A sociotechnical imaginary of generative AI in education for cognitive collaboration
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/reec.48.2025.45379Keywords:
Sociotechnical imaginaries, artificial intelligence, tools for cognition, cognitive tools, activity theory, critical thinking, educational policyAbstract
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (gAI) in education is causing great interest. Organizations such as the European Union, UNESCO and the OECD are creating reference documents and guidelines to facilitate the integration of these applications at the education policy level but also at the classroom level. These documents contain ideological conceptions of how this technology is understood in education – the socio-technical imaginaries. Artificial intelligence can be understood as a technology designed to replace the teacher, with tutorial functions and the personalization of teaching -a conception of learning from the digital technology-, or understood as a tool for cognition (TFC), with which to have a cognitive collaboration -a conception of learning with the technology, which derives from the sociocultural theory and the activity theory. The aim of this research is to present this second perspective and analyze how the documents created by these organizations promote this sociotechnical imaginary of generative AI as a tool for cognition -TFC-, a vision of student empowerment and critical thinking versus the vision of AI as a merely tutorial technology. Four documents from different organizations (European Union, UNESCO and OECD) have been analyzed qualitatively using deductive and inductive coding. The results show that the view of distributed cognition appears in all the documents analyzed, which point out a change in the teaching roles based on the distribution of person-gAI tasks, with a human leading role, but with a risk of cognitive skills loss. The need to promote teaching and learning scenarios to foster students' critical capacity is mentioned, but it is hardly specified how to carry it out. Thus, the integration of gAI applications in education for a cognitive collaboration and for critical thinking is at stake if the uses of gAI as TFC are not clearly elicited in these documents.
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