Author: Graham Attwell

This poster summarises the results of a recent study by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in the UK. The study investigated how secondary school science teachers could use ChatGPT to support lesson planning and preparation. T…

With the explosion in newsletters, I could easily spend all day just reading the latest outpourings. One I particularly like is the innovatively named Paul Kugman by Paul Krugman. As wikipedia explains he was a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024.[7] In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. It seems he left the New York Times in a dispute over content – he wanted to write a series about trade tariffs which the didn’t think was interesting! […]

There are seemingly endless calls for papers for journals these days. And most of them are pretty bland and boring. But not this one. Its great! “University as Infrastructure” to be published in Culture Machine:”Universities have become increasingly dependent on a proliferation of outsourced services, database providers and information management systems, with spiraling costs across the sector as a whole. From virtual learning environments, digital attendance systems, human resources software, booking platforms, data repositories, and online teaching platforms to the basic provision of email and server space, much of the infrastructure of the contemporary marketised university is outsourced to big […]

AI in education has long been dominated by massive, resource-hungry language models—the kind that require data centres to function and corporate budgets to access. But this may be about to change. Small Language Models (SLMs) are emerging that can be focused on educational technology, offering AI that’s affordable, adaptable, and most importantly accountable to the communities using it. Education has long been a paradox – a system meant to equalize opportunity yet frequently full of inequities. Traditional AI tools, built for scale, often amplify these divides. A high school in Oslo can tap into GPT-4 for essay feedback, while a […]

Its fairly obvious that scepticism about the benefit of Generative AI in education is growing. And yesterday a surprising name, Ethan Mollick, added his voice to the list. Mollick is a researcher in entrepreneurship and innovation, and how to teach people to become more effective leaders and innovators. But he is better known for his more recent work on AI, and especially how it affects education and work. Through his newsletter, One Useful Thing, he has led the way in prompt engineering for education and has generally been an cheerleader for the potential of Generative AI. But yesterday, in an […]

So many of the newsletters about AI are based on the intersection of technology and business. So it came as welcome relief to find an edition of AI Supremacy talking about AI, psychology, relationships, adaptation, coping and our self-regulation to live more fulfilling lives as individuals. The edition is based on work by Natalia Cote-Munoz of the Newsletter Artificial Inquiry. Natalia says: “The future of human-AI collaboration is being written right now—not in Silicon Valley conference rooms, but in the daily workflows of neurodivergent people who’ve discovered something remarkable: AI tools designed for general use can remove barriers that traditional […]

Get any group of teachers together and ask them their main concern about AI and the answer will be assessment. Its not really surprising since education systems have built their reputations on the value of assessments, however weak traditional exam systems have been. But of course in vocational education and training in most countries there has been change, with moves towards outcome based curriculum leading to more practical real world assessment exercises. This doesn’t mean vocational teachers don’t have the same concerns over AI and assessment, especially when it comes to assessment of more formal academic learning. In the UK, […]

There is an avalanche of blogs, papers. reports and so on over AI in higher education and in schools. There is not so much about vocational education and training. And as for adult education – it has largely been ignored. I suppose one reason may be that adult education provision varies so much in different countries. And another may be that funding for adult educati9on is generally pretty poor. That is why the latest resource kit “Beyond the Buzz: AI in Adult Education” in the EU EPALE electronic platform and newsletter is so welcome. The faeture asks the central question […]

There is a growing conversation about data rights, suggesting that the debate over digital ownership is just beginning. Apart from several well publicised legal cases in the USA over scraped data, in the UK the government has been forced to launch an urgent review, after facing a fierce campaign by musicians and employees in the creative industries. The big tech AI companies have been claiming that scraping data for training Large Language Models represents fair use, even when being explicitly asked not to do so. Now the Mastodon social network, launched in 2016, allowing users to create their own servers […]

Everything can change very fast when Generative AI is involved. Only a few weeks ago I was writing about how although a number of occupations had been hit hard by Gen AL, in general the jobs outlook was relatively good. If course the present USA economic policy (if it can be called that) does not help in trying to work out what is going on. The latest alarm seems to have been kicked off by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei who said that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a […]