In a recent interview (Bender et al., 2025), Professor Emily M. Bender discussed the limitations of technical solutions in addressing harmful Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias. She described a particular point we may reach at which technical solutions stop working, and when we should then widen the lens to ask about the problem framing itself. This is a crucial step in any inquiry that is of concern to both novice and experienced researchers alike: moving from problem-solving to problematisation. This commentary aims to provide educational researchers with a glimpse into the wide array of research problems and problematisation of AI in Education (AIED). It discusses seven framings of AIED: methodological pluralism; metaphors; ethnographic studies; imagining futures through fiction; humanistic groundings of AI design and development; third space professionals in research; and open education. We describe why these particular frames are relevant and how we wrote this commentary. We go on to suggest that to sustain the desirable but sometimes elusive nexus between research and teaching, we need to see both as rich, diverse, and distributed activities consisting of many actors. We seek to probe: What is AI? Who gets to say so and why? What critical, creative and pluralistic approaches can we take to research into its effects on the outcomes and experiences of students in higher education?.

This study addresses the challenges of documenting and demonstrating practical knowledge (PK) in craft subjects. Acquiring PK is a dynamic process involving experience, reflection, practical work, and active engagement with the environment. The aim of this study is to explore the aspects of PK that can be seen in silent video documentation of the Swedish craft subject Sloyd. Twenty students consented to film and submit videos documenting their craft projects. Four categories of PK were identified: know-how, know-what, know-when, and know-why. The findings from the video data analysis provide valuable insights into PK, showcasing, for example, students’ dexterity, material knowledge, planning, creativity, and decision-making. However, observing reflections in the silent videos was challenging. This study increases our understanding of what PK is in the context of craft education and how it becomes visible in action, offering an alternative or complement to the assessment of students’ written reflections and oral presentations.

The aim of this article is to introduce and provide an overview of fiction as a research method with examples from education. Although there are similarities with narrative research, particularly narrative construction, fiction allows for more speculation and imagination. Two types of fiction are discussed: informed fiction and speculative fiction. Informed fiction uses data to inform and inspire fictional works, while speculative fiction encourages researchers and research participants to craft more imaginative and creative fictional narratives. To illustrate different ways fiction can be informed, examples are provided of how fiction can draw from empirical data, workshops, and literature. Then, examples of how speculative fiction can connect with research and researchers are discussed. These include speculative fiction created as part of research, research participants creating speculative fiction, and researchers themselves creating speculative fiction. The article also critically examines what quality might mean when creating research fiction. While some traditional indicators of qualitative research quality may apply to informed fiction, they often do not apply to speculative fiction. Fiction, as a research method, encourages researchers to embrace their imagination and creativity rather than suppress it.

Advocates of AI in Education (AIEd) assert that the current generation of technologies, collectively dubbed artificial intelligence, including generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), promise results that can transform our conceptions of what education looks like. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate how educators perceive GenAI and its potential use and future impact on education. Adopting the methodology of collective writing as an inquiry, this study reports on the participating educators' perceived grey areas (i.e. issues that are unclear and/or controversial) and recommendations on future research. The grey areas reported cover decision-making on the use of GenAI, AI ethics, appropriate levels of use of GenAI in education, impact on learning and teaching, policy, data, GenAI outputs, humans in the loop and public-private partnerships. Recommended directions for future research include learning and teaching, ethical and legal implications, ownership/authorship, funding, technology, research support, AI metaphor and types of research. Each theme or subtheme is presented in the form of a statement, followed by a justification. These findings serve as a call to action to encourage a continuing debate around GenAI and to engage more educators in research. The paper concludes that unless we can ask the right questions now, we may find that, in the pursuit of greater efficiency, we have lost the very essence of what it means to educate and learn.

This article focuses on visual peer feedback and the idea process in visual arts education and how this process was shared digitally. In the study, sixth-grade students gave each other visual feedback on their sketches in an assignment in pictorial composition. Visual feedback is understood here as direct interaction with copies of the original composition, given by adding and/or revising elements, which differs from traditional peer feedback that is mainly textual. The aim of the study was to investigate how students can develop their idea process by giving and receiving visual peer feedback, and how students can share their ideas and the feedback digitally. Thematic analysis was used to identify different techniques of visual communication given in the feedback, and a survey was used to map how the students perceived the feedback process. Most students engaged in the feedback process by reusing the objects or the shapes of the objects in the original sketch in new compositions using various techniques like cutting, sketching, and coloring. The interactive and visual feedback dialogues created a playful learning environment. Most students found the peer feedback activity useful and appreciated studying and developing the work of their peers.

