What the AI debate misses about the Global South

About this episode

Dr. Maria Mercedes "Didith" T. Rodrigo is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where she directs the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS) and co-heads the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory. For over two decades she has studied what students actually do and feel while learning with technology — detecting boredom, confusion, frustration and engaged concentration from interaction data inside intelligent tutoring systems, educational games and programming environments.

She is a former President of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) and a recipient of its Distinguished Researcher Award, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society. Her opinion piece "Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?" (International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education) argued that the classrooms most likely to benefit from AI are the ones structurally least able to deploy it. In July 2025 she delivered the keynote "The Technopolitics of AIED: A Developing Country's Perspective" at the AIED conference in Palermo, and later that year argued for culturally-responsive AI at the K-EDU EXPO in Korea.

In this episode, Didith talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why AI in education is built on Western psychological constructs — and whether boredom in Manila is the same as boredom in Michigan
• The Scooter experiment: US students deliberately provoking a scolding animated dog, Filipino students insisting "Scooter cares about me"
• "Gaming the system" — why students in the Philippines pretend to work rather than walk out, and what generative AI does to that instinct
• Findings from WHIMC, the University of Illinois Minecraft science environment, where lower-performing Filipino students made almost no observations — the cost of saving face
• Testing LLM grading bias on Filipino English, after earlier work showing essays written in African American English scored lower
• AI Ed Unplugged — Seiji Isotani and Ig Ibert Bittencourt's Brazilian movement to design AI for classrooms with one device, one connection, and paper exams
• Why she'd give the scarce resources to the teacher first — including the maths teacher assigned to teach relaxation massage
• Epistemic vigilance as the successor to critical thinking, and why friction, confusion and struggle have to be designed back in
• The trade-offs a Global South education minister actually faces — including feeding programmes, because hungry children cannot learn

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship