What is Plan B? Not Plan A!
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…
Team, We are entering a time where more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history. We often talk about bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose this as a career. Each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skill, judgement and knowledge. Having AI alongside the journey and increasingly doing not just the…
Hey team, I’ve always believed in radical candor and despise those who sugar-coat reality to avoid stating the unpleasant truth. The very basis for radical candor is care. You care enough about your friends and colleagues to tell them the truth because you want them to be able to understand it, grow, and succeed. So here is the unpleasant truth: AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my…
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) claims to be revolutionary but it is an ideologically-driven sham. It does far more harm than good. Folding in some of the worst learning theory into one 'my way or the highway' approach, it literally makes no sense. It is a barely disguised expansion of discredited Learning Styles theory, with costly and ineffective prescriptions. They claim its framework…
Arizona has taken a bold leap in education by approving a pioneering model: a charter school where artificial intelligence takes the lead in teaching. Set to launch next year, Unbound Academy will be a fully online institution catering to students in grades four through eight. Traditional teaching will be replaced with two hours of daily academic instruction tailored entirely by AI. Leveraging…
The venerable Mary Beard invited me to debate the ‘Future of Latin’ at the British Museum some time ago and every few years, normally in line with the electoral cycle, the issue arises again. So how did it go and what were my arguments? Sell-out A sell out, with 350 paying Latinists, who turned up to hear Mary chair a debate which pitched David Aaronovitch and I against Peter Jones and Natalie…
As easy as one-two-three? No. Easy as one-three. OpenAI has skipped o2 to call their new ‘frontier’ model o3 (Altman hinted that this may have been due to Telco o2 issue). I like the idea that AI is undermining everything we were told makes good marketing - no read branding, messaging, just get it out there with benchmarks. Social media was full of people saying Google had destroyed OpenAI. But…
The findings in this paper by Zheng and Meister ' The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? ' are quite startling when you consider the vast disparity between our sensory input capacity and our cognitive processing speed. It's almost as if we're living in slow motion within a world of high-speed data. This realisation challenges our intuitive understanding of human…
Great to see a meta-study asking this bold question: Does ChatGPT enhance student learning? A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies. See study here. STUDY Nice spread of subjects and focus on classroom teaching. Predominantly university-level interventions (84%), with a smaller focus on K-12 (14.49%), language education is most studied (32%), followed by computing, health,…
‘Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before,’ said Franz Kafka. That’s pretty much the same as learning. I’d like to see education and workplace learning be more aware of productivity as a worthy idea in this wider sense of the word. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also said, “Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it is almost…
A 30 minute talk given yesterday by Ilya Sutzkever already being seen as seminal. We have gone through a decade of astonishing advancements in neural network learning. We were right to equate an artificial neuron with a human neuron. Biologically inspired AI has been hugely successful. It led to huge success through scaling. We forget that we were using crude string matching, tables and…
I have just visited the Ramesseum, and the statue that inspired Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. This part of the world seems cursed by being the place where ‘writing’ was first invented, religious books written, each granting different groups a sense of stupid, eternal entitlement. They’ve been at each other’s throats ever since. When people dream of text-based heavenly Paradises, they can't see worldly…
I’m deeply suspicious, not of the claim that emotions are important in learning, but of the assumption made on the back of this, that emotion is quite simply a good thing in learning. It leads to all sorts of wrong assumptions about fun, gaming and no end of odd theorising about happiness. Like the shallow side of social constructivists, who simply conclude that all learning should be ‘social’,…
You may feel uncomfortable reading this, as it is a contentious area. But contention must not be left to fester, sides becoming increasingly polarised. Companies and educational institutions are pouring billions into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But do they work? DEI has to face up to the evidence, and there is a case for rethinking diversity training. Are we getting it all…
I had an epiphany some years back. In a brief conversation with a young woman, in the queue for lunch at a corporate ‘values’ day (I was a Director), opened my eyes up to the whole values thing in organisations. “I have my values,” she said, “and they’re not going to be changed by a HR department.... I’ll be leaving in a couple of years and no doubt their HR will have a different set of values……
Google’s Gemini-Exp-1114 has launched and is getting rave reviews. It beats OpenAIs GPT-4o model hands down. VIDEO The BIG new feature is the analysis of video. You can upload video for analysis from your Google drive and off it goes. Examples include analysis of: STUDENT PERFORMANCE Presentation performance Eye tracking in teaching surgery etc Coaching on sports performance Feedback on musical…