll examine what AI literacy actually looks like in context, why mindset and identity shift matter more than tool proficiency, and why IT departments are positioned to lead that conversation rather than just service-desk it.

This is not about prompt engineering. It's about institutional readiness for a shift that's already underway and won't wait for the next strategic planning cycle.

Learning Objectives:

  • A working distinction between AI as tool adoption and AI as literacy shift, with language to bring that argument to academic and administrative stakeholders
  • Three concrete ways IT departments can lead, not just support, campus AI literacy initiatives
  • A literacy-first lens for auditing current AI programs, policies, and training efforts at their institution

Speaker Bio:

Doug Langille (he/him) is Manager of Digital Innovation, Staff Training and Development at Nova Scotia Community College, where he leads Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment, faculty AI adoption, and the eternal institutional question of whether we can just use Excel for this. With 25 years at NSCC and a front-row seat to every wave of workplace technology, he brings a practitioner's honesty to conversations about AI integration and digital change. He publishes Digital Doug weekly on AI in practice, productivity systems, and higher-ed innovation: documenting the experiments, the failures, and the occasional wins. No thought leadership theater. Just the rubber meeting the road.