Keynote Speakers

Sonia Livingstone. The London School of Economics and Political Science (UK)

Keynote speech: Is there a right age for AI in education?

AI is being introduced into education at all stages, whether as a strategy, because students choose to use it, or simply because it is now embedded in existing educational technologies. At the time, there are growing doubts about students’ use of AI, on the grounds of learning, agency, safety, privacy or wellbeing. Some countries are setting age limits on when students can access AI. Some AI platforms are introducing their own age limits. So, is there a right age for AI in education? This lecture asks a seemingly simple question to open up a deeper set of questions about the purposes, benefits and risks of harm linked to AI in education. Drawing on a mix of social science and legal research, and focusing on school-aged children, I will invite reflection on what good looks like for AI in education, and how educators can navigate this fast-changing landscape of risky possibilities.

Workshop: What do children think of the educational technologies they use and why might it matter?

Children and teachers use a host of different kinds of educational technologies, for different reasons, in different ways, and with different outcomes. But students themselves are not often asked what they think of them. Indeed, in our recent workshops in the UK, conducted by the Digital Futures for Children centre, children were surprised to be asked, but very keen to tell us the answers! This workshop will take a child rights approach, which centres children’s experiences and voices in matters that affect them, as educational technologies definitely do. I will share some of the workshop resources and children’s responses, and invite workshop participants to reflect on what children can tell us and how we, as educators and researchers, might respond. The goal is to recognise the diverse student perspectives evoked by the same piece of technology, and the consequences for pedagogic and strategic choices about how such technologies are deployed in schools, and even some implications for better design and development of educational technologies from a user-centred perspective.

About Sonia Livingstone

Sonia Livingstone OBE FBA is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She has published 23 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” and Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six. Since founding the EC-funded “EU Kids Online” research network, followed by Global Kids Online with UNICEF, she has advised the UK government, Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF. Recent funding includes Medical Research Council and Huo Family Foundation research on youth mental health in digital contexts, Economic and Social Research Council research on family engagement with digital platforms, MacArthur Foundation for research on digital parenting, and European Commission for research on youth digital skills, on children’s online lives, and on age assurance. Her main focus is children’s rights in the digital environment, she is a member of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, and she leads the Digital Futures for Children centre at LSE with 5Rights Foundation.

Website: www.sonialivingstone.net

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Mutlu Cukurova. University College London (UK)

Keynote speech: From Replacement to Synergy: Human–AI Teaming in Education

Generative AI often improves what people produce. Whether it improves what they learn is a separate question, and the two can come apart. Recent studies show that AI assistance can raise performance on the task at hand while reducing persistence and independent performance once the assistance is withdrawn. In this keynote, Prof. Cukurova argues that the dominant replacement paradigm, in which AI does the cognitive work on the human's behalf, optimises the product rather than the person. He further argues that education has been evaluating human–AI collaboration with the wrong unit of analysis. Complementarity is usually judged by the quality of joint human–AI output, whereas in education what matters is the capability the human retains and develops. Judged by output alone, a system can appear successful while exhibiting what he terms “degenerate complementarity”, in which the quality of joint performance is maintained even as human competence atrophies. The talk introduces a five-level taxonomy of human–AI teaming, from transactional to synergistic, which distinguishes forms of AI use by how initiative, cognitive work and judgement are distributed between people and AI, and therefore by what each leaves teachers and learners able to do. Informed by ongoing experiments in which teachers give feedback under different levels of teaming, it closes with implications for task design, for how institutions evaluate AI, and for the human capacities that must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed.

Workshop: Building Expertise or Bypassing It? A Design Clinic on Human–AI Teaming

This hands-on workshop is the practical companion to the keynote. Participants work on a pedagogical task in an allocated level of human–AI teaming taxonomy. After they complete their interaction with the AI model, they try to diagnose the level at which the activity currently operates and who holds initiative and judgement at each step; identify where AI use risks substituting for their competence. The workshop suits educators at any level and in any discipline, and no technical background is required.

About Mutlu Cukurova

Mutlu Cukurova is Professor of Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London, where he directs the UCLAIT research group; he is also affiliated with the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on human–AI complementarity in education, asking how AI can be designed to strengthen rather than substitute for human learning, expertise and agency, and on multimodal learning analytics. He is Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Educational Technology, has over 200 peer-reviewed publications, and is named in Stanford University's top 2% scientists list in both Artificial Intelligence and Education. He works on AI-in-education policy with UNESCO, the OECD, the World Bank and the European Commission, and co-authored the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers.