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Tag: ALT

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation

Funny meme showing DeepSeek as a cat, stealing OpenAI's fish, which is stolen data
A gratuitously stolen meme from Reddit. Oh, the irony! The hypocrisy!

The UK government are currently running an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence, and have outlined their preferred solution to “include a mechanism for right holders to reserve their rights, enabling them to license and be paid for the use of their work in AI training” and to introduce “an exception [into copyright law] to support use at scale of a wide range of material by AI developers where rights have not been reserved.”

The main issue I have with this proposal is that it does nothing to respond to the wholesale copyright theft which the tech industry has already conducted. Additionally, it firmly places the emphasis on individual creators for protecting their copyright, when the bleak reality is that it is already the case that individuals have no practical means of redress against multinational mega corporations like Meta, OpenAI and DeepSeek*, who openly admit to copyright theft to train their large language models. I would much prefer that the government spent its efforts towards enforcing existing laws in order to protect the livelihoods of artists, authors and creators, rather than appeasing the tech industry.

But that’s just my opinion. If you have your own thoughts on the matter, you can read the full proposal on the gov.uk website and complete the consultation online. Like every government consultation I’ve ever engaged with, it’s dense, complicated, and time consuming. Almost like it was designed to be off-putting and to lead to a foregone conclusion. I was guided in my submission by the work of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society.

As well as seeking individual responses, organisations are also invited to respond to the consultation as collective bodies. ALT are doing so behalf of the learning technology community, and are asking for feedback to them by the 18th of February, with the consultation closing a week later on the 25th.

* My compliments to DeepSeek on training their AI model on OpenAI’s AI model, then releasing it as open AI, which OpenAI is not, something which has irked them greatly, and for that alone they are worthy of praise.

AI Disclaimer: There is no ethical use of generative artificial intelligence. The environmental cost is devastating and the technology is built on plagiarised content and stolen art, for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing real people.
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ALT Cancels Twitter, Bravo

Crow sitting on a grave marker
The only crow you need to see this month

Just a quick one to say kudos to ALT for suspending their Twitter accounts and activity. To quote:

“Following recent events that conflict with our values and in consultation with our Trustees, staff, and members of the community, we will cease all activity on X from 30 August 2024.

To safeguard our identity, we will retain our @A_L_T and @OERconf accounts. Individual members who are still active on X may continue to post about ALT’s activities. We will no longer post, respond or retweet as an organisation.”

Good stuff! We need to see more big organisations removing themselves from the platform. I feel a twinge of guilt at not having deleted my account entirely, but akin to ALT, I have a very unique name and feel like I need to own it on such spaces, so I too have merely mothballed it.

ALT can now be found on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

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CMALT Portfolio Review

Meme of rabbits fighting, juxtaposed with armed medieval bunnies
I would cite the source, but I have no idea where this meme came from

My CMALT Portfolio Review for 2024 has passed, woohoo! This was well overdue. I remember chasing ALT when they introduced the three year review policy back in 2016/17, as I was overdue but they were very relaxed about it, so I haven’t chased since and they’ve let me go six years. You would think with that kind of timescale available to me I wouldn’t have rushed it at the last minute. Unless you are one of my former OU tutors and you know perfectly well that I rushed it at the last minute. I am, therefore, very pleased to get the pass without revisions, and to celebrate I present one final medieval bunny meme.

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ALT NE User Group: June 2024

Northumbria Uni library ceiling with power 'blocks' from the ceiling, and a humours 8-bit Mario hitting one of them
I’m not the only one who sees this, right?

Northumbria’s turn to do hosting honours this time around. It’s been a while since I was on my old campus, and I was shocked to see that the Library refurb ran out of money to finish the ceiling. I did like the ceiling mounted power extensions that look like Mario coin blocks though. Solves the problem of tripping over or accessing floor panel extensions, but introduces new problems for the vertically challenged. Julie said she couldn’t reach them to pull them down, while I, on the other end of the spectrum, had to duck and weave to avoid bonking my head on them at times. I wouldn’t mind if they actually dispensed gold coins, but no such luck.

