Open educational resources should be central to the public mission of universities - Impact of Social Sciences
Why open educational resources should form a central part of university strategies for public engagement.
DP Round Up
How (not) to use the AIAS
Leon Furze provides some clarification about what the AI Assessment Scale he co-created is and how it works best. He links to the full open access article at the end.
Why XR developers in the UK need accessible and authoritative guidance
The role of regulators in mapping existing laws on to the risks of immersive technologies
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia
This is the advice that Wikipedia gives its editors to spot undisclosed AI generated content being uploaded to the site.
User Acceptance of Augmented Remote Sign Language Interpreting
Helen NB from the AI/ advice team shared this article with me, as someone who is hard of hearing myself I have been keeping a keen eye on the use of AR glasses to support accessibility for Deaf/ deaf/ HoH users. The results seem promising in that AR could enhance/ improve remote sign language interpreting. But I'm not sure we are there yet with the technology, there were issues with the internet connection, battery life, and getting it set up and connected which limit its benefit as a handy/ on-the-go solution. I'd be interested in seeing how this space develops as the technology advances to lighter glasses with longer battery life though (such as the new Meta glasses).
Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian
A pretty sobering look at what happened to a nation that lost its internet connection after a natural disaster took out it's sub-sea cables. The bit that stands out for me is that it's not just a case of losing internet and having to go back to pre-internet communications; it's that so much has been built around internet access, Tonga ended up going back almost to pre-telecomms technology days. Sobering, in a "it could happen to anyone" sort of way!
Techno-solutionism in education - Education Technology Society
I'm a big Neil Selwyn fan and as I'm currently reading his latest book 'Digital Degrowth, I was thrilled to be able to geek out on this podcast deep dive in to techno-solutionism. This concept is expertly defined in the first couple of minutes and develops in to a thought-provoking and engaging discussion.
Is the UK government getting too close to Big Tech?
I read this article from The Week with interest. The UK government has signed a major AI deal with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia, securing billions in investment. This deepens UK dependence on US tech firms, raising concerns about digital sovereignty and environmental impact. For education, could this be a wake-up call to critically evaluate platform reliance and safeguard ethical data use?
Putting ChatGPT on the Couch
Telling insights into the design choices of how and why #ChatGPT responds the way it does to our prompts.
srhibberson·newyorker.com·
Open Educational Resources Spotlighted as Digital Public Goods at
enjoyed reading this summary of a session on Open Educational Resources at Digital Learning Week 2025 and particularly this quote from Anne-Marie Scott "If we can work out how to source tea ethically, we can certainly learn to procure technology ethically"
What is Bluesky? Everything to know about the X competitor.
An update from Tech Crunch on the microblogging scene, including a useful summary of BlueSky and its key features.
srhibberson·techcrunch.com·
Why digital badging must be at the heart of how we recognise skills for work
Misinformation vs disinformation: What do these types of fake news mean and what’s the difference? - Other Side of the Story - BBC Bitesize
Useful for academics trying to raise learner awareness around issues such as fake news. Do you know the difference between misinformation and disinformation?
srhibberson·bbc.co.uk·
Wait... Smart Glasses are Suddenly Good? - YouTube
Marquess Brownlee's analysis of the new Meta product. There are some really interesting affordances (live captioning and translation, maps...). The technology looks like a step forward in augmented reality technology but as he says, this system is locked into the dubious Meta ecosystem. Given teh physically intimate nature of the device. would you trust a corporation like Meta with treat data?
Saying Goodbye to VLEs We Have Loved – a Moodle Story – Digital Learning Applications and Media
I loved this fond farewell to Moodle from the Digital Learning team at University of Edinburgh. As a former student user myself, the mix of data and reflections made a great story and highlighted how VLE changes are very much about how people feel as well as functionality. Farewell Edinburgh Moodle!
Digital Storytelling: An Introduction
Digital Storytelling: An Introduction, This original and landmark textbook is required reading for advanced students of media and communication, as well as anyone looking to understand the transformative power of digital storytelling in all of its forms.
Digital Storytelling: An Introduction
ChatGPT developing age-verification system to identify under-18 users after teen death
Sam Altman said if there is doubt the system will default to the under-18 experience putting ‘safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens’
What happened when teens tried out tech-free bedrooms?
A bit of a stunt but an interesting insight nonetheless into the pervasiveness of tech in young people's lives. The issues of social isolation and spatial privacy stood out for me., painting quite a complex picture.
Story Arcs | UK Reproducibility Network
The role of storytelling in research is a really fascinating area. This podcast series by Anna Ploszajski in partnership with UKRN and StoryArcs has been looking at the way research narratives shape understanding. It's a fascinating listen.
China Green Leap Outward — Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab
Fairly through report on the strengthening position of China in green manufacturing industries.
