Prof. Sangmin Michelle Lee
Kyung Hee University, South Korea
From Tool to Partner: Co-evolving with AI in Education
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), AI technologies have increasingly been integrated into classroom contexts. Accordingly, a growing body of research has examined the impacts of AI on human learning, reporting mixed and sometimes controversial findings. Despite these debates, AI has become unavoidable in education. Rather than questioning whether AI should be used, there is an urgent need to explore how educators and learners can effectively benefit from AI and co-evolve with it.
AI offers a range of pedagogical benefits. It can support learners in acquiring new concepts, brainstorming ideas, accessing diverse perspectives, and improving work efficiency. Moreover, AI enables personalized learning tailored to individual learners’ needs and knowledge levels—an affordance that has long been difficult to achieve in traditional classroom settings. Recent studies further suggest that AI can foster higher-order thinking skills, including creativity, which has traditionally been regarded as a uniquely human trait.
From a computational creativity perspective, students can enhance creativity with AI by recombining existing ideas in novel ways (combinational creativity), exploring conceptual spaces to generate new possibilities (exploratory creativity), or producing fundamentally new ideas (transformative creativity). In this process, AI can function as a cognitive partner or creative collaborator, serving as a more knowledgeable peer within the learner’s zone of proximal development. This presentation introduces research projects that illustrate how students can collaborate and co-evolve with AI while maintaining human agency, and it also discusses potential limitations and risks associated with AI use in education.