Report from Workshop on Dialogue alongside Artificial Intelligence

Educational dialogue -- the collaborative exchange of ideas through talk -- is widely recognized as a catalyst for deeper learning and critical thinking in and across contexts. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful force in education, with the potential to address major challenges, personalize learning, and innovate teaching practices. However, these advances come with significant risks: rapid AI development can undermine human agency, exacerbate inequities, and outpace our capacity to guide its use with sound policy. Human learning presupposes cognitive efforts and social interaction (dialogues). In response to this evolving landscape, an international workshop titled "Educational Dialogue: Moving Thinking Forward" convened 19 leading researchers from 11 countries in Cambridge (September 1-3, 2025) to examine the intersection of AI and educational dialogue. This AI-focused strand of the workshop centered on three critical questions: (1) When is AI truly useful in education, and when might it merely replace human effort at the expense of learning? (2) Under what conditions can AI use lead to better dialogic teaching and learning? (3) Does the AI-human partnership risk outpacing and displacing human educational work, and what are the implications? These questions framed two days of presentations and structured dialogue among participants.

Using Vision Language Models to Detect Students' Academic Emotion through Facial Expressions

Students' academic emotions significantly influence their social behavior and learning performance. Traditional approaches to automatically and accurately analyze these emotions have predominantly relied on supervised machine learning algorithms. However, these models often struggle to generalize across different contexts, necessitating repeated cycles of data collection, annotation, and training. The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers a promising alternative, enabling generalization across visual recognition tasks through zero-shot prompting without requiring fine-tuning. This study investigates the potential of VLMs to analyze students' academic emotions via facial expressions in an online learning environment. We employed two VLMs, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, to analyze 5,000 images depicting confused, distracted, happy, neutral, and tired expressions using zero-shot prompting. Preliminary results indicate that both models demonstrate moderate performance in academic facial expression recognition, with Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct outperforming Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct. Notably, both models excel in identifying students' happy emotions but fail to detect distracted behavior. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct exhibits relatively high performance in recognizing students' confused expressions, highlighting its potential for practical applications in identifying content that causes student confusion.