September has a way of making everything feel possible.
New classrooms. New students. New ideas. New technology. And, increasingly, new questions about what all that technology is actually doing for learning.
For the first episode of the new season of the ShiftED Podcast, we sit down with Adam Dubé, Associate Professor at McGill University and Director of the Technology, Learning & Cognition Lab, to ask a deceptively simple question: What does technology actually change about learning? It’s a particularly good question to ask as Québec educators head back to school.
The conversation around AI in education has become almost impossible to escape. Teachers are thinking about ChatGPT, assessment, academic integrity, privacy and AI literacy. School systems are trying to figure out where these technologies belong—and where they don’t. But Adam’s perspective is useful precisely because his work didn’t begin with ChatGPT. For years, he has been studying how children and adults learn with technology—from tablets and educational games to apps, digital assistants and now AI. The technology keeps changing. The learning doesn’t necessarily change with it.
And that’s where things get interesting.
Something can be engaging without being educational. Something can make a task easier without making someone a better learner.
Those distinctions sit at the heart of our conversation.
We talk about what happens when technology moves from being something children use to something that can actually talk back. What does a child think an AI knows? What happens when a machine can respond, adapt and sound remarkably confident—even when it’s wrong? We also get into the uncomfortable questions AI is forcing schools to confront. If a student can ask AI to write, explain, summarize or solve something, what exactly are we asking that student to learn? Is the problem really cheating—or are we discovering that some of our assessments weren’t particularly good measures of learning in the first place? For Québec teachers, these aren’t distant, theoretical questions. They’re showing up in classrooms right now. But Adam doesn’t offer a simple “AI is good” or “AI is bad” answer. Instead, his research points us back toward a much more useful question: Under what conditions does technology actually help someone learn?
That feels like the right question for September. Because the goal shouldn’t be to put more technology into classrooms. It should be to create better opportunities for students to think, struggle, explore, create, question and learn—and to know when technology genuinely helps them do those things.
As we begin a new season of ShiftED, that’s where we’re starting.
Not with the next big tool. With the learning. And maybe that’s the conversation education needs to have first.
https://www.mcgill.ca/education/adam-dube
Featured image: © Shutterstock
