"AI in Education: Fostering Dialogue to Placate Fear"

Research Lab Seminar 1: AI in Education: Fostering Dialogue to Placate Fear

The topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been setting academia alight and consuming most educational forums and conversations for the last two years now. Although AI in itself is nothing new, the ways in which it has infiltrated daily educational practices, affected the way we look at pedagogically sound endeavors, and potentially changed students' views on what 'learning' is and how it should be responsibly framed have been overwhelming. In the recent TESOL International Convention, AI was the focus of many presentations and discussions, and although there were no definitive answers to all that it entails, the vibrant dialogue about it has proved to be a healthy and productive one. As students all over the world have been intensely exposed to AI's myriad possibilities, educators have promptly immersed themselves into the current discussion to understand and boost their own AI literacy, enhance engineering proficiency, and more than ever, ensure that robust critical thinking skills will keep the transformative aspects of this new reality in check (Walter, 2024). At the core of such a quest to understand and master AI should be the notion that seeing it as an ally (not a threat) might be the inevitable and wiser route to overcome the fear and anxiety many feel about its unquestionable power. Yet, many questions arise about the ethical elements of AI, the need to constantly evaluate its use, and how to draw an ethics-oriented line between the acceptance of this new reality while devising strategies to foster pedagogically sound practices and critical thinking opportunities for students. It's fair to say that, amidst the many questions and proposed discussions AI has generated, the best approach to it is one of a solid exchange of views and gathering of "a holistic and trustworthy picture" (Walter, 2024, p. 2) of its use in education. The proposed seminar aims at looking at different angles of the AI spectrum in the higher education realm, and if not necessarily producing answers to all the many inquiries it has been triggering (there are no definitive ones one may envision for now) at least exchange and foster a diverse range of perspectives on it.