I should say off the bat, that I am ‘pro AI’, whatever that means. I use both Claude (my favourite as it is a terrible flatterer) and ChatGPT, although not yet enough to get a subscription to either. This underuse is due to the work that I do, as well as the limitations of my own imagination in respect of how to fully use AI to augment and enhance my life. Fundamentally, I think we all need to get adept at integrating AI into our lives because we are on a precipice, and those who do not understand how to incorporate AI will get left behind. What follows are some thoughts on how AI is currently impacting certain aspects of higher education in the UK, and how it could fundamentally transform HE altogether. Namely, coursework assessment at present, and the structure and function of education in the future. Students’ use of
I recently read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I confess that I am terribly late to this book and I have no good reason why: it is a masterpiece. Then again, I am also convinced that all books have a ‘time’ to be read by the reader, and it would appear that this was the right time for me to read this one. This isn’t a book review, save to say – go read it if you haven’t – it is depressing how many of the conditions affecting working-class lives remain 90 years later: the casualisation of labour, housing struggles, crap food, disbursement of communities, etc. I also recognise many of the difficulties around communication styles I have encountered (especially) in the academy, when he talks about the rough rudeness of the working-class from the perspective of the middle- and upper-classes. On the plus side, I’m proud to be
I was given this domain name as a gift in 1999 and I promptly set about learning HTML in order to build the website. Finally, no one could tell me to shut up! I launched myself into the internet with abandon and in the early days, this website housed a very successful and regularly updated blog. That all feels like a very long time ago now and the internet I remember from then – before the rise of the social media giants and before newspapers had really clocked what was happening – feels like a much more varied place. (Does anyone remember that beautiful word-linkage website blather?) At first I eagerly used all of the social media things as they were released: MySpace, Google/Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. Sometimes I would get fatigued and want to unplug, but mainly I participated to a high degree and was glad of