Crossing and dismantling boundaries: recognising the value of professional staff within higher education
In this article, we use the concept of the third space to explore how professional staff within UK universities experience boundaries. We focus on professional staff working in three areas of higher education that have been conceptualised differently as third spaces to date: widening participation, technical staff and academic administration. We draw on empirical research from three distinct, but related, qualitative research projects that explored contemporary issues, institutional change, professional identities, relationships and expertise within these under-researched professional contexts. We show how boundaries are experienced, crossed and sometimes dismantled. We highlight where increased collaboration has a positive effect on achieving institutional goals through improved relationships between academic and professional staff, and the recognition of diverse forms of knowledge within the university workforce. We argue for a conception of the third space that is not a discrete or distinct space, which professionals work within or outside of, but instead conceived of as a way of working, which all higher education professionals may engage in, to greater or lesser extents. Doing so provides new insights into the existence of third space working among new professional groups and highlights the potential for all professional staff to engage in third space working to the benefit of their institutions.
Beyond the Technology: digital storytelling and assessment - Jisc
My interview with Teti Dragas from Durham Uni and Richard Beggs from Ulster Uni about the uses of Digital Storytelling for assessment. For me the most interesting parts were about the pedagogies of human connection that it helps facilitate and how it's not something limited to humanities. Storytelling has a strong role in STEM too!
Building bridges - working together across departments
Chris reports on the latest work the Advice Team have been doing to support cooperation and collaboration between teams in education. The team proposes a framework for classifying issues and opportunities that we are using as the basis for future work in this area. Watch this space!
Reality check
This thorough report on the state of the immersive tech industry is aimed at people with an interest in regulation, there are some important messages about adoption of XR and the state of investment which have implications for education. It's a long document but the Exec Summary is a good reflection of the whole.
We find, however, that the adoption of immersive technologies today is most significantly characterised by niche use cases, rather than by widely adopted general-purpose use cases.
Many of these use cases take place in high-impact industries, augment safety-critical tasks and overlap with vulnerable groups, such as children and people receiving mental health care. These factors create significant potential for risk.
There are limited consumer applications,4 and the applications that do exist are not offering enough added value to compel people to replace traditional technology with immersive technology products.5
Their use is isolated, characterised by applications that give people extra things to do rather than making existing day-to-day activities easier.
usability difficulties (e.g. set-up difficulty) and difficulty in integrating these technologies into social contexts.
Accessibility issues with immersive technology products15 mean that people with physical disabilities may not be able to use them effectively without additional adaptive technologies.1
Venture capital and start-up funding has decreased significantly,
anti-competitive market practices and the concentration of biometric data driven by the ‘loss leader’ data business models of big technology companies,
these may change in the future
Against the backdrop of the mass release of AI foundation models and generative AI products such as OpenAI’s GPT-426 in 2022, the immersive technology market seems to have slowed down, particularly for VR.
‘I think [Facebook], especially after the election, had just a terrible brand name and that’s why they had to rebrand themselves.’109
funding rounds for start-ups related to AR/VR and IVWs dropped by over 90 per cent, and total start-up funding fell by more than half between 2022 and 2023.115
For broad-scale adoption to occur, the technology must move beyond niche adoption and be widely utilised within the target market, not just by early adopters.
The first multi-university group arrives
This maybe the first of many mergers in HE to come. Not strictly a digital practice issue but it might have implications for things like shared platforms and digital services. There's a lot that the FE experience can teach HE here, I think.
Greenwich and Kent announce merger to form 'super-university'
Interesting that the OfS anticipates that we could see more of this in the short term as financial constraints on HE continue to bite.
Office for Students (OfS), England's higher education regulator, welcomed the move and suggested more universities may explore similar options as they battle economic challenges, with 40% of English universities now believed to be in financial deficit.
srhibberson·bbc.co.uk·
Impact of chatbots on mental health is warning over future of AI, expert says
Concerns being voiced about the impact of AI powered chat bots on mental wellbeing.
Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?
The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.
evidence is piling up that AI is failing to deliver in the real world. The tech giants pouring the most money into AI are nowhere close to recouping their investments. Research suggests that the companies trying to incorporate AI have seen virtually no impact on their bottom line. And economists looking for evidence of AI-replaced job displacement have mostly come up empty.
One participant later described the process as the “digital equivalent of shoulder-surfing an overconfident junior developer.”
And the study focused on expert developers, whereas the biggest productivity gains could come from enhancing—or replacing—the capabilities of less experienced workers.
When researchers at MIT recently tracked the results of 300 publicly disclosed AI initiatives, they found that 95 percent of projects failed to deliver any boost to profits.
Gartner, a tech-consulting firm, recently declared that AI has entered the “trough of disillusionment” phase of technological development.
The dominant view within the industry is that it is only a matter of time before companies find the next way to supercharge AI progress. That could turn out to be true, but it is far from guaranteed.
enerative AI would not be the first tech fad to experience a wave of excessive hype. What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy.
By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of this year have collectively spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and have brought in just $35 billion in AI-related revenue.
But there’s also a weirder, in-between possibility. Even if AI tools don’t increase productivity, the hype surrounding them could push businesses to keep expanding their use anyway.
The University of Banford – WE are not a university. we are better.
Four ways to keep your energy bills down
Household energy bills are due to rise again in October but there are ways to keep a lid on your expenditure.