Category: Blog

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 […]

In last weeks edition of her newsletter, Philippa Hardman reported on an interesting research project she has undertaken to explore the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in instructional design. It seems instructional designers are increasingly using LLMs to complete learning design tasks like writing objectives, selecting instructional strategies and creating lesson plans. The question Hardman set out to explore was: “how well do these generic, all-purpose LLMs handle the nuanced and complex tasks of instructional design? They may be fast, but are AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini actually any good at learning […]

Is Artificial Intelligence challenging us to rethink the purpose of Vocational Education and Training? Perhaps that is going too far, but there are signs of questions being asked. For the last twenty five years or so there has been a tendency in most European countries for a narrowing of the aims of VET, driven by an agenda of employability. Workers have become responsible for their own employability under the slogan of Lifelong Learning. Learning to learn has become a core skill for students and apprentices, not to broaden their education but rather to be prepared to update their skills and […]