The emergence of AI notetaking platforms presents exciting opportunities for learners while potentially disrupting traditional learning processes. Participants will collaboratively consider benefits and challenges of AI notetakers, explore their impact on learning, then brainstorm strategies to promote ways of using them that support, rather than undermine, meaningful learning.

Session Overview
AI notetaking platforms and meeting assistants are rapidly entering our learning environments, offering both opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning. While these tools can enhance accessibility and support diverse learning needs, they also raise important questions about student engagement, the cognitive value of traditional note-taking, and effects on class environment. Through a combination group brainstorming and group work, this conversational will bring participants together to tackle a pressing challenge: How do we embrace the positive potential of these emergent tools while ensuring they support, rather than detract from, learning?

What are AI Notetakers, Exactly?
AI notetakers, also often referred to as AI meeting assistants, are generative AI-based digital tools that can record, transcribe, and analyze live class sessions or meetings. Some operate visibly (like AI meeting participants), while others work discreetly in the background where neither instructors nor other students would know they're being used. While originally designed for business meetings, they're increasingly marketed to students as learning tools, with companies promoting them as ways to increase efficiency and accessibility in educational settings. These aren't just simple recording or transcription tools - they use AI to actively process and synthesize the content, attempting to identify and highlight what's most important, much like a human note-taker would do, generating outlines, summaries, highlights and key points, and even bespoke flashcards and quizzes.

Opportunities and Challenges
AI notetaker tools and AI meeting assistants can positively augment the learning process, increasing the accessibility of the class sessions—particularly for those with learning differences or who struggle with traditional note-taking—and providing a novel way for students to engage with course concepts and content. While these tools were originally developed for business contexts (like Zoom’s AI Companion), many companies now market these products as educational tools, proclaiming their ability to make the learning process deeper and more efficient: these solutions, it is suggested, free up student attention so that they can focus less on taking notes during a session and more on listening and interacting with their peers and instructors.

A darker side of these tools, though, is evident in any number of social media posts: on TikTok and Instagram, many content creators actively promote these tools to college students not as learning aids, but as replacements for active engagement. No longer do students need to listen to lectures; they only need to sit back and let the AI agent listen for them, then later review the perfectly-organized notes the system generates. Such messages imply that AI-generated materials are inherently superior to student-created notes. Such uses of these tools arguably undermine the cognitive benefits that come from the act of note-taking: processing information, synthesizing concepts, and integrating with prior knowledge.

This use trend also overlooks two other crucial aspects of the learning process. First, these tools do not have access to the personal context that often makes note-taking so valuable: they cannot identify individual knowledge gaps, recognize conflicts with existing mental models, illuminate how concepts relate to a student's unique academic journey, or capture the emotional and social resonance that can infuse new ideas with meaning.

Second, these tools have the potential to disrupt the social dynamics that are often integral to learning: class sessions can sometimes be messy affairs, with students sharing half-completed thoughts, testing out their ideas, struggling to find words to express complex (mis)understandings: in these contexts, generative AI notetakers, trained as they are to create “perfect” summaries composed of complete ideas, may misconstrue the goings-on of a session. The use of these tools may reduce some of the productive friction that animates both personal growth and collaborative learning environment.

With these ideas in mind, this session is designed to help participants grapple with the positive and potentially negative aspects of AI notetakers and help us reconcile the opportunities and challenges to forge a positive way forward.

Conversation and Interaction Plan
1. Setting the Stage (5 minutes): Introducing the topic
2. Full Group Discussion (10 minutes): The session will begin with a structured yet organic exploration of AI notetakers' impact on learning, framed in terms of a SWOT analysis: as a full group, we will brainstorm strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that AI notetaking platforms present in the context of teaching and learning. These will be entered on a 4-column Padlet.

3. Small Group Discussions (15 minutes): Using the SWOT analysis as groundwork, participants will divide Ito for groups, each exploring a distinct question:
* Group 1 - The Personal Context Question: "How might the act of manual note-taking create meaning for individual learners, and what specific cognitive and personal elements are lost when this process is automated?"
* Group 2 - The Session Culture Question: "How might AI notetaking tools affect the class session as a space for risk-taking, working through ideas, and sharing personal perspectives?"
* Group 3 - The Digital Literacy Question: "How might we help students pinpoint and critically evaluate the differences between AI-generated notes and their own meaning-making processes?”
* Group 4 - The Institutional Response Question: "What institutional infrastructure and support systems might we put in place to promote responsible use of AI notetaking tools?"

Each group will choose a representative to report to the group at the conclusion of the activity. While groups will be asked to record their responses on a collaborative document, each will also be provided physical handouts listing questions and providing space for handwritten notes.

4. Full Group Discussion (10 minutes):
Groups will reconvene to share insights and explore how their answers intersect. Participants will be asked to provide one last post in the Padlet noting the key takeaway(s) from the session.

Participants will leave with a link to a collaborative document compiling any resources shared in the session along with resources that they can further explore after the session.