Anyway, that’s enough shade thrown at my previous employer, time to be serious. Generative AI once again dominated our morning discussions, with a presentation by Tadhg, an academic at Northumbria, who has revamped their Business module with content related to Generative AI, teaching students how to use it to help write research proposals. This was followed by Ralph in their learning technologies team who has been using D-ID and Elevenlabs to create animated videos to supplement written case studies for students in Nursing. Dawn from Northumbria’s Library service then gave us a talk on their experience of Adobe Creative Campus, and reported a much more positive experience than Teesside.

After lunch we had some open discussions on digital exams. Newcastle are using Inspera to facilitate a proportion of their exams, and have mixed feelings about it. I was pleased to note that they have strongly pushed back on using online proctoring on ethical grounds. Emma from Teesside led a discussion on WCAG changes which prompted us to discuss getting the balance right between supporting all students along the principles of UDL, while being practical and having to work within the technical and cultural limits of the systems we have to use and processes we have to follow. Student record systems only allowing one assignment per module, for example.

Finally, Craig from Northumbria gave us a demo of some interactive 360 degree content they have created, including surgical simulations, nursing scenarios, and examining crime scenes. They are producing this content such that the scenarios can be accessed via any web browser, at the expenses of immersion, but they are also exported into a format that can be used with their bank of Vive VR headsets for students to get the full experience.

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ALT NE User Group: March 2024

GIF of Jonny 5 reading a book really fast
Now this is the kind of AI I was promised as a kid

The latest ALT North East User Group was hosted at Middlesbrough College, and had a very generative AI heavy agenda. But first, Tamara at Middlesbrough presented on ‘ED Tech and Pedagogy’ which was quite similar to a TEL and pedagogy session I do on our PG Cert, and I picked up a few points that I can integrate into future presentations. Including the argument that it is really Gen Z who are the first true digital natives which will be useful as I still use Prensky’s original talk to explore the idea that different generations approach technology differently.

Next we had a round robin session on how we are approaching AI at our respective institutions. I talked about the in-year changes we made to student regulations in response to the release of ChatGPT, something Middlesbrough College have also done, and Northumbria are using a cover sheet template for student assignments for them to delicate if and how they have used AI to help with their work. Quite a few of us are pressing forwards with Microsoft Co-Pilot now that it is available.

Ross from Durham then presented on an AI chatbot they have created using Cody AI to assist students on a large module where, for various reasons, information is located in different places, including Blackboard and SharePoint. Cody looks interesting. It’s using various models under the hood, I’m sure Ross said models from multiple provides were available, but I only saw OpenAI based ones in their demo. You train the chatbot on your own data which you upload to Cody, and sharing that data and use of the model back with OpenAI is allegedly opt-in. (Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but I wouldn’t OpenAI on this.)

Finally, after lunch, I presented on something not AI, but EDI – the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Portal which I have created at Sunderland in partnership with our EDI team in an effort to widen access to our various EDI educational resources.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2023

My turn to do the hosting honours today, for the first time since before we had that pesky pandemic. My carefully planned agenda went completely out the window during the first item, but everything still managed to run pretty smoothly, and splurging the boss’s cash on the catering after getting the venue for free was a result, as the food was roundly praised.

We began with institutional updates from attendees. I thought as it was the first meeting of the year a quick round of updates would be good to have. I asked for one slide or five minutes each, got something like 17 slides from one bod, and this half hour item ran to well over an hour. But it was good, and I learned that we are all dealing with the problem of digital skills of staff and trying to make improvements there, and what the Blackboard and Anthology merger has done for AI in Blackboard. Staff now have access to an AI Design Assistant which will create entire course outlines and structures which serves as a great starting point. Middlesbrough College are trialing Microsoft’s Copilot tool in Bing, and have made it available to all staff and students, and Newcastle have seen a big increase in digital exams which are now at 40%.

After the roundup, I had one of my team do a demo of the Clevertouch boards we rolled out last year, then a learning design / content development showcase which provided an opportunity to share examples of best practice. In the afternoon we had a discussion on the role of ALT and where we sit within it, and a tour of Sunderland’s new anatomy suite. We have a new Anatomage table with a number of additional models, including some fine detail scans which have digitised certain features down to 0.1mm.

