1. The three plenary talks so far from the IATEFL conference here in Brighton:

Patricia Angoy’s talk on Tuesday, English language – the coloniser. A black female leader’s response https://youtu.be/75qt67_iBWc

Danny Norrington-Davies and Richard Chinn’s talk on Wednesday, Emergent language: how we see it and what it can be https://youtu.be/B39S6xH40dw

Larisa Kasumagić Kafedžić’s talk this morning, Reimagining language education for peace in our divided world https://youtu.be/K1eTJwPxOYg

2. Here’s the slides from Şirin Soyöz Yılmaz’s excellent talk this afternoon on Designing AI-Focused Communities of Practice For Teacher Educators https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UqLMA7oU5IPmqr7aGGw–5MD2FHr9Cux/view Lots of useful references and background reading on what exactly constitutes a community of practice. PDF below as well.

3. Also today, Pearson presented their new report, Assessment Evolved: Redefining Formative Assessment in a Generative AI Era https://plc.pearson.com/sites/pearson-corp/files/2026-03/pearson-assessment-evolved-mar-2026.pdf PDF below as well.

As GenAI becomes embedded in education, we have an opportunity to evolve formative assessment practices to make them stronger than ever before. The arrival of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has been an inflection point for many aspects of society, and assessment is no exception. Media headlines often frame GenAI in terms of academic dishonesty, with institutions scrambling to respond. Understandably, many have reacted apprehensively, emphasising surveillance and resistance. Students do not appear to share this hesitation. Adoption is widespread and accelerating. Many are already using GenAI for schoolwork, regardless of whether their institutions explicitly allow it or not. At the same time, there is considerable uncertainty about what constitutes academic misconduct. But the deeper issue is not whether students are cutting corners, it’s whether they risk missing out on essential future knowledge and skills, if they do not learn to work with GenAI responsibly and effectively.

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4. Alessia Cogo has put together a wonderfully rich 80th Anniversary Virtual Issue of ELTJ for the conference, consisting of

a set of short commentaries on selected articles from the Journal’s archive. These pieces have been written by former editors, long-standing contributors, and friends and readers of ELT Journal. Each contributor was invited to choose an article that has, in some way, influenced their thinking or practice. The result is a collection that is intentionally personal, partial, and diverse. Rather than attempting to define a canon or provide a definitive account of the journal’s “most important” contributions, these commentaries offer individual perspectives on what has mattered, and continues to matter, in ELT.

Download here https://tinyurl.com/52y44m6j and PDF below in case that link proves troublesome.

5. This blog post by Nik Bear Brown is a long one, for a quiet half-hour at the weekend (or a train ride home from Brighton in my case): The Inheritance We Never Examined: how Skinner’s Teaching Machine Still Grades Your Children’s Software https://www.skepticism.ai/p/the-inheritance-we-never-examined

There is a machine in every classroom now, and it measures what it has always measured. The name on the box changes — Duolingo, Khanmigo, i-Ready, DreamBox — but what the box counts has remained, across seventy years of silicon and software and venture capital and neuroscience, almost perfectly stable. Accuracy per item. Time per response. Progression through atomized units. Performance on the test the system was built to prepare you for. B.F. Skinner named these measurements in 1958. He had a good reason.

6. And, finally, an extract from Graham Greene’s novel, ‘Brighton Rock’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/71297/brighton-rock-by-graham-greene/9780099478478/excerpt

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong — belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd.