1. Colm Downes & Jade Blue have just established a consultancy, EcoLens Education, which focuses, as the name suggests, on visual literacy for climate education https://ecolenseducation.org/ Their website offers an ‘Education Guidance Model’ and an ‘Education Toolkit’. PDF of the guidance below.

The images we use to teach about the climate crisis matter. They shape how learners feel, what they understand, and ultimately, how they act. By offering a structured yet flexible approach to visual communication, EcoLens Education helps climate education realise its transformative potential. This is not only a project about climate visuals; it is a project about justice, agency, and the kind of future we wish to imagine together.

2. Another one from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab courtesy of Rishi Sunak, The Enterprise AI Playbook: Lessons from 51 Successful Deployments https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/enterprise-ai-playbook/ PDFs of both full report and the one-page ‘Key Findings’ below.

Every week brings new forecasts and debates about whether AI is useful, which jobs will disappear, which industries will transform, which companies will dominate. But when we speak with executives actually deploying AI inside their organizations, we hear a different set of questions. Not what might happen in five years, but what is happening right now. Practical realities, not abstract frameworks. This report was born from a simple conviction: the most valuable insights about AI adoption are not in hypotheticals or predictions. They are in the patterns of those who have already walked the path.

3. One by Michelle Spear for The Conversation with which I can empathise, Headspace: can our brains get full? https://theconversation.com/headspace-can-our-brains-get-full-279173

My husband was recently describing something that happened on a past holiday. It wasn’t a significant event, but it sounded pleasant. I, however, had no recollection of what he was telling me. He couldn’t quite believe it. We know that “recollections may differ”, but how can it be so different? And why do I not have this memory? I’m busy at work – have I simply run out of space? It’s a tempting explanation …

4. Here’s a piece for Engelsberg Ideas by Daisy Christodoulou, Indulgences, LLMs, and the crisis of the university https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/indulgences-llms-and-the-crisis-of-the-university/

I used to be a secondary English teacher and remember one student submitting an essay that was copied and pasted from SparkNotes. What gave him away? He hadn’t bothered to delete the advert for teeth whitening that was on the webpage. Another time, a student submitted an essay with a series of paragraphs in the middle that had been copied and pasted from Wikipedia, with just a couple of words tweaked. In 2014 a university lecturer complained about students who overused the thesaurus function on their word processors and ended up with absurdities like ‘sinister buttocks’ replacing ‘left behind’. SparkNotes, Wikipedia and the word-processor thesaurus are technologies of the past …

and here’s the accompanying podcast discussion, Universities are at crisis point, with Daisy, Nicholas Wright and Paul Lay which discusses the crisis in British universities and how to fix it.

5. I was on volunteer duty at the Cambridge Literary Festival last weekend for Rachel Clarke’s ‘State of the Nation’ lecture, which I thought was tremendous. There’s no free recording of her talk, I’m afraid, but here’s her interview with Stephen Sackur on ‘Hard Talk’ a couple of years ago which covers some of the same territory, Talking honestly about the end of life https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct32rw

Rachel’s lecture will appear in due course on the Cambridge Literary Festival Player https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/clf-player-watch-listen/ but you’ll need to subscribe to watch it: not too expensive, but not free!