Back to Birmingham – Weeknote #210 – 10th March 2023

Monday I was spending time planning and working on the  Intelligent Campus community event for the 24th May 2023 and the Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June 2023. I also did some more planning for Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meetings on the 20th March and 21st April, including producing slides for the meeting I am planning some internal and external personalisation events.

The government got slammed on the Twitter for talking about innovation, through the use of a QR code and some weirdly animated AR text.


I published this in 2011 which was a little while ago, though for some I guess it only feels like yesterday… Ten ways to use QR Codes.

Sorry, this is not a blog post on ten ways to use QR Codes, but it is a blog post about what you actually can do with QR Codes. Once you know what you can do with QR Codes then you can build learning activities round those functions.

Still one of my favourite bizarre uses of a QR code.

Remember holding your phone whilst driving is illegal.

In the middle of the week, I was in Birmingham this week for Jisc’s Digifest conference.

I did a few sketch notes of some of the presentations.

I undertook a fireside chat with Dom Pates on the Intelligent Campus, early indications were forty plus people attended the session. It was also recorded. In case you were wondering where the slides are, well we didn’t use slides, we literally had a chat, with a video of a fireplace on my iPad.

It also coincided with the launch of the revised guide to the intelligent campus.

Many colleges and universities are working on ways to improve their students’ experience, business efficiencies and environmental performance by better utilising data. This data can be directly related to learning and part of the overall campus experience.

I was intrigued and enjoyed this article, Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed on The Register.

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In the article, Alexander Hanff, a computer scientist and leading privacy technologist who helped develop Europe’s GDPR and ePrivacy rules, talks about how ChatGPT killed him off and even tried to fabricate URLs to a fake obituary. A scary thought on how relying on AI could result in you trying to prove to people that you’re alive, though the AI says you’re dead!

Though there is an upside to ChatGPT, Essay mills ‘under threat from rise of ChatGPT’.

The emergence of chatbots and other writing tools powered by artificial intelligence may pose a far greater threat to the future of essay mills than legislation has proved to be, experts said. There are early signs that firms which specialise in selling assignments are already having to shift their business models in the face of more students using the likes of ChatGPT to generate answers of a similar or better quality to what they may have been tempted to buy previously.

At the end of the week I was doing some logistics for future travel and events.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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