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Life beyond ed tech
As part of the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, I did a session with Clint Lalonde on life after ed tech. I’ve been retired for two years and Clint is heading for retirement. We’ve both been in open and ed tech fro a while so thought it would be fun to discuss things outside of that life, and accompany these with record choices, as we’re both vinyl collectors. The fun was in the process. We set up a google doc to throw in some ideas, and then think about a song that might accompany each. We pre-recorded the show so Reclaim could just play it on the day. The topics we…
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August 26 round-up
It’s been an August which saw severe drought across the UK, and wild fires raging in South Wales, so we went to bed with acrid fumes every night. Against this backdrop there are plans to build huge data centres in Cardiff which will use water, generate fumes and add to pollution. I mean, yeah, let’s prioritise AI over people. We had a staycation this month – in the correct sense of that term in that we stayed at home, not just holidayed in the UK. We went to the Big Pit museum, where you can have a tour of a mine. It could be subtitled “capitalism is terrible”, because you…
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Publication day
My new horror novel, The H-Index, is coming out on the 1st September. As an indie horror writer all of the promotion comes down to you. But luckily there are so many services willing to take my money to do it also! Some of these are better than others. Here’s what I’ve tried: Amazon ads – mixed results. Probably broke even on what I spent and what I got back on my last book. Will try again with more refinement for this one. BookBub – you can set up campaigns in here, discounted and promoted. It didn’t really produce any noticeable upturn last time, but I think I may have…
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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…
