A Paradigm Shift for AI in Education

I’ve been thinking about something that’s shifted my perspective on AI in education. What if we’re approaching this all wrong? What if, instead of seeing AI as a tool we use in education (like we use a calculator, laptop or a whiteboard), we thought of it as a medium through which education happens (like how we use language or mathematics)?

Think about how we use language in education – it’s not just a tool for conveying information, it’s the medium through which understanding emerges. We don’t just use language; we think through it, create with it, develop within it. The same goes for mathematics – it’s not just a tool for calculation, but a medium for understanding and expressing relationships, patterns, and logic.

So what happens when we start thinking about AI the same way?

First, it changes how we approach integration. Instead of asking “How can we use AI to achieve this learning objective?”, we might ask “How does learning transform when it exists within an AI-mediated space?”

This shift has a few implications:

Instead of AI being something we deploy at specific moments (like for feedback or assessment), it becomes part of the learning environment itself – affecting how we think, create, and understand.
The focus moves from AI’s capabilities to how it changes the nature of learning itself. Just as writing transformed how we think and remember (compared to oral traditions), AI might fundamentally alter how we process and create knowledge.
Rather than worrying about students using AI to “cheat,” we’d focus on developing fluency in thinking and creating within this new medium. After all, we don’t accuse students of “cheating” when they use language to express something more succinctly or more eloquently.

If AI is a medium, then like any medium, it shapes not just what we can do, but how we think about what’s possible. Just as the invention of writing made possible new ways of thinking and organizing knowledge, AI might enable entirely new forms of understanding and creation.

This means my project would need to explore:

How does AI as a medium change what we consider knowledge?
What new forms of expression and understanding become possible?
How do we develop “AI literacy” not just as a skill set, but as a way of thinking and being?
What happens to creativity when AI becomes part of our thinking process rather than just a tool we use?

We might need to rethink not just how we teach, but what we teach and why. Just as we don’t primarily teach writing as a tool but as a medium for thought and expression, we might need to approach AI education differently. This isn’t about AI replacing human thought – just as writing didn’t replace thinking but transformed how we think. It’s about understanding AI as a new medium through which human thought and creativity can express itself in previously impossible ways.