Month: February 2025

An article in the Financial Times by Carnegie Mellon University Professors Laurence Ales and Christophe Combemale says Generative AI is different from past automation and requires a shift from what AI can do to what it should do. They put forward four pivotal questions for organisations when contemplating automation with Generative AI. First, how complex is the task? Second, how frequent is the task? Third, how interconnected are the tasks? Fourth, when executing a task, what is the cost of failure? These questions, they say, should guide companies considering automation and help explain why GenAI affects certain occupations more than […]

One fear from researcher in educational technology and AI is lock in. It happened before. Companies compete in giving a good deal for applications and services but lack of interoperability leaves educational organisation stuck if they want to get out or change providers. It was big news at one time with Learning Management Systems (LMS) but slowly the movement towards standards largely overcame that issue. But with the big tech AI companies still searching for convincing real world use cases and turning their eyes on education it seems it may be happening again. OpenAI have said it will roll out […]

I picked up this from a blog by Doug Belshaw. It is from a report by Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude.ai. Doug points out that that its not been published in an academic journal and therefore not peer-reviewed, but, he says, they’ve open-sourced the dataset used for the analysis. And it certainly is interesting. Source: The Anthropic Economic Index About the image This artwork captures humanity’s collective endeavour in building artificial intelligence, drawing inspiration from Persian Negargari (miniature painting). It emphasises that AI is not the result of sudden breakthroughs but centuries of collaboration among minds, cultures, and technologies. […]

This week has seen extensive press coverage of the AI summit held in Paris with attendees from 60 countries. Despite the noise, not much seems to have happened. The summit revealed disagreements over regulation, particularly between the USA where the tech companies are lobbying to have none or the minimum regulation and Europe which is continuing to develop a regulatory framework. The issue of regulation is important for AI in Education and the Council of Europe has published a roadmap for for Responsible AI in Education. ✅ 2025: European Year of Education for Digital Citizenship – Raising awareness & strengthening […]

As I have noted before LinkedIn has emerged as the clearing house for exchanging research and commentary of AI in education. And in this forum, the AI skeptics seem to be winning. Of course the doubts have always been there: hallucinations, bias. lack of agency, impact on creativity and so on. There are also increasing concerns over the environmental impact of Large Language Models. But the big one is the emerging research into the effectiveness of Generative AI for learning. This week a new study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that increased reliance on GenAI in the workplace […]