Open Education Speaker to Discuss Environmental Impacts of Generative AI
AggieOpen Invited Speaker Series Celebrates Open Education Week
Join us for this virtual event!
Tuesday, March 5 at 11:00am PST
Each Open Education Week, the AggieOpen team brings distinguished educators to share their research and work promoting a more equitable educational experience for students in higher education through the use of openly licensed learning materials.* The AggieOpen program collaborates with departments and programs across the UC Davis campus to feature internal and external speakers for our Open Education Invited Speaker Series.
Topics address important issues in Open Education and offer speakers the opportunity to share their research with a broad audience.
2024 Invited Speaker
The UC Davis Library’s AggieOpen program is thrilled to host Open Education Librarian & Assistant Professor Marco Seiferle-Valencia as our invited speaker for 2024. Professor Marco Seiferle-Valencia will present “AI Spring: Generative AI, Open Education, and Climate Catastrophe” on Tuesday, March 5th, at 11:00 am PST via Zoom.
While AI promises to revolutionize many fields, including education, this technology’s unsustainable carbon footprint and other devastating ecological impacts mean that revolutionary progress is far from guaranteed. In fact, the rapid, widespread adoption of energy and resource-hungry AI invites revolutionary regression. This talk discusses the environmental impacts of generative AI by examining the often hidden ecological costs of these new tools and asks how we, as open practitioners, can ensure the burgeoning collaboration between AI tools and open education serves learners, teachers, and the environment.
About the Speaker
Marco Seiferle-Valencia serves as the University of Idaho’s Open Education Librarian. He grew up in Northwest New Mexico, in the shadow of many ongoing ecological disasters stemming from coal power production, fracking, and uranium production. His areas of research interest include social and environmental justice, education as a vehicle for personal and social liberation, and community archives, particularly those with a BIPOC focus.
About the Invited Speaker Series
The program is sponsored by the UC Davis Library as part of our commitment to supporting scholarship in Open Education.
For questions, contact us at aggieopen@ucdavis.edu.
*Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and carry legal permission for open use. For more information about openly licensed educational resources and the AggieOpen program can be found on our website.