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The Death of an Academic
Like most people working in higher ed, I was horrified by the treatment and death of Professor Jason Arday. It was naked racism, purely and obviously. As a white man, I don’t have the voice to speak to that pain, so here are some Black writers who put it more eloquently than I ever could. Sneha Krishnan writing for Al Jazeera, correctly highlights the underlying motivation behind the campaign against Arday, saying “There was no ambiguity from the beginning that this so-called revelation of “plagiarism” was a cudgel: it was a way to make a point that equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are supposedly academically dishonest.” She goes on…
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Slop Will Eat Itself (then us)
Many of you will have seen the story about Anthropic (and other AI companies) buying books, and destroying them in the process of digitising. The reasons for destroying as opposed to just scanning them, seems to be a mixture of cost and avoidance of copyright issues. The need for this large scale process is because, as was pointed out some time ago, LLMs will suffer from model collapse, that is they start to train themselves on their own content. This undermines the argument often put forward by AI enthusiasts that it is only going to get better. There is a real possibility that it is going to get worse as…
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July 26 Monthly round-up
A busy month with my daughter having her Cardiff Masters graduation, our purchase of our first electric vehicle, a trip to Newcastle and finalising my second book publication. I also went to see the Odyssey twice, once with Maren and once “the way Nolan intended” in IMAX. It’s been interesting to see the online discussion about it. I must admit, I hadn’t appreciated hitherto how many experts in ancient Greece walked amongst us. I also can’t recall a film where so many people have opinions. My insightful view is, I quite enjoyed it as a piece of cinema. I will note that many who criticise Nolan’s version seem to have…
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New book cover reveal
My new horror novel – The H-index – is coming out in September with Morfa Press. Here is the cover designed by Roderick Brydon. I love it! The cover builds off the style of the first book, The Recluse Rules. I’m writing a series of novels all set on the Welsh coast. The books in this “Cursed Coast” series are all stand-alone, but they exist within the same ‘universe’, a bit like Stephen King’s Derry novels. There’s even an easter egg or two in them. Here is the cover: The back cover blurb reads: Publish or perish just got real. An isolated writing retreat on the Welsh coast brings together…
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Unsubscribe me
When I left the OU I went through a process of unsubscribing from all the lists and circulars that had my work email listed. These could be research bulletins, newsletters, products, platform updates, etc. It was cathartic. I try to do this periodically on my Gmail account also. But what I hadn’t done was a real back catalog clear out. I had around 90,000 emails which Gmail placed in the Updates folder, and a similar number in the Forums and Promotions categories. I’ve used Gmail as my main account since about 2008. I generally try to delete stuff as it comes in, but even so it accumulates. At one point…
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Monthly round-up June 26
(Featured Image – we saw The Cure perform an amazing set on the scorchingly hottest day of the year) A month that almost resembled the old days of working. I gave a keynote (online), had an external examiner meeting (the end of my tenure for the fabulous Warwick IATL courses) and went to a conference. I need a month off now. I may blog this in more detail later, but this month made me reflect that when I first left the OU I was quite focused on creating distance between my old identity of ed tech and open ed, because I wanted to carve a new path. But after a…
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Open Phase X
As I mentioned in my previous post, I went to OER26 this week, back at the Open University. Huge congrats to Rob and Beck for chairing such a great conference. Like all good conferences it helped crystallise some existing thoughts and prompted fresh ones. So, I’ll probably do a couple of related posts from it. The theme of the conference was “Looking Back and Looking Forwards”. The conference started with an engaging keynote form my colleague Eileen Scanlon looking back over her career in open education, and citizen science. There was also a 20 years of OpenLearn panel and 30 years of JIME retrospective. This chimed with something I’ve been…
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OER ahoy!
I’m off to Milton Keynes next week for OER26. It’s my first time attending a conference just as Joe Public, I even paid with my own cash! They are celebrating 30 years of JIME and 20 years of OpenLearn. Of course, I know all of this is merely a ruse for the real celebration – two years to the day since I left the OU. There is a strong GO-GN presence there as you’d expect so I’m looking forward to catching up with all of those people. I’ve been back to the OU a few times since I departed, and it combines a bit of a nostalgia hit along with…
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Tales from the riverbank
I was invited to give an online keynote to the Pedaforum conference in Finland last week. Their theme was sustainability of practice, so I decided to lean into that idea of sustainability and draw on metaphors from ecology. This came with my usual caveat of metaphors being drawn from nature being potentially dangerous. I used three – resilience, invasive species and rewilding. The main point I wanted to make however was not the metaphors themselves (which were of course, mindblowing) but rather that as educators we need conceptual tools to make our practice sustainable. The first question to ask in terms of sustainability of practice, is sustainability of what? The…
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Making The Daily Sprout
I set out the idea for my Daily Prefab Sprout in this post. Here is the process for making it. Step 1: Curating the Lyrics As good a lyricist as McAloon is, you still don’t want everything. I needed to curate the lyrics from the ten albums. I used Claude (claude.ai) to analyse each song’s lyrics and strip out repetition and filler. I then identified lyrics to keep, either as stand-alone or as couplets. I used the extensive collection of lyrics at A2ZLyrics for this. Step 2: Setting Up the Google Sheet I needed to create a database of the lyrics so decided to use a simple Google Sheet, with…
