Abstract

AI tools have disrupted the classroom, raising concerns about academic integrity, enabling learning shortcuts, and undermining human relationships. At the same time, they promise personalized learning, greater creativity, and faster output. The outcome of using AI tools can depend on how we choose to use them, or not use them, and those decisions should be guided by human values.

Media literacy has historically taught children a checklist of rules for navigating technology. But a checklist cannot adapt to changing capabilities or the many scenarios students will encounter with general-purpose tools. What's needed is a set of habits that stays resilient as technology changes, so students can make informed decisions about whichever tool comes next. A virtue ethics approach offers this resilience: instead of a premade set of rules, it asks students to act in line with their own virtues, which requires understanding those virtues, the capabilities of the technology at hand, and the setting they're in.

In this talk, Daniella will share how virtues can ground AI literacy efforts and support responsible AI use. Virtue ethics stresses the importance of reflection and adjustment after each decision– a practice that is ideal for a classroom environment. She will present two projects: a game in which students practice virtue-based reasoning through concrete AI use scenarios, and an in-school youth council in which high school students build on a shared values framework to draft AI policy for their own schools.

Speaker Bio

Daniella DiPaola, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab. Her work lies at the intersection of AI, children, and society. She conducts human-AI interaction research, develops K-12 curricula on the responsible creation and use of AI, and supports educational policy on AI in schools. Her research has been featured in top ACM and IEEE conferences in human-computer interaction and STEM education, and her learning activities have reached millions of students worldwide through educational organizations such as Day of AI, Edward M. Kennedy Institute, and Project STEM.

Daniella earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where she also holds a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences. Her dissertation, ""AI Literacy as Civic Literacy: Developing Youth as Responsible Citizens in a World with AI,"" argued for framing AI literacy as a civic skill and developed programs to help youth share their voices on AI.