Thank you to the AMEE organisers for their generous support, particularly Rakesh Patel, Raquel Correia, and Ken Masters.
Earlier today I presented a session at the AMEE AI symposium on the idea of context sovereignty, and what becomes possible when you own your context. This is an idea I’ve been developing with Wesley Lynch over the past few months, where Wesley’s insights have really helped me understand the nuance of what becomes possible when you think about model intelligence as a commodity.
In the presentation, I argue that context sovereignty is essential for meaningful AI-supported learning. Current chatbots require repetitive prompting and can’t access our persistent knowledge structures, limiting their educational value. Context sovereignty addresses this through three principles:
- Persistent understanding: Systems that naturally accumulate learners’ context over time
- Individual agency: Learners maintaining control over their personal learning data
- Cognitive extension: AI that amplifies learners’ intent based on their specified outcomes
This matters because context determines how we integrate new information with existing knowledge. Rather than asking “what can AI do?” we should ask “what context do I bring?” By maintaining agency over our learning context whilst enabling cognitive amplification, we preserve the human element in learning whilst leveraging AI’s capabilities. This repositions us from passive consumers of AI-generated content to active architects of our learning environments.
Here are the slides (navigation panel in bottom left).
Read more about context sovereignty and related ideas (e.g. context engineering and the learning alignment problem).