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Scott Sommers's avatar

The post doesn't mention Taiwan, which also has huge investment into AI. At my daughter's public school, they have computer classes that have access to a government AI education platform. They are actively taught how to use it. But that's a class in the school. Otherwise, phones are forbidden on school property. If there's a problem or emergency, I have to call the school. This is standard across the region. I'm not sure how well that would go over in the USA. But more significantly, like South Korea, there is huge investment in education. The math curriculum is extremely well thought out, and schools guard access to all kinds of activities. It's not just a matter of money. Schools are this way because voters think it is important. I'm not sure that anything like these Asian experiments is possible in the USA.

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Scott Tuffiash's avatar

Also wanted to add the UNESCO main source for "shared memories" - https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/future-collective-memory-preserving-past-digital-age?hub=1081

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Steve Covello's avatar

I appreciate the measures you have undertaken to know how the rest of the world is apprehending AI in education. It is not surprising to me that Asian countries approach this problem from a collective philosophy and that America leaves everyone to figure it out on their own.

In a recent essay, I have proposed that we break down the use of AI in education into two domains of assessment: Reflective Thinking and Proficiency. The proficiency aspect is well-covered in your article. However, I feel that learners need to pre-establish an objective awareness that using AI is form of transaction with a fluent entity. We may assume that learners position themselves as controlling agents of AI by virtue of repeated use, but that may not be self-evident without metacognitive orientation. I argue that initial engagement with AI requires a reflection component that self-assesses learners' position as a user (controller) prior to scaffolding their ability to, say, meta-prompt, elicit chain of thought, or make comparisons of different AI systems.

In other words, reflection as a user is an emphasis on *the nature of engagement itself* more so than on the output of engagement. Yes, there is overlap between these two assessment approaches, but I propose that one precedes the other:

"Why do we assess reflection in an AI-infused assignment and not proficiency?

Is assessing learners’ position in a transaction with AI more important than their ability to master using it?"

https://stevecovello.substack.com/p/why-do-we-assess-reflection-in-an

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Scott Tuffiash's avatar

How much poetry have your read from Korean poets and writers? I appreciate your observation and agree overall, but as a US ELA teacher who has worked with international collaboration since 2010, the core problem we are all facing is hiding within the systematic order you noticed and is in many ways true to tech adoption across Asia and across the globe. In all of our educational locations, we are within a business-driven product adoption push that is, at best, just shifting access and profit margin of "shared memories" from a wider distribution model and revenue stream to a less-wide distribution model and different revenue stream. Please do not file that observation under "moral panic" - instead, consider purely the economic access to "memory", then a reflection on the daily life of people as expressed within the writers someone might read or encounter in an ELA HS classroom in the US.

https://wordswithoutborders.org/contributors/view/kim-sung-min/

I used the story above with the 10th class in 2023-2024 for our too-fast move through Korea, past, and South and North Korea, present. Not comprehensive, but a good introduction into a land split in many ways, with older technology so distant from natural language processing but still living a daily life where shared memory is essential to a person's sense of self, community, place, purpose, and hope.

Glad you posted this - super helpful commentary from you and you're in somewhat of a unique position to observe and note all of this.

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Nick Potkalitsky's avatar

Thanks for the recommendation—I'll look into this writer. Your thoughts on shared memories really struck me. I'm increasingly wary of narratives that reduce technological progress to corporate exploitation and data harvesting. Yes, the internet's emergence was economically driven, like other educational transformations. But it has also created something approaching a digital commons, giving students research capabilities and access to information that previous generations couldn't have imagined.

The data-sharing question cuts to the heart of this tension. We're operating within a fundamentally unbalanced system where corporations extract enormous value from our collective digital activity. Yet this same system has democratized access to knowledge in ways that genuinely empower students and researchers. The challenge isn't choosing between these realities—it's figuring out how to preserve the benefits while addressing the asymmetries.

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