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The End is Not Nigh


Pecuniam populo antepone

Yesterday I had the dubious pleasure of catching a bit of Rishi Sunak’s chat with Elon Musk about the future of AI, and it was dreadful. Absolutely no criticality whatsoever, Sunak just blindly accepted everyone Musk told him. This is something which bothers me so much that over the past few months I sort of accidently wrote 2,500 words on why the robots will not be taking over anytime soon, but instead of publishing it here I sent it on to the ALTC Blog for consideration, and it was published today – you can read it here. I should think of the ALTC Blog more often and try to get more of my ramblings published there, it’s been a while. They even gave me a badge.

Anyway, the short, short version is that no matter how impressive ChatGPT may seem, it’s not doing anything very new or revolutionary, and that particular kind of artificial intelligence has pretty much gone as far as it can. There is absolutely no path from where we are today to general artificial intelligence which can rival or surpass human intelligence. None. Whatsoever. The real threat of AI we should be worried about is how it is being used to displace and make precarious workers in certain industries to further increase the capture of wealth by the top 1%. This is one of the issues which SAG-AFTRA are striking on, specifically the practice of replacing background extras in film and TV with AI generated images. This is the time to be fighting back and supporting campaigns like this, because our politicians are certainty not up to the challenge, even if it does mean you have to wait an extra few months for Dune: Part 2.

ALRC Blog Contributor Digital Badge

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ALT NE User Group: June 2023

A photo of Durham's lightboard in action
Durham University’s Lightboard, a very cool (but smudgy) piece of tech

Hosted by my lovely colleagues at Durham, this ALT North East meeting began with a discussion of the practice of video assessment. I talked through what we do at Sunderland using Canvas and Panopto, covering our best practice advice and talking through the things which can go wrong. The problem of a VLE having multiple tools for recording / storing video was one such headache shared by all of us, no matter what systems we are using.

We then moved on to a discussion about Turnitin, ChatGPT and AI detection, pretty much a standing item now. Dan shared with us a new tool he has come across, which I’m not going to name or share, which uses AI to autocomplete MCQs. A new front has emerged. Some bravery from Northumbria who must be one of the few HEIs to have opted in to Turnitin’s beta checker, and New College Durham are going all in on the benefits of generative writing to help staff manage their workload by, for example, creating lesson plans for them. A couple of interesting experiments to keep an eye on there.

After lunch we had demonstrations of various tools and toys in Durham’s Digital Playground Lab. This included a Lightboard. This is a really cool and simple piece of tech that lets presenters write on a transparent board between them and the camera using UV pens. I came across this a few years ago, before the pandemic I think, but it’s a strange beast. It’s not a commercial system, but open hardware, so anyone can build one for themselves at little cost. Unfortunately at Sunderland, and I suspect at many bureaucracies, this actually makes it a lot harder to get one than just being able to go to a supplier. So it never happened, but at least today I got to see one live.

Another bespoke system demonstrated was a strip of LED lights around the whiteboard controlled through a web app which allows students to discretely indicate their level of comprehension. We had a short tour of the Playground’s media recording room, watched some video recordings of content created in VR to, for example, show the interaction of the magnetic fields of objects, a demonstration of Visual PDE which is an open source web tool for demonstrating differential equations, and Kaptivo, a system for capturing the content of a whiteboard but not the presenter. You can see the Kaptivo camera in the background of my photo, behind the Lightboard.

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ALT North East User Group: March 2023

Various responses on Padlet showing our thoughts on AI. It's a tad negative.
A screenshot from Padlet showing our thoughts on generative AI. It’s a tad negative.

We’re getting back into a stride now, with the second meeting of the academic year at Teesside. After introductions and updates from each of the core university groups, Malcolm from Durham kicked us off with a conversation about Turnitin and how we all feel about it. From a survey of the room, most of us seem to be using it rather apathetically, or begrudgingly, with a few haters who would love to be able to do away with it, and no-one saying they actively like the service. Very revealing. So why do we all keep on using it? Because we all keep on using it. Turnitin’s database of student papers pulls like a black hole, and it will take a brave institution to quit the service now. Of note was that no-one really objected to the technology itself, especially originality reporting, but rather their corporate disposition and hegemonic business model.

Emma from Teesside then talked about their experience of being an Adobe Creative Campus, which involves making Adobe software available to all staff and students, and embedding it into the curriculum. Unfortunately, Emma and other Teesside colleagues noted the steep learning curve which was a barrier to use, and the fact that content had to sit on Adobe servers and was therefore under their control.