The Swedish municipal adult education curriculum emphasizes that there should be flexibility in education and accommodation to meet the adults’ diverse needs. However, it appears unclear what the concept of flexibility means in practice especially in the context of adult distance education. This study explores how the distance teacher role is constructed, how flexibility is enacted, and its implications for didactic practice. Drawing on focus groups with 46 teachers and principals and a mapping of seven municipal adult education activities, the findings reveal a paradox of conditional flexibility: while teachers are expected to be highly adaptable, organizational and economic constraints, standardized structures, and policy-driven efficiency goals limit real flexibility. Teachers navigate tensions between pedagogical ideals, administrative demands, and students’ expectations of autonomy, often at the cost of didactic quality. Assessment requirements further restrict flexibility, reinforcing rigid practices in a system that markets itself as flexible. The study argues for strategic organizational support and a redefinition of flexibility that prioritizes pedagogical and didactic dimensions.

Research informing adult education teachers’ didactic practices in distance education is scarce. Approaching the adult learner’s perspectives on how distance education is perceived is key to informing future initiatives. This study explores adult learners’ perception of distance education, concentrating on aspects such as, social presence, course structure, and perceived learning and satisfaction. A survey was distributed to teachers (n = 78) in five schools organising adult distance education. Findings show that teacher accessibility and course structure correlated positively with social presence and perceived learning and satisfaction. Overall, adult learners are satisfied with their distance teaching. A challenge facing adult distance education is to create a sense of social presence despite the high demand for flexibility. Thus, we explored learner perceptions of benefits and challenges in distance education and structured these into social, cognitive, spatio-temporal, emotional, and technical dimensions. Findings reveal that one challenge in the social dimension was a lack of connection with peers, and a benefit in the cognitive dimension referred to autonomy and self-regulation. These findings are important as educational institutions and policymakers may strive for high flexibility, which in turn may lead to lower group cohesion and a lack of social presence.

In this paper, we begin our process of incorporating an AI bot in an online chat tutoring setting as a support for the tutor. We explore how an AI bot could give suggestions for tutor messages, although the human tutor will control how to communicate with the student. Tutoring, an important dimension of networked learning, has long been seen as a beneficial approach to students’ learning. An AI bot has the potential to aid tutors in the tutoring process and contribute to the scalability. The present pilot study was conducted in the tutoring setting of the Math Coach program. In the program, teacher students aid students from upper primary school to upper secondary school in mathematics through an online text-based chat system. Llama2 was used as a large language model (LLM), fine-tuned for Swedish comprehension utilizing the Math Coach system's chat logs. Four coaches, teacher students at a technical Swedish university and active in the Math Coach program, were invited to interact with the AI bot and participate in a group discussion. The coaches interacted individually with the AI bot while the chat conversation was displayed on a monitor so all participants could discuss the interaction while it took place. A semi-structured interview approach was taken and the participants were also encouraged to 'think aloud' about their experience. In the discussions, the coaches expressed surprise by the AI's social aspect. They perceived the AI bot as friendly with a positive attitude and were especially surprised by its ability to correctly place appropriate emojis. The coaches agreed that the AI was able to ask both appropriate and helpful questions and share some good guidance for how to proceed in the problem-solving process. However, they felt that the AI bot was not able to offer sufficient mathematical guidance, oftentimes the AI bot was confidently wrong. It also wrote too long messages, which humans would typically separate into several chat messages, and did not wait for a response but instead moved too quickly towards the solution. Moving forward we plan to address the effects of improved prompts on the AI bot and continue finetuning the LLM. We will continue to conduct pilot studies and eventually conduct more large-scale empirical studies.

Applications of learning analytics (LA) can raise concerns from students about their privacy in higher education contexts. Developing effective privacy-enhancing practices requires a systematic understanding of students' privacy concerns and how they vary across national and cultural dimensions. We conducted a survey study with established instruments to measure privacy concerns and cultural values for university students in five countries (Germany, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States; N = 762). The results show that students generally trusted institutions with their data and disclosed information as they perceived the risks to be manageable even though they felt somewhat limited in their ability to control their privacy. Across the five countries, German and Swedish students stood out as the most trusting and least concerned, especially compared to US students who reported greater perceived risk and less control. Students in South Korea and Spain responded similarly on all five privacy dimensions (perceived privacy risk, perceived privacy control, privacy concerns, trusting beliefs, and non-self-disclosure behavior), despite their significant cultural differences. Culture measured at the individual level affected the antecedents and outcomes of privacy concerns. Perceived privacy risk and privacy control increase with power distance. Trusting beliefs increase with a desire for uncertainty avoidance and lower masculinity. Non-self-disclosure behaviors rise with power distance and masculinity and decrease with more uncertainty avoidance. Thus, cultural values related to trust in institutions, social equality and risk-taking should be considered when developing privacy-enhancing practices and policies in higher education.