Author: Graham Attwell

I’ve written a lot about AI and education over the last year. I’ve not written so much about AI and learning and I’m going to try to remedy this in the next year. I’ve been writing for the AI Pioneers project in which Pontydysgu is a partner.

Look at a list of the ten tech companies with the highest market valuation as of mid-November. With the exception of the Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC, all are American; no European company even comes close. In an article entitled Why Does U.S. Technology Rule? in his new (free) newsletter, Krugman Wonks Out, renowned economist Paul Krugman examines the reasons for such American domination. Krugman points out America is a big country, “yet our tech giants all come from a small part of that big nation”. Six of the companies on the list are based in Silicon Valley, he says, and […]

Every day hundreds of posts are written on social media about AI and education. Every day yet more papers are published about AI and education. Webinars, seminars and conferences about AI and education. Yet nearly all of them are about formal education, education in the classroom. But as Stephen Downes says in a commentary on a blog by Alan Levine we need more on how people actually teach and actually learn. “We get a lot in the literature about how it happens in the classroom. But the classroom is a very specialized environment, designed to deal with the need to foster a common set […]

There\s some pretty fearsome discussions going on this week between so called sceptics of Gen AI and supporters (although much of the shouting is over the terms of the debate). Bur it seems pretty incontestable that the big AI technology providers are trying to muscle in on education as a promising market. In a series of posts on LinkedIn, Ben Williamson from Edinburgh University has looked at the different initiatives by the companies who not surprisingly are giving incentives to sign up with their AI variant. Google he said almost literally buying institutions, with prime ministerial endorsement, to advance its […]

Much of the big excitement about Generative AI was driven by the idea that it would boost productivity (and thus profit). Conversely one of the fears was that it would lead to job losses although there was little or no consensus about how severe such job losses might be and indeed some commentators speculated that new jobs created by AI would balance out the losses. Early research and reports into the impact of AI were conflicted, with increasing levels of hype perhaps overwhelming more sober research findings. And even now there is only a limited consensus of the impact of […]

I’m impressed by the work being carried out by the DAIR Institute. DAIR stands for Distributed AI Research Institute. They say “We are an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial. Our research reflects our lived experiences and centers our communities.” They believe locally-developed technology better serves its communities than solutions imposed from afar. In a recent blog, Decentralized, Locally-Tailored Technology, Nyalleng Moorosi looks at the difference between the tools that […]

UNESCO have launched an online course in response to a survey of digital content creators, 73 per cent of whom requested training. According to UNESCO the course aims to empower content creators to address disinformation and hate speech and provide them with a solid grounding in global human rights standards on both Freedom of Expression and Information. The content was produced by media and information literacy experts in close collaboration with leading influencers around the world to directly address the reality of situations experienced by digital content creators. The course has just started and runs for 4 weeks; over 9 000 […]

I’ve been looking at how we could use Open Source software to develop Generative AI applications for education. Of course one of the issues is data for training the AI. And its interesting that reports say that the quality of training data is getting worse, probably because so much poor quality data is being produced by AI. So I was interested in an article, The Making of PD12M: Image Acquisition, published on the Spawning blog. It reports that in the evolving landscape of AI data collection, the Spawning team has introduced Public Domain 12M (PD12M), a innovative 12.4 million image-text […]

I am very impressed with a paper, Towards social generative AI for education: theory, practices and ethics, by Mike Sharples. Here is a quick summary but I recommend to read the entire article. In his paper, Mike Sharples explores the evolving landscape of generative AI in education by discussing different AI system approaches. He identifies several potential AI types that could transform learning interactions: generative AIs that act as possibility generators, argumentative opponents, design assistants, exploratory tools, and creative writing collaborators. The research highlights that current AI systems primarily operate through individual prompt-response interactions. However, Sharples suggests the next significant […]