AI in Education: Why Learning Isn't Supposed to Be Easy

Nobody likes to struggle, but what do we lose when every answer is just a click away?

As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt and transform classrooms, new questions are emerging. What’s the best way for students to learn? Why does struggle matter in the learning process? And happens when technology eliminates the struggle? In this episode of Speaking Of... College of Charleston, Ian O’Byrne, associate professor in the School of Education, answers these questions and discusses the future of learning in an AI-driven world. 

In This Episode

• Why learning isn't supposed to be effortless
• The promise and pitfalls of AI in education
• What AI-powered schools like Alpha School are getting right—and wrong
• The growing debate over cognitive offloading and whether AI is changing how we think
• The difference between the “orchestrator” and the “outsourcer” when using AI
• Why great teachers still matter in an age of artificial intelligence
• How students can thrive in an AI-driven future

Featured Guest

Ian O'Byrne, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the School of Education at the College of Charleston. His research focuses on digital literacy, artificial intelligence, online reading comprehension, emerging technologies and education. He works with educators and students to better understand how technology can support meaningful learning while preserving the human elements that help people grow and succeed. 

Resources

• Read Ian O’Byrne’s article in The Conversation: AI Schools Promise Efficiency, but Can't Replicate the Messy Process That Helps Kids Learn 
• Learn more about Ian's work at wiobyrne.com 
• Explore more episodes of Speaking Of... College of Charleston on the College of Charleston podcast page

Transcript

Speaking Of Ian O’Byrne

Thu, Jul 16, 2026 2:34PM • 28:26

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Digital literacy, AI in education, cognitive dissonance, ChatGPT, AI-powered schools, Alpha schools, just-in-time learning, cognitive offloading, teacher roles, AI integration, educational struggle, student motivation, AI tools, educational technology, human-AI balance.

SPEAKERS

amy stockwell, Ian O'Byrne, Speaker 1

amy stockwell  00:00

Welcome to another episode of Speaking of College of Charleston. I'm Amy Stockwell from University Communications, and today I'm here with Ian O'Beirne, who is a associate professor in the School of Education. And Ian is here to talk about his research in digital literacy and artificial intelligence, and specifically his recent article in the conversation, and the article is called "AI Schools Promise Efficiency, but Can't Replace the Messy Process That Helps Kids Learn. So, thanks for coming in, Ian. Again, this is your second or third visit to our studio. I'm getting

Ian O'Byrne  00:38

used to this. Yeah.

amy stockwell  00:39

So, as as someone who spent decades studying digital literacy, when did you notice a major shift in AI?

Ian O'Byrne  00:50

It's so my initial work in in literacy and technology. It was a middle school, high school English teacher using computers in the classroom. I think I talked about this before in the earlier podcast. Like pre Google, I was trying to figure out how can my students, you know, have a paperless writing system. And then we started the we saw the advent of Google. I remember when the special ed teacher in my team introduced me to it. You

amy stockwell  01:18

remember the advent of Google. I remember I was sitting there one day. You've been around that long teaching

Ian O'Byrne  01:23

eighth grade students, and then a colleague was like, "Look at this site! Like it's it's weird. It's all white. And I and I was like, "How do you pronounce that? Like Google? Like what kind of name is that? And then we saw you know Google Docs and different writing systems. I started doing work in, you know, at the local public television station, teaching teachers and other people how to use digital tools. I was an Intel master teacher and taught people like Microsoft Word, as if we don't we need that anymore. You know, and slowly I started doing more and more work in online reading comprehension and trying to figure out what does the internet look like, what does it mean when we move from print to pixel. All along, I realized that there were signals and algorithms and messages and data that were behind the scenes, informing what we do and where we go. And it really wasn't until and I knew that machine learning was a thing. I knew that artificial intelligence was a thing, mostly a lot of like my sci-fi reading and stuff like that. But it wasn't until ChatGPT was launched by accident about four years ago that we've really seen it drastically impact all of society. The truth, right? Because AI'S

amy stockwell  02:40

been around for a long time, like you say, it's been around for a long time. But it only-I

Ian O'Byrne  02:44

mean, it's been paying attention to like your your Netflix queue and your Amazon queue, and it's informing what you do. But now we have the opportunity where we can do something with it, and we can create with these tools.

amy stockwell  02:56

Yeah, yeah, okay. So in the article and the conversation, you write that struggle and frustration are essential parts of learning. I'm jumping right into the article, and so I would love to know what that looks like. Can you give me an example of what the struggle in learning looks like?

Ian O'Byrne  03:14

Well, I think it's you know sometimes we we want you know our our children have like struggle-free lives, but really, you know, and and I present it in the piece. But a lot of the the research suggests that some of the best things that we learn are through struggle. You know, there's this idea in Ed Psych that you know we really learn through cognitive dissonance. We learn through the idea through the basically having two completely different ideas in her head at the same time, and so that cognitive struggle-you know-that that trying to figure out hard things is sometimes where the best learning happens. And so I think there's a couple things that that happen here. One is that you see parents and companies they want to eliminate the struggle; they want to take work out of the system, and we see this happening with technology elsewhere. You know, we see this happen with you know years ago. We would think that it is ridiculous to have to to use an app and you know push a couple buttons and have a stranger come pick you up in their car and drive you someplace else. And now it's standard practice. But we think about different ways in life, in technological advances, that we want to like filter out or hide the work that happens. We want to send the work elsewhere, and that's one of the issues with the data center discussion right now. And so, with with education, I think there's the belief that education doesn't know what they're doing, our schools don't know what they're doing, and we should be able to like code out or develop a situation that makes it a lot easier and a lot more streamlined. The challenge is that most of that struggle, a lot of that struggle, is where we learn, but also. We ignore the social aspect of it. We ignore the fact that students learn from adults. They learn from their peers. They learn just by, you know, bumping and bruising and and trying to figure out things along the way.

amy stockwell  05:13

And I understand that 100% And and I've experienced struggle in my own life that has taught me a tremendous amount. But I I wonder if that's not a hard argument to make that will convince people. You know, like I'm sure there's research out there that that shows struggling, learning through struggling versus not struggling, and that's what. But but I worry that that's like not a strong enough argument to convince the powers to be to reduce the amount of AI that we have in schools. You know, like I I could think there's people easily arguing on the other side of like, well, we don't need struggle and whatever.

Ian O'Byrne  05:55

Well, there's a couple things. One is like if you are a parent of a child and you see your kid struggling with something, you're for the most part going to do anything that you possibly can to step in and remediate or advocate for your child.

Speaker 1  06:09

Right.

Ian O'Byrne  06:09

And so, if you have a child that's struggling at something, you probably don't want to hear someone like me saying that struggle is a good thing. Right. And keep in mind, we're we're talking about general forms of like educational struggles. You know, having students. You know, there's a one of the the schools of thought is should we be having kids in K 12, and I would say also kids in higher ed deal with and look at wicked problems. Should they think about things like climate change and take their time to think about that, or food insecurity. Should they think about those really problematic, thorny questions in K 12 and in in higher ed? I would say yes. And so we're when we think about struggle, yes, there are students that need accommodations and modifications. Yes, there are students that are in at risk situations. Yes, there's kids that are, you know, dealing in you know less than adequate schools. I think what we're talking about is on a general everyday basis. Should we try to optimize everything about the the the human interactions? You know, if you think about our own lives, if you think about your life, would you have wanted someone or some system or some process that could have like optimized things and get you through the rough spots, or do you feel like you needed to go through those spots to learn and grow and become who you are?

amy stockwell  07:34

Yeah, yeah, I remember back in when my middle son was in elementary school, he was just super smart about math, and he could look at a math problem and just tell me the answer. And but he always would get notes back from the teacher saying, "Show me your work. Show me your work. Show me your work. And and it was you know it was hard to explain that to him at seven years, eight years old, whatever, because he knew it. He's like, "Well, I know it. Why do I have to show my work? And that's that's that process part that that yeah, we're like skipping right over. AI is helping us skip right over.

Ian O'Byrne  08:11

And another piece of it is that there is yes, our teachers are overworked. Yes, they're understaffed. They're not paid what they're worth. And so one of the areas that AI could be a helpful benefit is that just-in-time learning. You know, so the the teacher, if they have 30-five kids in the room, that that you could have an AI bot or a tutor that can step in and support that one student exactly when they need it, or help explain to a child that is more math friendly. You know what does this mean in language arts, or make connections across what they learn and be more fine tuned with that.

amy stockwell  08:46

That makes sense. Yeah. So what happens then if if students are and can get answers immediately from AI? What happens to their motivation to figure? I mean, that's a hard argument for me to make with my own kids. Like, what happens to their motivation to to figure it out the long way, the old way? The field right

