Riding Through Sand - how AI is changing internet research - Maurice Draggon...

This session was a turbo talk and focused on how AI is changing internet research and some guidelines about how one school district put some boundaries in place. What I got out of this was a few questions that will help form our AI policy.

Maurice's presentation is here

Google uses AI to help give search results regardless of if in AI or not. Sources must be trusted before using AI summary - need to check facts via sources as AI draws from everywhere. Notebook LM puts research in reverse and is google based. It uses AI based only the resources you upload and will build on and enhance what you already have. A bonus is it gives you links of your information. 

Some takeaways:

• Ask one tool to critique another as a comparative step
• Policy must ID areas where AI is not the final decision maker staff are eg:IEP or grading
• Get AI to find the gaps and faults in the wording
• When creating policy get school wide and whanau feedback - AI can summarise stakeholders responses.
• Use AI tools to turn text into graphic display, image, movie
• The question is not whether students will meet AI. The question is whether they will know how to reason with it.
• AI as a research assistant helps you do more thinking. It does not replace your responsibility to think. AI can broaden the field. It can surface patterns. It can find areas of disagreement. It can help compare sources. But the student still has to ask better questions, check the sources, and decide whether the evidence supports the conclusion.
• The goal is to make students stronger at directing, testing, and revising AI-assisted research.
• If we want students to become AI-ready researchers, we need to make the behaviours explicit. These are the classroom routines we need to build.
• We need to remember that no single AI tool gives a complete view.
• If the AI says, "Research shows," the student asks, "Which research?" If it says, "Experts agree," the student asks, "Which experts, and who disagrees?" 
• Paste the answer from one AI into another to analyse it. This helps students spot gaps, assumptions, and bias. Over time, they internalise this critique and start asking these tough questions themselves, shifting them from AI dependence to AI-supported critical thinking.
• One of the most important research lessons in the age of AI is that a fact can be accurate and still be misleading.
• The promise is more visible thinking: broader investigation, better questions, stronger evidence, and more responsible conclusions.

Students need to do these checks with AI literacy and must take an active part in this to find a balance between what they know and what AI generates.