Ollie Brae’s tweet, leads to Game Over for Maths A-level — Conrad Wolfram The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone). Wrong conclusion: ban it. Right conclusion: change what humans are learning so they step up a level, and don’t compete with what AIs do well. Wolfram goes on to explain that an overhaul of the math curriculum is long overdue, and quotes himself from 3 years ago: Today’s ecosystem of education doesn ..read more

“Loveday Daffodils” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license ..read more

Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of listening and observing, both in classrooms and where I have observed children in other contexts. Here is what I have noticed. A lot of children are still very hyper-vigilant after whatever they have been through over the last few years. The result of that is that they are on edge, quick to jump to conclusions or make up stories where things don’t make sense to them. Their central nervous systems are jangly and many of them still seem to fear that things are not safe and that being on edge and defensive is required, that the worst could happe ..read more

Listened 246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin by Nathan Wrigley from wpbuilds.com So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so i ..read more

A Hem A Po Em. I love words Neatly arranged on a page. They help me Manage feelings of rage. And love And fear And overwhelm Ing things that aren’t so neat. The nuances Of real life The complexities of the inter Personal. Not so complex When shaped and crafted Into something More universal. On a page Where you and I connect And share Me over here You over there ..read more

“View from the JMS Learning Hub” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license ..read more

You try to tell me time and time again That sun will always follow on from rain. You try and try with patience to explain That sun will not protect from further pain. You know That somewhere in between the two is where I need to live. Where the rainbows are. But when the rain is pouring I can’t help But brace and run and flee And save myself. And when the sun is shining All I know Is how to squirrel up the bails Just so. Ready for later Barricades up Survival guaranteed In case. This Tired Old Wise Beleaguered body Has habits lived and lived and hard to break. And yet So desperate, now, to bre ..read more

This blog post was originally posted on the Open Scotland blog.  To mark 10 years of the Open Scotland initiative we will be holding two events as part of the OER23 Conference to bring together members of the education community in Scotland to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade against the backdrop of global crisis and uncertainty (Campbell and Wilson 2021). Hosted by ALT and the University of the Highlands and Islands, the OER Conference is taking place in Scotland for the first time since 2016. One of the main themes of the conferenc ..read more

I've enjoyed giving some thought lately to potential applications of AI in teacher education. Today, I experimented with ChatGPT in generating exemplar lesson plans and the results were mixed, but no lesser than one might expect from student teachers in their first foray into lesson planning. My initial thoughts were that this might be a useful tool for creating new examples of lessons to help model lesson structures and, moreover, offer students an opportunity to evaluate various plans, identifying the merits and shortfalls therein. There is also scope to use AI to help students/teachers ge ..read more

“A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license On 22nd January an invite appeared in my inbox I am writing to invite you for a collaborative paper on ChatGPT and AI…The planned paper will adopt a speculative future design methodology. Each of us was invited to write two short stories, one positive and one negative, and then we were invited into a collaborative Google Doc. Over the next few weeks I watched the paper evolve as we wrote and edited together. The final paper was published yesterday and, as ..read more