There’s a dual interpretation of the title in this post. First, I’ve been using my own writing as a tool to understand what AI can and can’t do. It provides a useful medium for doing this as I have a lot of it, and it’s something I’m deeply familiar with so I can gauge the quality of the output. I tried feeding a couple of writers tools, including Sudowrite and Novel.AI as well as Claude and Gemini with both my academic text (Metaphors of Ed Tech) and fiction writing (my in progress...| The Ed Techie
As part of Reclaim Hosting’s “On Writing” series, I had a chat with Jim Groom about my 20 years of blogging. You can see the recording here. Kudos to Jim for this series by the way, it’s fascinating to hear people like Kate Bowles talk about the role that writing plays in her life. In preparation for the chat, I tried to impose a series of phases on my blogging life. You can always slice these things different ways, but here is the one I came up with, which we talk about in the video:...| The Ed Techie
(Happy 50th anniversary to the best film ever made) One year on from leaving the OU has seen my busiest work month since I left. On one day I had three meetings. Three! I needed to have a lie down afterwards. I was part of the panel assessing applications for GO-GN’s Pilot Hubs. It’s great to see GO-GN continuing to expand and develop and the idea of regional hubs is one we had mooted for a long time, so congrats to the team on getting funding for these. I also had my annual award board a...| The Ed Techie
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to the UN as part of a group of experts considering a proposal to develop a UN online university in STEM for Least Developed Countries (LDCs). I’m not sure how I got invited, and I didn’t attend physically, because, well, because it meant travelling to the US (an aside, I’m not sure the UN can continue to function with it’s HQ in New York, even if it is notionally sited on it’s own territory). This is a non-commercial venture, with the collaborati...| The Ed Techie
I left the OU a year ago, so have been reflecting on how that year has gone. Because I’ve been missing writing all those monthly, annual, random, reports, here is my Annual Report to be submitted to the funding council (ie me). With tongue a bit in cheek, I’ve adapted the format from an annual report that I used to prepare for a research funder for Post-OU Martin Inc.| The Ed Techie
Some of you will have seen how at least one author has been caught accidentally leaving AI prompts within the finished text of their book, and also how a suggested summer reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times contained AI hallucinations for books that don’t exist. There was, rightly, an outcry against this laziness, and a sense of being cheated (also, does no-one do any editing anymore?). But beyond these obvious, egregious examples, I find the question of artistic integrity (and related, a...| The Ed Techie
Clip art used to require specialist access and skills. It was literally clipped stock art, that could be used in creating physical paste-ups which would be photographed to create ads (I remember a friend of mine who worked in graphic design in the 80s having widely admired scalpel skills for cutting out images). Then in the late 80s it became almost entirely digital with desktop publishing, but this was still largely the domain of professionals. It was with the advent of the Microsoft product...| The Ed Techie
I’ve seen a few stories recently about how people (often men) are sort of disappearing into AI blackholes. Whether it’s being convinced you are a spiritual leader, hunted by the CIA, unhealthy sexual fantasies, or generally reinforcing self-beliefs it’s hard to see how this is going to stop. As humans we’re programmed to anthropomorphise, we see Jesus’s face in toast for goodness sake, so even when you know it’s not real, it’s pretty hard to resist the emotional response that ...| The Ed Techie
It is Mental Health Awareness week this week, and this year they have the theme of community. As the Mental Health Foundation states:| The Ed Techie
