Dr. Francisco Arri, Academic Secretary of the School of Communication atUniversidad ORT Uruguay, served as a panelist atCampus Sur, an initiative organized byCeibal thatbrings together regional conferences in various locations across the country, aimed at teachers and teacher education students.
These events encourage reflection on pedagogical approaches, teaching practices, planning, creativity, and educational innovation, with a particular focus on the connection between education and technology.
The Panel: Digital Citizenship and Inequalities
The panel was part of thedigital citizenship track, which explores the ways in which people interact with technology within a specific sociocultural context.
Entitled“Digital Skills in the Classroom to Address Inequalities,” the event took place at the Executive Tower.
Arri shared the stage with two leading experts in the regional academic field:Flavia Costa, a CONICET researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, andMatías Dodel, a researcher and professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay.
Building Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Arri’s presentation was titled“Building Agency in the Classroom in the Age of AI”and proposed shifting the traditional focus on“technical skills”toward a more profound pedagogical question.
How agency is constructed and shared in educational contexts shaped by algorithmic technologies.
From a perspective rooted in teaching practice, the speaker highlighted the need to approach classroom management based on pedagogical criteria and judgment, particularly in settings mediated by artificial intelligence.
In this context, he explained that agency refers to the ability to shape one’s environment through one’s own decisions and to exert control over one’s circumstances and daily life.
Regarding this approach, Arri stated that:
The challenge of digital skills is not merely one of access or use, but of agency—that is, the ability to understand, make decisions, and take action within the digital ecosystem. The approach should always be to integrate generative AI through classroom management and pedagogical judgment, to complement teaching and learning activities without replacing the teacher’s role and connection with students.
Research, Media Literacy, and Democracy
During his presentation, Arri mentionedtwo research projects in which the School of Communication is participating.
On the one hand,“Investigar en Red,” a study involving 38 universities from nine Latin American countries that analyzes how university students in journalism and communication programs stay informed, study, and consume content.
He also cited findings from theNational Survey on Information Consumption and Digital Technologies, conducted by the Faculty’s Communication Research Center, which provides empirical evidence on information-seeking habits in digital environments.
- You might be interested in: Faculty Communication Research Center
Finally, the speaker addressed the various narratives surrounding the adoption of technology and emphasizedmedia literacyas a key factor in strengthening democracy and fostering citizenship, particularly in the face of phenomena such as misinformation and the glut of synthetic content.