AI Literacy and extended learning: toward an inclusive socio-technical pedagogy

Abstract

Within networked learning ecosystems, AI Literacy becomes a fundamental condition for understanding how learning emerges from hybrid configurations of interaction among bodies, environments, and intelligent systems. This contribution conceptualizes cognition as an embodied, distributed, and co-evolutionary process and examines how the increasing presence of generative AI in everyday practices reorganizes attention, memory, participation, and autonomy. Far from being a mere digital support, artificial intelligence is interpreted as a socio-technical actor that co-shapes educational practices, languages, and meaning-making processes. This scenario reveals the limitations of both anti-smartphone rhetoric and transmissive instructional models, as they fail to account for the reality of extended and technologically mediated learning. Drawing on insights from special pedagogy and inclusive design, the paper argues that AI Literacy—understood as a critical, ethical, and operational capacity to engage with intelligent systems—can function as a facilitator for learners with diverse functioning profiles, enabling new forms of agency, regulation, and accessibility. The contribution aims to outline criteria for an extended pedagogy capable of integrating AI within the human–environment–technology network as a generative and inclusive component of contemporary cognitive ecosystems.