Ian O'Byrne  09:08

now is looking at you know cognitive offloading. Basically, this idea that if I continue to ask AI to do certain jobs for me or to do certain tasks for me, then you know we're seeing a replay of the "Is Google making us dumber" Debate that we had 20 years ago, and so there's this belief that if I keep having AI do different jobs and tasks for me, then I'll forget how to do them, and then I will you know be less intelligent or lazier or whatever. You know, you you basically can't get the work done. In my research, in different research that's coming out, what I look at is I have students in my classes here at CFC, and I had them use a AI tool to help them do their work and be a critical friend. And I basically scaffolded the thing all out, and I noticed two types of people in there: the the orchestrator and the outsourcer. So as you work with AI, as you use the tools, are you orchestrating? Are you basically telling it exactly what you wanted to do? Have it do it in finite chunks. Once it gets the work done, then you basically add it in. You push back a lot, so the human, you know, has all the agency in that. And then the outsourcer is the thing that's we've seen since the beginning of time. Just give me the answer. I'm going to give it to the teacher now, and then pass it on. So the the thought is okay, and not that one's good or bad, but which role, which profile are are we, you know, filling, and then also our students, you know, what's what's the purpose of the work? And sometimes, to be honest with you, we have work that seems a little bit menial. We have some paperwork that we have to turn in, and reports, and endless bureaucratic forms that we have to fill out, and we don't know if anybody watches them. Is that something that I would be happily happy to outsource? 100% But then also, there's other pieces that I want to make sure you know I can use in my own work. I can use AI as a cognitive amplifier. I can use it to push my thinking and organize my thinking, and help me keep me structured. But I also know when it's I'm losing my voice in it, and when the the machines are taking over.

amy stockwell  11:29

Yeah, yeah, I know, and it's a hard argument to make with our students and and with about about why they what the importance of doing it themselves, so to dive into the article a little bit more, you write about the growing number of AI-powered schools. So this is bigger than just students using ChatGPT on their laptops. What what what are these schools doing right, and and what are what are they missing? Schools like Alpha, right, is the most common or the most known.

Ian O'Byrne  12:06

So the big, the the most well known of them is the Alpha schools. You know what we're seeing is instead of you know if we look at AI integration in schools, let's say AI just in K 12, we're seeing there. There's a wide spectrum as to what AI integration means. It might be just an app that helps out. It might be an app that rides along. It might be an app that the teacher uses to create some rubrics. Then we have things like the Alpha School where they really flip the script, and most of the interactions are through AI, and so what they'll do is they'll have the students work with, you know, on the computer, work with technology, and it'll be very concise. So be a lot less time on the actual content, and then the idea is that they go off and do other exploratories around that. There are adults in the room. They're pretty much facilitators, and they're they're

amy stockwell  13:05

but they're not certified teachers or anything, right? I don't know

Ian O'Byrne  13:08

if they are, and it would be interesting to see if that would make a difference.

amy stockwell  13:13

And we should say too that schools like Alpha are private, right?

Ian O'Byrne  13:16

The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of them are, you know, private schools, and they're also pretty cost prohibitive. So you are paying a lot to send your kids there, and we see, you know, and I present it in the research in the piece. But then also we're seeing, you know, varying levels of types of schools like this. You know, there is a spectrum of what AI integration means, but also these types of schools, we're seeing different, you know, cost parameters with that. So I mean, one of the things that they do well is that you know they had that just-in-time support. They are the model should be quick to differentiate, change things for different learners. It the model should be able to pay attention to, you know, what the learner needs and be able to support them. One of the things is that we don't really know what the models are doing. You know, if you think about AI and the advances in just the general stuff that you and I use, we don't really know what it's doing. And so the model should be able to support them if we can streamline a lot of the day to help support students focus on their academics. That's absolutely wonderful. I mean, that in our own lives we look for work-life balance. What the model, what they also do well is that if there are other exploratories and get the kids out to other events. That's obviously helpful as well. One of the the biggest challenges is: Are we what are we optimizing for? You know, are we trying to get efficiency out of the model? I know as a parent, I know as an educator, there's not a lot of efficiency. Days so if there's an opportunity to bring that in, it's a value add. But we want to think about what are we trying to optimize and get out of the system to make things work more smoothly.

amy stockwell  15:10

Yeah, and and you teach students here at the College of Charleston. We have a fantastic school of education, and our students go out into the into the world once they graduate, and they're working in schools across the state and beyond. And so, I imagine conversations like this must, I would imagine, come up in class discussions. And so, what what do you say to the next generation of teachers to reinforce what a what a great what a great teacher can do that AI can't.

