Digital learning, AI & the future

I built my first webpage in 1999, while teaching at Yogyakarta International School. I can still remember the feeling of it. A classroom in Java, connected to the world. It was slow and imperfect, and it felt like magic. That sense of awe has never really left me. Every new tool since has carried the same promise: that technology might bring learners closer to ideas, to people and to possibilities they could not otherwise reach.

Digital learning has featured strongly in my career ever since. I have led online learning communities, supported schools through rapid shifts to remote provision and worked with educators exploring what generative AI might mean for their classrooms. Across all of it, one lesson holds. The technology is never the point. What matters is what happens between people because of it: the question a student finally asks, the colleague who gains confidence, the conversation that would not have happened otherwise.

I think about this as the balance in between. On one side sits genuine excitement about what these tools make possible. A student can now receive feedback in the moment she needs it, explore an idea from more angles than any textbook allows and create things that would have been out of reach a few years ago. On the other side sits something just as important: presence, relationship and the slow, human work of understanding. The most powerful learning I have witnessed rarely came from a screen. It came from a student standing in a place that moved her, or from a conversation that changed how she saw herself.

Awe belongs on both sides of that balance. There is awe in what technology can do, and there is awe in what a young person can do when someone believes in her. My job as a leader is to make sure the first kind never crowds out the second. That means asking harder questions of our tools than we sometimes do. Does this deepen a student’s thinking, or does it do the thinking for her? Does it connect her more fully to others, or does it quietly replace the connection? What can she explain and do independently afterwards?

At PLC, I would love to explore these questions with girls and their teachers. Not from a position of fear, and not from uncritical enthusiasm, but from curiosity. I would want girls to help us ask what good learning with AI actually looks like, and I would want teachers to have the time and support to test ideas carefully and talk honestly about what they find. If we get the balance right, technology becomes one more way to honour what education has always been for: human potential, human connection and a sense of awe at what people can become.