Tag: higher education
-
From oppression to liberation – PBL2025 conference
Institutional responses to AI—detection software, control policies—reveal that education has always measured proxies for learning rather than learning itself. PBL’s foundational commitments to agency, collaborative knowledge construction, and authentic problems position it to respond differently, enabling students to maintain control over meaning through context sovereignty while developing evaluative judgement about what deserves to exist.
-
AI and judgement: Cultivating taste in an age of capability
Content creation is trivially easy now. Curation—selecting what to make—is also becoming easier as AI learns your patterns. What remains is taste: evaluative judgement about what should exist in the first place. AI can be descriptive but not evaluative. It can learn your preferences but cannot judge whether they’re worth amplifying. That’s your responsibility.
-
My book on scholarship as a commons
We face increasingly complex challenges yet have made systematic thinking tools exclusive to academic institutions. This creates artificial scarcity when we need broader intellectual engagement. Scholarship should function as intellectual commons—shared infrastructure enabling thoughtful navigation of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity for everyone, not just credentialed experts. This book explores what that might look like.
-
AI in Research and Assessment – University of Gibraltar
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with faculty and PhD students at the University of Gibraltar, on the topic of changing our relationship with AI in higher education. Rather than fighting against AI use, we need to embrace it—helping faculty design authentic assessments that evaluate how well students collaborate with AI, and teaching PhD…
-
Context Sovereignty in AI and learning – AMEE AI symposium
Current AI chatbots can’t access your persistent knowledge structures, forcing repetitive prompting and limiting meaningful learning. Context sovereignty changes this by letting you maintain control over your personal learning data while using AI to amplifie your intent. Rather than asking “what can AI do?” we should ask “what context do I bring to shape AI’s…
-
[Link] Changes Coming to Higher Ed
https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/changes-coming-to-higher-ed The institutions that thrive won’t be the ones that resist everything or buy everything. They’ll be the ones that choose carefully, show their working and keep people at the centre. Interesting ideas.
-
Efficiency in teaching is important, but learning is importanter
When we focus solely on how AI can automate teaching tasks, we miss its transformative potential for learning. The question isn’t whether AI can grade papers faster, but whether it might help learners navigate complexity, connect diverse perspectives, and construct meaning in ways previously unimaginable in traditional educational environments.
-
DfE to stop grading English schools based on proportion of Russell Group students
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/oct/26/dfe-to-stop-grading-english-schools-based-on-proportion-of-russell-group-students
-
Reimagining higher education in the face of advanced genAI: An opinionated vision
This post explores the potential impacts of advanced generative AI on higher education. It presents a radical vision where AI transforms learning processes, redefines institutions, and reshapes the nature of knowledge itself. The analysis considers how universities might evolve to remain relevant in a world where AI becomes the primary source of information and education.
-
New Head space course: AI for academics
Announcing an upcoming Head space introductory course on generative AI for academics.
-
Navigating AI challenges: How universities can stay relevant in the age of AI
The 2024 Work Trend Index report reveals widespread AI adoption in the workplace, posing significant challenges for universities. Higher education institutions must rapidly adapt curricula, train faculty, and emphasise AI skills to remain relevant. Failure to do so could lead to obsolescence, reduced enrollment, and competition from alternative education providers in the AI-driven job market.
-
Eureka Labs: An AI+Education company
The first, to my knowledge, AI-first educational institution announced.
-
Weekly digest 25
A weekly collection of things I found interesting, thought-provoking, or inspiring. It’s almost always about higher education, mostly technology, and usually AI-related.
-
Students completing obsolete assignments
“Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools…
-
What OpenAI did
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-openai-did With universal free access, the educational value of AI skyrockets (and that doesn’t count voice and vision, which I will discuss shortly). On the other hand, the Homework Apocalypse will reach its final stages. GPT-4 can do almost all the homework on Earth. And it writes much better than GPT-3.5, with a lot more…
-
Integrating AI in higher education needs a culture shift
Integrating AI into higher education requires a questioning of assumptions, and a re-evaluation of attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs. In short, it requires a change in culture.
-
Link: Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
https://a16z.com/podcast/crisis-in-higher-ed-why-universities-still-matter-with-marc-ben/ In this one-on-one conversation, Marc and Ben tackle the university system – what has certainly been a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months. As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis. Together, Ben…
-
An AI-first approach to higher education in the UK
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2024/01/ai-university.html Donald Clark proposes a vision for an AI-first university, tackling the pressing need for high-quality, low-cost online education in the UK. Here’s a distilled list of 25 transformative ideas, drawing inspiration from other successful educational models: I couldn’t agree more. For me, AI has the potential to massively scale personal learning, and for that…
-
On the ethics concerns around requiring students to use AI
Note: I wrote this over the course of a busy day full of meetings. At the end of the day I just wanted to get it out there. I’m not sure that I’m fully on board with the arguments, but the thing that I love about blogs is that it doesn’t matter. So these are…
-
Workshopping AI in higher education with students
I’m thinking about contributing to a workshop activity that involves students working on practical issues related to the implementation of AI-based services in higher education. Here are some ideas that I think might be worth exploring.