NEC Corporation and AIC Collaborate on AI Workshop Exploring the Future of Learning

On February 27, 2025, the NEC corporation and AIC collaborated to hold an online event titled, “AI Co-generation Workshop: Exploring Next-Generation Learning Tools”  

During the event, participants learned about “digital facilitation,” a learning method advocated by AIC Fellow Masata Tahara as a way to brainstorm and come up with ideas, and then split into teams composed of both Keio students and NEC Corporation employees for a competition.

【Digital Facilitation Presentation】

At the beginning of the event, Masato Tahara gave a presentation on digital facilitation. Participants were encouraged to use interactive communication skills throughout the event, asking questions in the middle of the lecture and bringing their own thoughts to the table, which allowed for everyone to explore the topic more deeply.

【Workshop】

In the first half of the workshop, students and NEC employees split into mixed teams and used Miro, an online platform for outlining ideas and other projects, to brainstorm around the prompt of the day: how will AI change education?

Each team used vastly different approaches to how they grouped and structured their thoughts, inspiring each other as they worked. Participants were able to put into practice what they had learned during the lecture, experimenting with both “divergent” and “convergent” thinking to put together their ideas and see how they related to one another.

In the latter half of the workshop, participants were given a new prompt, “what kind of skills, qualities, and learning tools will be needed when AI and robots are fully incorporated into our daily lives around 2030.” The teams again used Miro and AI platforms as they held their discussion, moving from “emergence,” to “divergence,” and finally “convergence.”

＜workshop using Miro＞

【Competition】

For the competition portion of the event, all four teams presented what they had discussed throughout the workshop. One by one they described their creative approaches and findings, going over how they used AI to confirm what they had discussed, gain new perspectives, and debate the finer points of their arguments with the chatbots.

【Workshop Results】

First place: Team C, Kazutaka Iwama, Noritaka Shimura, Kenshiro Fukuda, Mei Yasujima

Second place: Team A, Hayato Ishiko, Naoya Okada, Ayaka Imai, Jun Terada

【Competition Judges】

Daisuke Kochu, Director of Analytics Consulting, NEC Corporation

Shigeru Siina, ​Chief Executive Officer at Maverick, Inc, and Visiting Professor at the Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology

Masato Tahara, AIC Fellow

【Comments from Participants】

• “It was a great experience to be able to have such an involved discussion with people who are already in the workforce. I also learned a lot from the lecture.”
• “It may have been short, but the time debating with the NEC Corporation employees was really well spent.”
• “I learned a new approach to discussions. Someone brought up that ‘Interpretations are important and diverse. This is why it is vital to facilitate them during the creative process.’” 
• “Up until now, I had been thinking about things in strict categories of ‘online’ or ‘offline,’ and ‘synchronous’ or “asynchronous.’ However, when I learned about digital facilitation through this event, I was inspired and it made me change my thinking about how to integrate these approaches.”
• “While I found that the overall concept of digital facilitation was difficult to grasp, by the end of the event, I realized that I was actually pretty confident about what is involved in it.”

【Acknowledgments】

AIC would like to thank everyone for their support in organizing and hosting this event, especially Fumiko Hasegawa, Chihiro Ito, Hirohiko Ito, and Kyoko Fujishige from the NEC Corporation

◆Keio AIC representatives, faculty members, and administrators:

Takahiro Yakoh, Mari Kobayashi, Fumio Kohno, Yuki Hamanaka

◆Student administrators:

Leo Tanaka, Mei Yasujima, Kotoe Fujikata