Ian O'Byrne  15:47

Yeah, I mean it's a great question. You know, I teach teachers here. I also work outside of here and and work with practicing teachers. Next week I'm going to talk to a bunch of practicing teachers, and the interesting thing is that it's a really it's always a challenging time to go into education, but it's really you know here in pre-service teacher ed, it's a challenge because my students hear from a lot of others on campus, and it's our institution is not unique in this regard. Hear from a lot of other people that AI is just bad. That you should stay away from AI. There's a lot of hype and hyperbole and hysteria and fear mongering, and so a lot of my students are terrified to use AI because they feel like we're. It seems like we're in a world now where if something is moderately good or seems moderately well thought out and polished, and you know we would say like it's pretty as a picture. I feel like now we're in this world world where if it's moderately good or moderately polished, then we automatically assume it's AI. We don't even stop at any other. It's just had to be AI, and so I wonder from a literacy perspective, do we start moving to a world where people purposefully make mistakes in the way that communicate and share information with other people, so they know that a human did it? And so, for teachers, our pre-service teachers, there many of them are terrified of using AI because other instructors have basically threatened them that they're going to be accused of cheating, and then they will be kicked out of the institution. Then, at the same time, for people that are going into education, there is a it's a double challenge. They're in double jeopardy because now K 12 doesn't really have a lot of guidance on what teaching and learning looks like. We don't know what the future is going to look like what we continue to see, and I talked a little bit about the piece. I talked about it in my newsletter and in in other writings. We need to have the human in the loop. We need to have that educator in the room. With the alpha schools, this last week we saw new news that you know, a lot of the people that can afford schools like the Alpha School, they're preferring to have like a balanced approach. They want to have rooms with AI in it. They want to have rooms with the computers and the the supervised differentiated learning, the quick access, the just in time learning. But they also want the humans there. They want the people there. There's a balance. We we see it happening, you know, elsewhere. That a good teacher can reach people. You know, a good teacher can make those connections. A good teacher can create those bonds and help learn along with students and inspire them. So one of the things that I suggest to my students is well with our current teachers, and this is one of the things I said at professional development in June is that what you've done previously still works. The what you know about teaching and learning, what you know about your students still works. It doesn't all go out the window because a new technology is here. What I also suggest is that we don't know what the future of technology is going to look like. So if there is this belief that everything has to be AI, or we have to just automatically assume that the people above our pay grade are making the right decisions, we've made that mistake in the past, we made the mistake in the past with one-to-one laptop initiatives. Most of them failed. We made the mistake where we would trust that we all need 600-dollar pieces of glass, you know, iPads in our rooms. A lot of that has gone out the window. Now the field is moving to yonder pouches and got all the cell phones.

amy stockwell  19:42

My son had that. That was ridiculous.

Ian O'Byrne  19:46

And that's the thing: is like we we in education in tech we should have learned lessons in the past, and if we repeat them again as AI comes in, we're we're missing another opportunity. So. I I try and press upon teachers that I work with just trust your gut. You know the learning theory. You know how to teach. You know how to work with students. You know how to work with youth. Whatever you can do to help that child succeed is the best case scenario. Continue to do that.

amy stockwell  20:16

Yeah, I I agree with that 100% And it just makes me think about how many people that you've talked to in a day to day, or that you talk to who who have a memory of a teacher in their life that was especially meaningful. I feel like everybody has that memory of like, oh yeah, my teacher back in eighth grade, it was fantastic and changed my life. And so I I do believe in what you're telling them.

Ian O'Byrne  20:38

And in many of those cases, it it happens almost there. Think about how much serendipity is involved in life. You know, think about how many times that you wanted to have this one teacher and you thought it would go horribly wrong, and then you accidentally were in that other eighth grade teacher's room, and then you made that bond and it changed your life forever. I don't think that we can just try and and work all the efficiency out of our lives, even though there's large part of this planet that wants to.

amy stockwell  21:03

Yeah, yeah, it's the messy stuff that's where the fun happens, where the learning happens.

Ian O'Byrne  21:09

That's what makes us human.

amy stockwell  21:10

And one thing that's incredible about you, as we're wrapping up here, is is how informed you stay. And you should see his website is amazing. So how do you? First, I want you to share how people can find out more about your work, but also how you're teaching a full load. You have children. You have your own life. How do you stay on top of all of this stuff that is moving at such a fast rate? Yeah,

