The entry of artificial intelligence into schools is sparking a heated debate in the educational community. As was the case with the use of cell phones, which is still under discussion, the dominant attitude is hostile. The school has maintained essentially the same form for millennia. The teacher in the desk, with a blackboard, the students in the desks, with books they use mostly outside of school. Primary goal: to learn the alphanumeric language thoroughly. Of course, this is a simplification; school has always been the teacher of life, the place where so-called soft skills, deep personal and social skills, are consolidated. Moreover, there have been different, highly advanced and innovative schools for centuries, and, especially for younger students, various forms of reorganization of the school space have been experimented with, also in search of an evolution of the relationship between teacher and student.
Digital technologies have been widely introduced into schools for decades, but the most common form of education still remains that of frontal teaching in the classroom and the book for individual study at home: the use of screens instead of blackboards and tablets instead of notebooks has so far not revolutionized the paradigm.
Artificial intelligence, coupled with virtual and augmented reality, could disrupt the traditional pattern of the classroom, and impose new relational and spatial models, radically redefining the role of the teacher, student activities and the educational experience itself.
The presence of artificial intelligence in the classroom, since AI is not present in nature, but usable through digital devices, occurs as we know through technological devices that enable its fruition in various ways, including that offered by the recent introduction in education of extended reality viewers.
At present, AI looms as a cumbersome “stone guest” that is entering the school to stay there: it becomes necessary, therefore, to imagine the new forms of the school “extended to artificial intelligence.” And then we will have to ask how AI relates to the teacher, how it is to be used by students, how it is to be integrated into teaching technologies. And the answers must first of all consider that schooling is aimed at the growth of human intelligence, but that this intelligence, in the age of artificial intelligence, must change form…it must “extend.” Therefore, it is essential to change paradigm in the pedagogy of the near future, devising novel teaching methodologies and interactions of the same with new technologies, which include AI and use it, but which are at the base inspired by and aimed at the protection and enhancement or extension of human intelligence.
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