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What is the work?

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Presentation

RCN Education conference · Royal College of Nursing · 15 April 2026

Keynote presentation

Overview

A keynote asking a simple question: when we say we don’t want AI to do “the work”, what do we mean by the work?

The argument moves through four stages:

  • Why the usual responses (denial, retreat, restriction, resignation) are insufficient
  • What the premises of learning, teaching, assessment, and certification actually require — and why AI has not changed those premises, only the evidence we were using to meet them
  • How assessment came to measure artifact production rather than formation, and why the proxy has now collapsed
  • What structural (not discursive) responses look like, and why the conditions that support genuine cognitive struggle are the same conditions under which AI use becomes transformative rather than substitutive

The session closes with a reframing: the question has always been what students are actually doing, not what they are producing. AI has simply made it impossible to defer that question any longer.

Slides

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