Josef recognition mirror — Read transcript
Automatically transcribed from the recording; some words may need correction.
There's a question I keep coming back to: if a student can ask AI a question and receive a perfectly competent answer in seconds, what exactly are we developing? Because so much of education has been built around producing the answer, the essay, the analysis, the solution. And suddenly, the output doesn't necessarily tell us very much about what happened inside the learner. That's what brought me into dialogic. I started exploring the idea of intellectual agency. Not whether somebody can produce an intelligent response, but whether they can think, question, judge, recognise weak evidence, develop a position, change their mind for a reason, know when AI is helping their thinking and when it's replacing it. Then I tried the feature argue, and I could see a completely different relationship with AI emerging. Instead of asking it to write an argument, I had to develop the claim, find evidence, defend why I'd chosen it, notice assumptions in my reasoning. The AI could challenge me, but it couldn't do the intellectual work for me. That distinction feels increasingly important, because perhaps we've been measuring the visible product of education when what actually matters is the capacity developing underneath it. curiosity, reasoning, discernment, independence, the ability to remain with uncertainty, the capacity to create something genuinely your own. So now I'm thinking about curriculum differently, assessment differently, even what we mean by progress. What would happen if we designed a module around the development of the learner and measured the academic work alongside that? I don't think we have the answers yet. That's what makes this interesting. Generative AI hasn't just created a new tool for education, it has exposed a much deeper question. When intelligence is available on demand, what kinds of human beings should education help us become?