Next up was my partner in crime, Dan, reporting on Sunderland’s various efforts over the years to effectively gather student module feedback. This was a short presentation to stimulate a discussion and share practice. At Newcastle they have stopped all module evaluation, citing research on, for example, how female academics are rated lower than male. This has been replaced with an ‘informal check’ by lectures asking students how the module is going, are you happy, etc. They are being pushed to bring a formal system back due to NSS pressures, but are so far resisting. At Durham they are almost doing the opposite, with a dedicated team in their academic office who administer the process, check impact, and make sure that feedback is followed up on.

Finally after lunch, we had a big chat about that hot-button issue that has taken over our lives, the AI revolution! It was interesting for me to learn how Turnitin became so dominant back in the day (making it available to everyone as a trial, and getting us hooked…), and the parallels which can be drawn with their plans to roll out AI detection in the near future. Unlike their originality product which allows us to see the matches and present this to students as evidence of alleged plagiarism, we were concerned that their AI detection tool would be a black box, leaving wide open the possibility of false accusations of cheating with students having no recourse or defence. I don’t think I can share where I saw this exactly, but apparently Turnitin are saying that the tool has a false positive rate of around 1 in 100. That’s shocking, unbelievable.

No-one in the North East seems to be looking at trying to do silly things like ‘ban’ it, but some people at Durham, a somewhat conservation institution, are using it as a lever to regress to in-person, closed-book examination. Newcastle are implementing declarations in the form of cover sheets, asking students to self-certify if / how they have used AI writing.

There were good observations from colleagues that a) students are consistently way ahead of us, and are already sharing ways of avoiding possible detection on TikTok; and b) that whatever we do in higher education will ultimately be redundant, for as soon as students enter the real world they will use whatever tools are available in industry. Better that we teach students how to use such tools effectively and ethically in a safe environment. As you can see from the Padlet screenshot above, our sentiments on AI and ChatGPT were a tad negative.

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ALT NE User Group: November 2022

Photo of the Owl microphone and camera in action
Stock photo of the Owl mic

And lo! November 2022 did bring forth the first, proper, ALT North East User Group since The Before Times. Though we did have a catch-up meeting in January to check-in and talk about how the pandemic has affected us all.

I was unable to make any of the management meetings to help organise and set the agenda, and so was duly punished by being putting up first to give me now almost routine talk about how our pilot year with Studiosity has gone.

Next up was Newcastle University and how they have rolled out digital assessment. Interestingly, they made a decision not to implement any kind of online proctoring software over the pandemic, a decision I very much support. They have been using, and are now scaling up, the use of Inspera for in-person exams. This was chosen over others for its ability to save local copies of exams – which it does every 6 seconds – as a contingency against network outage, and which in extreme cases can be retrieved from the computer as an encrypted file and uploaded on the students’ behalf. They are using a bring-your-own-device model, with power supply available for around 10% of the exam room capacity, and a laptop loan scheme available for 5%, which have been sufficient to cover them. For improved convenience, they are now looking at providing portable power banks rather than running extension cables around the room.

Next, my old muckers from Northumbria talked about their digital literacy scheme which sees TEL colleagues mentoring staff on digital technologies, and an expanded IT Place which now features TEL as well as IT staff, supported by a range of asynchronous content with certificates for staff who complete set courses. They are looking at digital badges to replace / complement this moving forwards.

After lunch, Durham talked about their experience of dual-mode teaching, including the use of Owl telepresence devices, as featured in the pic above which I gratuitously pinched from their website (please don’t sue, I have no money). It was an interesting experience, mixed. A conclusion from the learning technologies team was that they were great for meetings and small rooms, but the mics and cameras weren’t up to the job in larger teaching spaces. That didn’t stop their IT department from purchasing them en masse and kitting out every room though! Ah, classic IT.

Finally, we ended with a roundtable discussion on the use of student data. Again, Newcastle I feel are ahead of the curve here in banning the use of predictive analytics outright. Durham talked about their experience of the Blackboard feature which allows automated messages to be sent to students based on performance – they turned it off. They felt it was problematic for student motivation as the messages didn’t provide sufficient (any?) contextual information for students.

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