Category: AI

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 Doug points out that that its not been published in an academic journal and therefore not peer-reviewed, but, he says, they’ve open-sourced the dataset used for the analysis.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 […]

I recently went along to a University of Liverpool symposium showcasing case studies of generative AI in teaching, learning and assessment. The presenters and audience were predominantly from an HE background but the content, augmented by the suggestions from other educators in the chat provided some great transferable ideas. The focus was on multimodal learning, which is academic speak for multimedia, apparently multimodal has more emphasis on the design and process (but when has a good educator ever really preferred style over substance!?)  The big timesavers with the most impact were in using generative AI tools to speed up creating […]

When we talk about education and training we tend to focus on teachers and trainers in vocational schools. But there is a whole other sector known as L&D – Learning and Development. According to the Association for Talent Development, the term learning and development, encompasses any professional development a business provides to its employees. It is considered to be a core area of human resources management, and may sometimes be referred to as training and development, learning and performance, or talent development (TD). Phil Hardman is a researcher and L&D professional. Her weekly newsletter is in interesting because of her […]

In the latest edition of Dr Phil’s newsletter, entitled ‘The Impact of Gen AI on Human Learning: a research summary’ Phil Hardman undertakes a literature review of the most recent and important peer-reviewed studies. And in contrast to some of the studies currently coming out, which tend to claim either amazing success or doom laden failure for the use of AI for learning, she adopts an analytical and nuanced viewpoint, examining the evidence and providing a list of key takeaways from each report, leading to implications for educators and developers. Here are the Key takeaways from each of the five […]

Last Friday, 24 January, marked the UNESCO International Day of Education. And as part of that, the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning hosted a webinar on ‘Lifelong learning in the age of AI’ aiming “to bring together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to revisit the idea of lifelong learning in the age of emerging technologies, with a thematic focus on lifelong learning as a concept, workplace learning, digital competencies of adult educators, and bridging the grey digital divide.” Current policies on AI and lifelong learning, they said, often adopt an instrumental and technologically deterministic approach, prioritising efficiency over human development and […]