Stephen Downes

As Nick Potkalitsky writes, "Study after study warns that students who rely on AI tools experience diminished critical thinking skills, reduced cognitive engagement, and what researchers term 'cognitive offloading'". I've mentioned some here in OLDaily. However, as Potkalitsky writes, "The cognitive offloading critique rests on a historical fiction: the autonomous learner, working in productive isolation, building cognitive muscle through solo effort. This student never existed, or existed only for the few." Another way to put it is that "Students have always learned through assistance. From peers, from teachers, from resources, from the structured support of the classroom environment itself." Instead, he writes, "Owen Matson offers a fundamentally different framework. In Beyond Augmentation: Toward a Posthumanist Epistemology for AI and Education, he argues that we're witnessing not the addition of a tool but 'a shift in the epistemic conditions under which learning takes place.'" Specifically, "When we frame AI assistance as cognitive offloading to be resisted, we're making a choice: preserve the purity of unassisted struggle for students who've never had assistance in the first place, while students who've always had extensive support continue to benefit from it." Do read this one.