Exploring Generative AI as a Cognitive Companion in Everyday Life
A 12 Week Lifewide Learning Inquiry
A 12 Week Lifewide Learning Inquiry
Technological Context
We are living at a moment when powerful digital technologies are reshaping how we work, communicate, decide, and imagine our futures. Artificial Intelligence is often portrayed as something distant, technical, or threatening—an external force acting upon us. This inquiry begins from a very different place. It starts with a simple question:
Q What might we learn about ourselves, our lives, and our world if we explored AI not as a tool to master, but as a companion for thinking, reflecting, and learning across the whole of our lives?
What this inquiry is about
This 12-week collaborative inquiry invites participants to experiment with AI as a cognitive companion—a partner that can help us notice patterns, ask better questions, surface assumptions, deepen reflection, and make sense of lived experience. The focus is not on technical expertise, productivity hacks, or automation. It is on learning through living our everyday life, with AI gently accompanying us as we do so.
You do not need prior knowledge of AI. In fact, curiosity, scepticism, uncertainty, or even resistance are welcome starting points. This inquiry is designed for people who want to explore whether and how AI might have a place in their everyday living and learning—on their own terms.
Living and Learning Context - the lifewide perspective
Our lives are not lived in neat compartments. We learn while caring for others for example as a parent or grandparent, or wen working, studying, volunteering, gardening, walking, socialising, watching TV or YouTube, resting, creating, worrying, celebrating, and coping with change and in many other situations. This inquiry recognises that learning and our own development and formation as a person (our becoming), happens everywhere—often unnoticed, unexamined, and unvalued.
By taking a lifewide perspective, we are encouraging participants to explore AI in relation to real moments, situations and experiences in their own lives:
- reflecting on past experiences and life stories
- making sense of present challenges and transitions
- imagining possible futures and directions
- attending more carefully to values, beliefs, emotions, and relationships
The Inquiry will begin on February xx (date to be confirmed)
Movement 1: Opening the Door (Weeks 1–2)
Purpose: to begin safely and honestly, starting from where you are. Where you start is entirely up to you.
You might explore:
Movement 2: Living With AI (Weeks 3–10)
Purpose: to experiment—carefully and critically—with AI in real life contexts.
Choosing an AI tool
Most participants will choose one AI tool (e.g. ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot) and stay mainly with it. Depth of experience matters more than breadth of tools.
Exploring personal lifewide contexts
You might try it in areas such as: work or volunteering, home and family life, travel and hobbies, creativity or writing, wellbeing or reflection, community involvement, making sense of past or future experiences
End of Week 6 – Group conversation
Movement 3: Making Sense of Living & Learning with AI (Weeks 11–12)
Purpose: to look back, synthesise learning, and form your own judgement.
This phase is not about deciding whether AI is “good” or “bad”, but about forming a situated, personal judgement based on lived experience at this moment in time.
You might explore:
The Inquiry will end on May xx (date to be confirmed)
Movement 1: Opening the Door (Weeks 1–2)
Purpose: to begin safely and honestly, starting from where you are. Where you start is entirely up to you.
You might explore:
- Where do I already encounter AI in everyday life (often invisibly)?
- How do I make use of it and how does it impact me?
- How do I feel about AI right now—curious, wary, resistant, conflicted?
- What beliefs and assumptions or stories do I already hold?
Movement 2: Living With AI (Weeks 3–10)
Purpose: to experiment—carefully and critically—with AI in real life contexts.
Choosing an AI tool
Most participants will choose one AI tool (e.g. ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot) and stay mainly with it. Depth of experience matters more than breadth of tools.
Exploring personal lifewide contexts
You might try it in areas such as: work or volunteering, home and family life, travel and hobbies, creativity or writing, wellbeing or reflection, community involvement, making sense of past or future experiences
End of Week 6 – Group conversation
Movement 3: Making Sense of Living & Learning with AI (Weeks 11–12)
Purpose: to look back, synthesise learning, and form your own judgement.
This phase is not about deciding whether AI is “good” or “bad”, but about forming a situated, personal judgement based on lived experience at this moment in time.
You might explore:
- What patterns do I see across my experimental and experiential inquiry?
- How has my awareness, stance, or confidence changed?
- What has AI added to—or detracted from—my learning from life?
- What kind of relationship with AI (if any) do I want to have going forward?
- What has AI learnt about me through the process of inquiry?
The Inquiry will end on May xx (date to be confirmed)
INQUIRY GUIDE to be published
