Plenary Sessions
OPENING PLENARY
AI as a Catalyst for Education Reform, In Ways You Might not Expect!
Tuesday, Dec 1
10:00-11:00am
Central Time
We talk endlessly about AI in education, usually about chatbots, marking, and lesson planning. Useful stuff, but it’s the obvious layer. This plenary looks underneath that.
The real story isn’t AI as a tool we bolt onto the system we already have; it’s AI as the thing that quietly exposes how much of that system was built for a world that no longer exists. Education was designed for an age of knowledge scarcity, when the job was to get information into heads. AI has flipped that economics. When knowledge is abundant, judgement becomes scarce. When output is easy, originality becomes scarce. That shift doesn’t just change how we teach, it changes what’s worth assessing, what skills actually matter, and where the human in the loop genuinely adds value.
Al Kingsley, MBE
CLOSING PLENARY
Beyond "Sounds Good": Building Skeptical AI Literacy by Inviting Students to Question AI Feedback
Wednesday, Dec 2
1:30-2:20pm
Central Time
As AI systems grow more sophisticated, it’s harder to notice when they’re wrong. Students need practice questioning AI as they seek to define their own purpose and make their own judgments. How do we build that habit?
This plenary shares an approach that invites students to engage with AI writing feedback alongside human feedback. Drawing on the Peer & AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR) project, a collaboration centered at the University of California, Davis and funded by the California Education Learning Lab, Mills will show how strategically designed prompts, follow-up chat strategies, and reflective assignments help students practice evaluating AI suggestions against their own purposes, pushing back when they disagree, and using AI as a stimulus for their own thinking. When students engage critically with AI feedback, they’re building a habit that will serve them wherever AI shows up in their lives.
Anna Mills