Dr. Manju Banerjee will speak at Vassar College on Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. in the Villard Room. Her lecture, The Learning Evolution: Does Outsourcing Knowledge Make Us Smarter?, will focus on the highly relevant topic of the use of AI tools at school and in the workplace. Leading the way in this exploration is the role students with learning differences play and what we can learn from their outsourcing tools.

Since ancient humans learned to keep tallies on papyrus as a way to record bags of grain, we have exponentially increased our engagement with tools that help us expand our cognitive capabilities. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is further revolutionizing how we generate and analyze our vast knowledge base. The internet is yesterday’s news. One common thread in the learning evolution is the constant expansion of what we know and how we manage and access information, given finite cognitive capacities. This presentation will seek to explore the questions:

• How is AI redefining teaching and learning in the age of ChatGPT?
• How has the digitization of knowledge changed how we learn?
• What does it mean to expand mental capacity by offloading cognitive load?
• How can we think differently about the use of AI tools by understanding learning differences better?

Dr. Banerjee has over 40 years of experience in the field of neurodiversity and postsecondary disability services. She is a certified diagnostician and teacher-consultant on learning disabilities and has published and presented extensively, both nationally and internationally, on topics such as disability documentation and accommodations, postsecondary transition, online learning, and universal design.

Dr. Banerjee is a former executive board member of the Learning Disability Association of America, and has been an editorial board member for the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability; LD: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal, a Professional Advisory Board member to the National Center on Learning Disabilities (NCLD), Learning Disability Association of America, and a consultant to Educational Testing Service, and Understood.org. She received her doctoral degree from the Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, on the application of universal design to high-stakes assessment.

Students, faculty, administrators, and area educators from primary grades through college are encouraged to attend.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity (AEO)