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altc2025

Sketchnoting at ALT-C

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This week I was in Glasgow for the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C). This year it is shorter.

While I was there I did a couple of sketch notes of two of the keynotes.

My sketch notes are really for me, rather than other people. The process of sketching allows me to digest for myself what is been talked about and demonstrated. The sketch note provides me with a mechanism that provides a process for my interpretation of what is being said and what I understand from the talk. The process of sketching engages me in the talk in ways in which note taking does for others or conversing on social media.

The first of these was from Charles Knight.

Being a leader, not an algorithm: Human skills for an AI-Shaped Future

Artificial Intelligence as a contested technology, is increasingly positioned as the solution to every challenge, from assessment to personalisation, efficiency, and leadership.  In this keynote, Dr Charles Knight, Director of Leadership, Governance and Management at Advance HE, will explore the intersection of leadership and technology, asking: what uniquely human skills and behaviours ATL members need to thrive? Drawing on insights from leadership practice, digital innovation, and organisational development, this session will challenge assumptions and surface blind spots, and argue for a very human set of skills.

The second was the keynote by Gabi Witthaus.

Engaging Learning: Rethinking Inclusion with Insights from the Margins

This talk is about how learning designers can foster more inclusive student participation in online learning by considering four key dimensions of engagement—cognitive, behavioural, social, and emotional. Student engagement is important because it is correlated with retention, especially for students living in precarious circumstances. There is evidence that engagement in any one dimension can fuel engagement in the others—and the corollary is also true: disengagement in one dimension can cascade into others, fuelling broader disengagement. I will argue that while academia tends to value the cognitive and behavioural, for some students—especially those in contexts of conflict, crisis and displacement—social and emotional engagement may be critical to the successful completion of their studies.

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Writing in a notebook
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

We know that students are using tools such as ChatGPT to support their assessment work. It looks like some staff are also using the tool to provide feedback.

Saw this tweet on the Twitter.

In one of the student discords I am a member of – someone explaining they had to write to their tutor to explain that it was clear that their feedback was from ChatGPT because they’d cut and pasted the prompt as well

Not much of a surprise that staff are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT for writing feedback for students to save time. There is a deeper question on whether this is not just ethical, but also if using the tool is providing useful feedback to the student.

We don’t know what the prompt was, but I suspect that if the prompt was left in as it was copied and pasted onto the student work, then it probably hadn’t even been read before being pasted.

I can see the potential for using tools such as ChatGPT to maybe tidy up feedback, but not to replace the entire process of creating feedback.

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It was rather cold – Weeknote #255 – 19th January 2024

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Having done a lot of travelling and with anticipation with work being done on the office in Bristol, I planned to spend a lot of the week working from home. However the work being done was rescheduled. Well at least I could access my locker in the office this week.

Much of the week though was researching, writing, and reviewing some documentation for some work we’re doing in the optimising operations and data space. It was challenging, as it is quite complex, and wide in scope. Working out what we wanted, what is needed, and what then, was quite challenging.

I am realising that as I no longer use Twitter, that I am missing out on news and views. I am not getting this from Threads or Bluesky.

A good example was this thread from Charles Knight discussing falling recruitment in higher education.

There is often talk about the future of higher education and how universities need to respond. I do think that there is still an assumption that the traditional three year undergraduate degree programme is set in stone and will be here for a long time. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but what I do think we will start to see is young people wanting more flexibility, and we will see employers wanting more flexibility and more specialism. It’s an interesting space, but this is less about predicting the future, more about building in the resilience and agility to be much more responsive to future changes in student demographics.

I realise that I am not as immersed into the AI in education discussion as colleagues both in Jisc and in the sector. There is a lot happening in this space. Though I have played with Bard and Firefly, I’ve not really taken a deep dive into AI.

It was great though to see my colleague Lawrie getting his research into academics’ use of AI published in Nature.