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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899. Through a seemingly well resourced portfolio of web sites, print, newsletter, media and live events, MIT Technology Review says they aim to explain the newest technologies and their commercial, social, and political impacts. Their mission, they say, is to empower our audience with credible insights to understand what’s coming next in emerging technology, and why it matters. I have been subscribed to their free newsletter on AI for the last three years. And it has extensively covered the rise of Generative AI from a […]
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
There is no shortage of noise about Artificial Intelligence in education. We are bombarded with daily announcements of new tools and bold predictions, swinging from utopian visions of personalized learning to dystopian fears of teacher redundancy. It can be difficult to find a signal in the noise. A a new white paper by Tom Chatfield, “AI and the Future of Pedagogy,” is a welcome intervention. It cuts through the hype and grounds the conversation not on the technology itself, but on the principles of how humans learn. For those of us in vocational education and training (VET) across Europe who […]
Digital Literacies Network
I am very happy to see the launch of the Digital Literacies Network, designed to Digital Literacies Network designed to empower Individuals and Communities and launched by my long time friend Cristina Costa, Associate Professor at Durham University in the UK and her colleague Michaela Oliver. The Digital Literacies Network, they say, “is dedicated to empowering digital citizens through collaborative learning and creative practice in digital culture. We believe that digital literacy is not just about technical skills, but about cultural knowledge, identity, voice, and participation in a diverse, interconnected world. We strive to: • Co-produce knowledge: working with young […]
On bursting bubbles, AI shopping and AI slop
Its a shorter article this week as I am off to Lueven in Belgium for the kick off meeting of a new project for schools in Europe, AI Ready. I’ll report on that meeting next week. But as I write, the news is buzzing rumours about a market correction, or put more vividly a burst bubble, in the value of AI companies. Its been some time coming. Market prices of companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and of course Nvidia have soared in recent months. Vast sums have been promised for developing the AI infrastructure with limited. justification. Indeed much of […]
AI Marking Workflow
Gloria Mendoza / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ollowing on from my last post around co-design, there seems to be an increasing number of experiments with educational institutions developing their own applications, rather than being totally dependent on commercial ed tech providers. One area attracting attention is assessment where teachers and trainers in vocational education are used to working with colleagues, especially from examining bodies, in designing assessment rubrics and processes. Last year, the UK Jisc organisation launched a pilot to explore how AI could help reduce workload around marking and feedback. That work continues this year, they say, with the KEATH, […]
From Procurement to Partnership: A New Era for EdTech?
For decades, the story of educational technology has been a one-way street. Technologists built the tools, and educators were persuaded to adopt them. The end-users, the learners themselves, were rarely part of the conversation. This has led to a flood of digital tools focused on efficiency rather than pedagogy, a point that Dr. Philippa Hardman explores in her latest newsletter. The Old Model: Efficiency Over Pedagogy Dr. Hardman argues that the traditional EdTech model has been driven by the wrong questions. Instead of asking, “How do we enable people to learn more effectively?”, the industry has been focused on “What […]
