The new panic
When we set up the AI Pioneers community, three years ago. there was a spreading panic in higher education about the impact of Generative AI. The majority of assessment was being organised through written essays and AI chatbots like ChatGPT were very good at quickly writing reasonably erudite essays. What was worse was that the detection applications traditional ed tech providers rushed to the market didn’t work, returning both false negatives and false positives. Over time, the panic has subsided, with universities developing new (and sometimes innovative) approaches to assessment. Indeed there has been a general acknowledgement that assessment needed […]
AI and health and social care
Photo by Mike Setchell on Unsplash One of our […]
We need quiet, rigorous progress to make educational technology trustworthy
MIT Technology Review is a media company founded at […]
Three Years of AI Pioneers: What We Built, What We Learned, and What Comes Next
For three years, AI Pioneers has been more than […]
There’s no such thing as self directed learning
Graham and I were discussing what personalised learning actually means in terms of the promises made by ed tech companies to use AI to offer differentiated and personalised learning. Graham introduced me to the idea of ants following predefined pathways as a metaphor for learners following AI predictions of what to study next. The more ants following the same pathway, the more that pathway becomes used, the more likely the AI is to suggest it. The pathway is never truly personalised, just branching options of a choose your own adventure story where the endings are pre-defined. I had always assumed […]
The Final AI Pioneers Newsletter: Reflecting on Three Years of Collaboration and Impact
As the funded phase of the AI Pioneers project […]
What the OECD Skills Outlook 2025 means for VET and AI
Skills and competencies have always been central to vocational […]
Generative AI and the Future of K-12 Education – Towards Sustainable and Ethical Innovations to Strengthen Human Agency
Maria Perifanou has announced the Call for Papers for a Special Issue in the Educational Technology Research and Development (ETRD) Journal on Generative AI and the Future of K–12 Education.The issut aims to advance research, theory, and practice on the responsible, sustainable, and ethical use of GenAI in K-12 education, promoting the significance of human agency within GenAI implementations. It invites contributions that explore and discuss the ethical equity and policy dimensions of GenAI adoption in K-12 educational contexts. Submissions may include theoretical reviews discussing frameworks, theoretical and conceptual analyses, ethical implications, empirical studies, and critical reviews. Collectively, these contributions […]
Beyond the Hype: What AI Really Means for Pedagogy and the Role of Teachers and Trainers
ts of new tools and bold predictions, swinging from […]
DigComp 3.0: A New Milestone for Digital Competence in Europe
The newly published DigComp 3.0 marks an important update […]