Ian O'Byrne  21:34

it's. I now that we're in the summer, I'm trying to take time to refocus, and I always try to think about how can I make my work more approachable and accessible. How can I talk to normal people out there about this and try to make it make sense? And that's not easy to do. I think I've sort of carved out a niche where I can explain challenging subjects, and so I blog regularly. I'm at wioburn.com. We'll put that in our show notes. I'll put all the notes out there. I have a newsletter that basically week in week out unpacks what's happening, and the idea is just trying to make you know the newsletter began, the the the blogging and the website began in my PhD program. You know, we would have a website you'd have to put together as a doc student, and then I wondered why couldn't I just start thinking out loud on the website and just explain what I'm doing and why. And I think that some people found value in it, but it was helpful for me and had that sense of audience. The newsletter. As I was leaving the Northeast a decade ago now, I wanted to have a way to stay in touch with people because this was drastically changing. And so what I did is I just started writing a regular newsletter. There are friends of mine overseas that do this all the time, so I've kept up the newsletter, continued a blog. I think you're talking me into starting to do YouTube chats again. I ran podcasts back in the day. I'm thinking about other more lightweight ways to share information. The way that I capture all this has changed over the years. Right now, what I'm doing is, I have a system where I basically take any and all information into the funnel. So that's podcasts I listen to, YouTube videos, books I read on the Kindle, audio books, audio podcasts, things I read online on social media, blogs, research PDFs. Bring it all into one end of the funnel, read it, consume it. Have AI do a little bit of light housekeeping on it, just to systematize it so tags all match and you know categories match and just you know information correlates with other information. And then this is the part that gets a little bit weird. Is there is a an AI developer Andrej Karpathy, and what he basically did is I I have an AI model that is called my librarian, and it goes in and it takes all the information that's coming in. It doesn't. This doesn't work yet, by the way. It's hopefully we'll be in this in the messy

amy stockwell  24:21

process,

Ian O'Byrne  24:22

it's messy. But having a AI bot that will go through and regularly automatically create an AI wiki about all the information I'm consuming, okay? And I don't put my, I don't dip my toe in that separate bucket at all. I just watch. I keep adding more stuff and reading and consuming, and then I wait and see what the the wiki looks like and what things are getting you know surfaced, and it's only information that I add to the initial part of the input, and then after that, and I purposefully cleave it off there. After that, I have the the third. Leg of the stool, which is where I create, and that's on my digital garden. You can see it. That's my newsletter. That's my book reviews. As I read, I take book notes. That's you know, if I publish notes online, that's like the messy side of my learning. So all that's how I try to keep track of everything. But it's just the a lot of it is the day in day out of doing a newsletter every week. You know, for 10 years now, having 400 issues of that thing. It's just writing and thinking out loud and trying to make sense of stuff. Probably consuming a little bit too much of this stuff. But the the interesting thing is that now I can look and I see a lot of trends and parallels and patterns in what's happening now and stuff that we saw decades ago when we started talking about hey look at this new thing called Google.

amy stockwell  25:57

That's fantastic. That's I. You still haven't told me how we fit all of that into your day, but I'm just gonna. Yeah, I mean it's

Ian O'Byrne  26:05

cloning helps. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's the. I think it's being device agnostic. I think it's you know being able to have systems where you're using your laptop or your tablet or your phone. You know it's trying to figure out how can tech fit into your life? So in the way here, I was listening to a podcast, you know, and able to like tag it as I'm driving, so I can take notes for later. But it's yeah, the the the struggle is real. You know, trying to balance that with family and coaching volleyball for the kids and cooking dinner and all that. I probably should do things, other things with my life, but oh, you're young, you have energy.

amy stockwell  26:45

You're you're doing just fine. And our students get to benefit. Our students get to be the witness and engage with your expertise that you bring from from the real world. So yeah,

Ian O'Byrne  26:57

I mean, it's that's one of the things that one of my big takeaways is just I listen to my students about how they feel about AI because there's a very interesting, you know, right now we we put people into buckets and like I I'm sure there's people online and friends of mine and colleagues here at campus that are like oh you're the AI person I'm not really you know I I study digital literacy and practices, but there's a very interesting pushback against AI, machine learning. You see it in the data centers discussion, and it's been about eight months now, six months now. But if you really sit and listen to our students, they say incredible things, and I I wanted to understand what their pushback is and what the hesitation is and what the concern is, so I can better understand and and learn about what it actually means to them instead of me dictating to them what I think they should believe.

amy stockwell  27:53

That's a great point. Listen to our students. Listen to our our younger people. Yeah. Instead of talking at them, listen to them. Well, thank you so much, Ian, for coming into the studio again, and thank you all for listening to another episode of Speaking of College of Charleston. As we said, I'll put all of links to Ian's information in our show notes, and and please leave a review or share this episode with a friend, so someone else can benefit from the knowledge. Thank you.

Ian O'Byrne  28:23

Thank you.