And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Olof Sundin and Anna-Lena Godhe, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on information-seeking and learning in Swedish schools. This is based on a series of focus groups with school teachers and librarians on how they experience the impact of generative AI on their own practices, with nine such focus groups already completed.
Searching for and evaluating information sources has played a crucial role in Swedish curricula for many decades; learning through projects has been a typical education style here, and this usually requires this kind of media and information literacy. References to finding and evaluating information can be found across state curriculum statements and teacher instructions, at various education levels.
But the introduction of AI chatbots changes much of this: AI systems provide direct answers of variable quality, rather than requiring an evaluation of sources. This has led to various changes to teaching: lessons have become more teacher-led, to make sure students follow the lesson; and more pen-and-paper-based, to avoid the use of AI shortcuts. Project work, and homework more generally, is more or less dead, since anything created at home that students hand in might have been AI-generated and can no longer be fairly assessed.
Further, search and sources have become more and more invisible: teaching students to search has become difficult, and critical approaches to AI summaries must be emphasised; students mimic source criticism but do not necessarily have deep skills in it. Looking at the sources highlighted by AI summaries is possible, but evaluating the AI summary text is much harder for students.
Students’ understanding of the material they generate has notably declined; they trust AI to have done a good job at writing texts for them, but in the process lose their own ability to think through theses ideas.
‘Searching’ is thus no longer a useful description for what students do, or think they do. Search in schools is now limited to teacher-provided sources, to avoid AI use, but this also deskills students in their own search practices. This also makes students more vulnerable to problematic actors, then: if schools give up on teaching critical engagement with AI tools, then who will?
