DrMichał Wieczorek

I am an Ad Astra Fellow - Assistant Professor in AI-Driven Educational Innovation in UCD’s School of Education. While the title might look tech-forward, I mainly do critical work on educational technologies and the ideas that underlie them. I love technology but make my living by pointing out that a lot of what we see in education today – especially all the AI stuff – is pretty bad. And as a philosopher with an applied ethics background, I get a lot of leeway in defining what counts as bad. My work deals with ethics, pedagogies, societal and practical impact and everything else that is less than great about edtech. Hopefully, my research can point out some ways for making educational technology better.

Before joining UCD, I spent 6 years at DCU and am just as confused about the abbreviations as you are now. In 2023-2025 I was an IRC Government of Ireland Fellow. My project entitled “AI in Primary and Secondary Education: An Anticipatory Ethical Analysis” dealt with prospective developments in the use of artificial intelligence in education and their ethical impact. During that time, I also served as a member of the university's Research Ethics Committee. Before commencing the fellowship, I was a PhD student at DCU and an Early Stage Researcher in the EU-funded PROTECT project. In my doctoral research, I studied the ethics of self-tracking technologies (e.g., Fitbits, Apple Watches) with the help of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and focused on their impacts on autonomy, social relations and justice. I previously studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw and KU Leuven.

I am affiliated with Cyberwise, the UCD Centre for Cyber Resilience Education, and a member of the interdisciplinary ADAPT research centre. I contribute to ADAPT's efforts related to digital technologies and education. For an example of our work, have a look at the AI Literacy in the Classroom project for which I am the ethics research lead.