Dr. Rupert Wegerif’s Keynote

Dialogic Education and Generative AI

That generative AI can outperform humans on many assessments should challenge us to rethink what we are doing in education. Students using GenAI to achieve targets in the current system are becoming less intelligent and more passive. But there are many ways of using GenAI that augment and expand intelligence. This talk argues that the advent of GenAI requires that we respond by developing a dialogic pedagogy which understands education as being about expanding shared dialogic space.

Drawing on The Theory of Educational Technology (Wegerif & Major, 2024) and Rethinking Educational Theory: Education as Expanding Dialogue (Wegerif, 2025), I argue via illustrations that AI should be used to help students think together with each other and with AI chatbots, getting them to ask better questions and make better evaluative decisions while at the same time equipping them with knowledge by inducting them into participation in long-term cultural dialogues. AI chatbots trained on vast datasets, potentially vetted data sets, can embody and give voice to the "dialogue so far"--what has been said in any given area of human endeavor--but the learning only happens when students dialogue with these cultural voices, engaging critically, refining prompts, and evaluating AI-generated responses.

Generative AI then is both a threat and an opportunity. If we do not change how we think about and assess education then using AI could reduce human intelligence and even make human beings seem increasingly irrelevant. If we respond to the challenge posed by rethinking what we are doing in education to turn all education into the expansion of dialogic space then this new AI has the potential to greatly increase intelligence, but a new kind of intelligence; human-AI collective intelligence.

About Dr. Rupert Wegerif

Dr. Rupert Wegerif is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and the founder and academic director of the Digital Education Futures Initiative at Hughes Hall, Cambridge (DEFICambridge.org). In the thirty years since his Ph.D. in educational technology at the Open University, he has focused on developing a new theory and practice of education for the digital age. His recent book with Louis Major, “The Theory of Educational Technology: A Dialogic Framework for Design” (Routledge, 2024) suggests ways to re-think education in the light of the AI-enhanced Internet and his latest book, “Rethinking Educational Theory: Education as expanding dialogue” (Edward Elgar, 2025) puts forward a coherent vision of education for the future.

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