What is Plan B? Not Plan A!
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Assessment within institutions is at a crossroads, squeezed between human nature and AI. In an educational system that has to cope with the massification of Higher Education, one that must scale and commoditise the delivery of learning and assessment, you are far more likely to have large numbers of learners who see the process as transactional. If you are transactional with them, they will be…
Just finished a big, fat book ‘The Infinity Machine’, about Demis Hassabis. Put aside any tropes you have about tech-bros… he’s smart, driven, humble, brilliant, Liverpool season ticket holder, indifferent to material things and obsessed with AI…. and has a Nobel Prize. Easily the single, most important man in AI in the UK, if not the world. These are the voices one needs to listen to, like…
A new teaching and learning tool has appeared in Google Translate. When a teaching and learning tool is embedded in an existing platform with over 1 billion users, in dozens of languages, it has an advantage in terms of visibility and potential. It is easy to use, simple but powerful. It is also free! We will see a lot more of this, useful tools added to existing services, as that is where the…
Illusion of competence In their 2006 research, Karpicke and Roediger used rereading as the control, as that is what most learners do, see Karpicke, Butler and Roediger (2009). In a survey of 117 students, they asked them to list their study strategies, then also choose from a list of set strategies. The majority chose ‘rereading’ as a strategy with relatively few using self-testing or free recall.…
Some describe the assessment issue in higher education as apocalyptic, destroying the very fabric of higher education. This is exaggerated. This piece offers an alternative, to turning learning and assessment into a toxic cat-and-mouse game, where there are many more mice, and the mice are winning, It is about better and more authentic assessment. There is no silver bullet, as this is a…
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry is suspect. None of the three episodes makes any attempt at comparing upsides and downsides. Almost all of the time is spent, often laboriously, on the downsides, so they come across as hatchet jobs. For a documentary series on AI, there is a serious lack of data, studies and balance. That’s a shame. Episode 1 AI girlfriends First episode, on Jaswant, who broke into…
“AI is your friend, not your enemy” was the title to my Keynote. That statement can sound provocative in a hall full of language teachers. We have all seen the headlines warning that translation tools are destroying motivation, that chatbots are replacing writing, that students are outsourcing their thinking. It is understandable to feel cautious. Yet when we look at the evidence and, more…
The most obvious problem with a European social media platform and software migration, touted by the EU, is that a political stance is not enough to shift the dial. I’d also like to explore the other reasons for expressing doubt. Network effects don’t care about your values, which is why a ‘European alternative’ rarely become mainstream. A political push will attract the Europhile fanboys and…
There is a widening hierarchy of participants and drivers in AI. This is not unusual, as almost all technological revolutions show this type of fractional distillation. 1) AI creators (working on models & other source techniques) 2) AI experts (implementing structured projects and products) 3) Experts-in-the -loop (using tools like Claude code etc) 4) Humans-in-the loop (using chatbots) 5) Humans…
So Starmer, who is now working full time on digging his own grave, wants votes for 16-year-olds. This is a bad idea, as bad as teenage pregnancy. We also RAISED the age of marriage to 18, so why go backwards on this? My first piece of evidence is myself. I was one. At 16 I has a Che Guevara poster on my wall, was a fake Marxist and had beliefs on politics, football teams even food that were…
