For three days this week, colleagues at the University of Edinburgh are striking as part of UCU Edinburgh‘s ongoing industrial dispute with university management. Colleagues are protesting against the threat of mass redundancies resulting from a manufactured financial crisis. Many hidden redundancies have already taken place through non-renewal of contracts and staff opting to leave […]
Read moreThe 16th annual Open Education Conference (OER25) is taking place in London next week and the theme “Speaking truth to power: open education and AI in the age of populism” could be more urgent or important. Chaired by Sheila MacNeil and Dr Louise Drumm, both of whom have a long standing commitment to critical engagement […]
Read more(This post was previously published on the Open.Ed Blog.) With many image and media applications now integrating AI tools, it’s easier than ever to generate all kinds of eye-catching graphical content for your presentations, blog posts, teaching materials, and publications. Want a picture of a cartoon mouse to liven up your slides? No problem! Stable […]
Read moreI was supposed to be running a workshop on blogging for my Digital Skills, Design and Training colleagues this week. For various reasons, that won’t be happening but I wanted to collate some of the links I’d planned to share so I don’t loose them and in case they’re useful for others. As the social […]
Read moreIt’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did not go as expected. At the […]
Read moreI’ve been thinking a lot about slowness and refusal; in technology, in practice, in life more generally. Slowness and refusal was the focus of an Edinburgh Futures Institute Contested Computing event earlier this month on Imagining Feminist Technofutures, with Sharon Webb, Usha Raman, Mar Hicks, and Aisha Sobey. In a wide ranging discussion that questioned […]
Read more(This post previously appeared on the Open Scotland blog and on Open.Ed.) The 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress took place in Dubai last week. The previous two congresses, held in Paris in 2012, and Ljubljana in 2017, resulted in the Paris OER Declaration and the Ljubljana OER Action Plan, which was the forerunner of the 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on OER. The output of […]
Read moreI know it’s a crowded field, but I came across an AI / open data development recently that really made me stop and take a breath. The Living Museum introduces itself as follows: If the artifacts in museums could talk, what would you say to them? Would you ask about their origins, or what life […]
Read moreI’ve been dipping my toes back into the debate about open education and AI over the last few weeks. I stepped back from this space earlier in the year both for personal reasons and because I was getting a bit dispirited by the signal to noise ratio. It’s still a very noisy space, more so […]
Read moreLast week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto. The themes of this year’s conference were: Open Education Landscape and Transformation Equity and Inclusion in OER Open Source and Scholarly Engagement Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI […]
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