Keynote Address: Friend, Tool, or Trouble? Striking a Balance with AI in the Classroom.
Location
Universal Center
Start Date
28-5-2025 10:45 AM
End Date
28-5-2025 12:00 PM
Description
Are we, as higher education instructors, like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory, mistaking the shadows of traditional pedagogy for the true potential of learning? For too long, many of us have believed that we knew what education should look like and that we, the professoriate, should unilaterally determine our students’ learning needs and outcomes. However, Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming our understanding of pedagogy, especially in higher education, presenting us, higher education instructors, with a critical choice in how we integrate this powerful technology. Should AI be positioned as a Teacher, a directive force that risks confining students within predetermined learning pathways – strengthening the chains of standardized curricula and limited perspectives that bind them to the cave of conventional learning? Or can AI evolve into a Friend, a collaborative partner that fosters student agency and empowers students as co-creators and allies in their own education as they move toward the essence of knowledge and genuine understanding? This shift requires us to confront the AI paradox: while students now have more access to knowledge than ever before, critical thinking only emerges when they experience productive friction with AI—when the shadows cast by its easy fluency provoke deeper questioning, reflection, and intellectual resistance that can lead them, at last to a Foe, a powerful agonist, that will, eventually lead them, and us, out of the cave.
Recommended Citation
Kassoria, Michelle and Novokshanova,, Eugenia Ph.D., "Keynote Address: Friend, Tool, or Trouble? Striking a Balance with AI in the Classroom." (2025). Teaching and Learning with AI Conference Presentations. 13.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/teachwithai/2025/wednesday/13
Keynote Address: Friend, Tool, or Trouble? Striking a Balance with AI in the Classroom.
Universal Center
Are we, as higher education instructors, like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory, mistaking the shadows of traditional pedagogy for the true potential of learning? For too long, many of us have believed that we knew what education should look like and that we, the professoriate, should unilaterally determine our students’ learning needs and outcomes. However, Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming our understanding of pedagogy, especially in higher education, presenting us, higher education instructors, with a critical choice in how we integrate this powerful technology. Should AI be positioned as a Teacher, a directive force that risks confining students within predetermined learning pathways – strengthening the chains of standardized curricula and limited perspectives that bind them to the cave of conventional learning? Or can AI evolve into a Friend, a collaborative partner that fosters student agency and empowers students as co-creators and allies in their own education as they move toward the essence of knowledge and genuine understanding? This shift requires us to confront the AI paradox: while students now have more access to knowledge than ever before, critical thinking only emerges when they experience productive friction with AI—when the shadows cast by its easy fluency provoke deeper questioning, reflection, and intellectual resistance that can lead them, at last to a Foe, a powerful agonist, that will, eventually lead them, and us, out of the cave.