<\/p>\n
There is a habit I’ve had for years, and one that I’ve found myself talking about more and more lately. Every time I prepare a series of seminars for an important moment in my academic life\u2014a promotion, a research stay, a keynote that really matters\u2014I don’t just prepare the content. I need to build a language for that particular moment. It’s a kind of ritual that I never consciously planned, but one that I’ve gradually recognised as part of the way I work.<\/p>\n
I’m not entirely sure when that process begins. Certainly not when I open PowerPoint. It starts much earlier. It starts by looking\u2014deliberately looking. Looking for images, colours, typefaces, photographs, textures… without yet knowing exactly what I’m looking for. If anyone had watched me during those weeks, they would probably have thought I was wasting an extraordinary amount of time. There were entire days when I didn’t produce a single slide. I would simply look at images, spend twenty minutes trying a different font only to go back to the previous one, replace a photograph because its colours no longer spoke to the rest, move an idea from the beginning to the end and then back again the following day. I do all this because I need to find the tone of the conversation before I can begin to write it. I’ve never thought of slides as supporting a talk; for me, they are part of the thinking itself.<\/p>\n
This time I knew two things from the very beginning. I wanted the four seminars to feel like a recognisable series, and I wanted that series to breathe nature. The optical metaphors came almost immediately\u2014The Lens, The Prism, The Mirror<\/em> and The Telescope<\/em>\u2014but I didn’t want a technological aesthetic. I wanted water, minerals, vegetation, crystal, light. I wanted each seminar to have its own palette while still feeling as though they all belonged to the same family. I’m always surprised by how much time I’m capable of spending on these things. Every single time I promise myself that this process will be simpler. Every single time exactly the opposite happens. By now I should probably accept that, for me, designing a seminar means spending a very long time looking before I can start writing.<\/p>\n There was another moment that I found unexpectedly revealing. I had the feeling that this series of seminars ought to look… older. Or perhaps more mature. (I have to admit that, lately, I’ve been trying to mature in all sorts of ways. Perhaps because my face has started doing it whether I like it or not…) Not more sophisticated, just calmer. In one of my conversations with ChatGPT, it started suggesting Nordic editorial design: lots of white space, restrained typography, clean layouts, understated elegance. For a while I genuinely thought that might be what I was looking for. It seemed reasonable that the visual language of my presentations should also reflect the fact that I’m no longer at the beginning of my career.<\/p>\n But the more I looked at those designs, the stranger they felt. Not because I didn’t like them. I still think they’re beautiful. The problem was something else: they weren’t speaking my language. And then I realised something that, once it occurred to me, seemed almost embarrassingly obvious. I’m Colombian. I’m also deeply Mediterranean after spending more than a half of my life in Murcia. Muchness is part of the way I see the world. I’m anything but modest or restrained. I think that way. I write that way. My texts are full of layers, metaphors and references that constantly overlap with one another. Trying to make my seminars look as though they had been designed by somebody completely different simply because I’m now a more senior academic suddenly felt rather absurd.<\/p>\n Growing older shouldn’t mean becoming someone else. It should mean becoming more fully yourself and allowing your work to reflect that evolution without giving up the way you naturally look at the world. After all, I can’t really be anyone other than myself. While all this was happening, the seminar itself kept changing.<\/p>\n The Prism<\/em> was probably the hardest of the four seminars precisely because it came first. In one sense it should have been the easiest: we’d already been working on the AI Prism for almost two years, and it had already generated several publications. But simply turning the seminar into an explanation of the framework… well, as Disney’s Alice would probably say, where’s the fun in that?<\/em> Anyone genuinely interested in understanding the framework can read the papers. A seminar has to do something different.<\/p>\n The earliest versions walked through the framework almost step by step. Little by little those slides disappeared. In their place came others that barely mentioned artificial intelligence at all. They talked about education. About the traditions through which we think about education. About the questions that each tradition considers important\u2014and the questions it quietly leaves outside the frame.<\/p>\n I remember very clearly the moment I realised that the seminar had to begin there. I couldn’t expect people to understand why the AI Prism distinguishes certain dimensions if they didn’t first understand the intellectual traditions from which those distinctions emerged. The framework was a consequence, not the starting point. That is where the opening slide came from\u2014the one that, in different forms, will appear throughout the entire seminar series.<\/p>\n I also started telling stories. Anyone who has ever worked with me\u2014or survived one of my classes\u2014knows that I tell a lot of stories. Some of these came directly from questions that had been following me around during the conferences I’d attended in my first few weeks in Sydney. Those conversations slowly turned into examples, and those examples gradually found their way into the seminar.<\/p>\n There was one final decision that I struggled with. Ending by questioning the prism itself. It felt inconsistent to ask people to adopt a critical perspective on artificial intelligence while presenting my own framework as though it were somehow definitive\u2014especially when I’d already begun questioning the metaphor myself months earlier. So I decided to finish by explaining why the prism had started to feel insufficient. Not because it had stopped being useful, but because every metaphor illuminates certain things while inevitably leaving others in the dark.<\/p>\n As always, another familiar companion appeared somewhere along the way: impostor syndrome. During those weeks I had two remarkably patient interlocutors: ChatGPT and Claude. I showed them endless versions, asked far too many times whether things made sense, whether I was being too ambitious, too complicated or simply too baroque. I wasn’t asking them to write the seminar. I needed them to help me keep thinking at the precise moment when I could no longer tell the difference between an idea that needed more work and one that was simply making me doubt myself.<\/p>\n Then came the seminar itself. And something happened that made me particularly happy. Most of the discussion wasn’t about the seven dimensions of the AI Prism. It was about the questions that had made it necessary to build the framework in the first place. My conversation with Simon Buckingham Shum was probably the clearest example. We talked about personalisation, learning, communities and artificial intelligence, but above all we talked about the educational traditions from which each of us was asking those questions. At one point Simon made an observation that has stayed with me: the danger of turning positions into caricatures when, in reality, they are far more complex than that. I think he was absolutely right.<\/p>\n I left with the feeling that the seminar had achieved exactly what I had hoped it would: it had shifted the conversation away from the framework itself and towards the problem that had made the framework necessary.<\/p>\n I’m sharing the recording of the seminar here.<\/p>\n