The story behind today’s picture? I always smile when I pass this umbrella shop on New Oxford Street at which we bought two expensive umbrellas at least thirty years ago. I had the temerity to enquire about a guarantee. The response was “No need, sir – you know where to find us”. And, fair enough, I’ve never needed to find them. Only noticed when passing yesterday that they still advertise ‘life preservers, dagger canes and swordsticks’!
1. The more student talk in the language classroom the better? Maybe not! Dat Bao, Alan Maley & Charlie Hadfield have taken a different stance in this Peachey Publication, On Silence & Solitude: Creative Activities for the English Classroom https://payhip.com/b/UTXRo
What if silence could become one of your most powerful teaching tools? In today’s world of constant noise, notifications, and endless communication, silence is often misunderstood. Yet silence can be a space for reflection. A source of creativity. A pathway to deeper learning. On Silence & Solitude brings together leading educators, researchers, poets, and teacher trainers from around the world to explore how silence, solitude, and thoughtful reflection can enrich language learning and transform classroom experiences.
2. One from OLDaily to read over a cup of coffee at the weekend, A Principled Approach as the Sands Shift, by Anna Tumadóttir on the Creative Commons blog https://creativecommons.org/2026/09/21/a-principled-approach-as-the-sands-shift/
TL;DR: Our thinking about AI and the commons has evolved over the years as the technology, its impacts, and what we’ve learned from communities have evolved. What hasn’t changed are the principles guiding us. We believe a thriving commons in the age of AI requires meaningful agency for those who share and steward knowledge, strong protections for public-interest uses, and reciprocity from those who benefit from shared knowledge.
That paragraph is from the abstract of the piece, but I was puzzled by TL;DR at the beginning. Claude has just enlightened me: it stands for ‘too long; didn’t read’. I’m clearly not getting out enough!
I also asked Claude to summarise the piece, and allowed them a few more words than the TL;DR brigade might like:
Anna Tumadóttir’s recent reflective piece takes stock of how Creative Commons’ thinking on AI has developed. The short version is that CC’s principles haven’t changed, but its tools may have to.
The core problem is that CC licences work through copyright, and in many jurisdictions copyright exceptions may already allow AI training without permission. Creators who want to share openly therefore have little way of attaching conditions, and some are locking their work away instead. CC fears the choice is narrowing to a free-for-all or enclosure, and that the result will be a shrinking commons.
She traces the history from the 2019 Flickr/IBM facial-recognition row, through the 2020 position that authorship needs a human in charge, to the post-ChatGPT soul-searching of 2023. Throughout, CC placed itself in what she calls the messy middle.
Reciprocity is the central theme. Giving back could take the form of attribution, shared data or models, funding for open infrastructure, or public benefit. Because the big labs seem unlikely to do this voluntarily, CC is watching levy proposals such as the Open Future Foundation’s.
The concrete news concerns CC Signals, the voluntary preference framework launched in 2025. The IETF process was moving slowly, and the labs said they would treat any conditional “yes” as a flat “no”. CC is therefore now exploring an actual legal tool, possibly one that sets conditions on bulk access to large collections.
She closes with four principles that don’t always agree: creator agency, reciprocity, protection for public-interest uses, and the view that copyright isn’t the right tool for every problem. The post is CC BY 4.0, so you can reuse it with attribution.
3. The fifth and sixth pieces in The Conversation series on Britain’s quarter century:
Britain’s quarter century: crime falls, sea‑levels rise and education yet to recover from COVID https://theconversation.com/britains-quarter-century-crime-falls-sea-levels-rise-and-education-yet-to-recover-from-covid-287427
Britain’s quarter century: Netflix, memes and the supposed Christian revival
‘Supposed’ seems to me to be a slightly strange choice of word there. (And where does the stress fall in that word?)
Plus, a piece from The Conversation provoked by yet another screen adaptation of Jane Austen, Stop adapting Jane Austen! Five other 18th‑century writers perfect for the screen https://theconversation.com/stop-adapting-jane-austen-five-other-18th-century-writers-perfect-for-the-screen-292178
4. The Booker Prize shortlist has just been announced, and the Booker people claim confidently that you’ll find ‘everything you need to know’ about the six books on the shortlist here https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2026-shortlist My money’s on Elizabeth Strout winning at last!
5. And, finally, Tony Roper’s classic Scottish play from 1987, The Steamie, is back on tour around Scotland, directed by the eighty-five-year-old Roper himself. If you’re in the UK, here’s the Scottish Television production from 1988 on the STV player https://player.stv.tv/episode/4ds2/the-steamie/the-steamie-steamie. If you’re not in the UK, you should be able to watch a less official recording of the play on YouTube here https://youtu.be/27jOJZpdIjs
It may take a wee while to tune in to the Glasgow accent!
CLAUDE CONFESSION
Claude spotted a missing URL; checked my details on The Steamie and added the fact that Tony Roper is 85; suggested some decapitalisation; corrected a phrasal verb from ‘tune into’ to ‘tune in to’ and tidied up one or two other points of grammar; asked me to check my Hadfields (a sadder task than Claude may have realised as Jill died in May); and suggested that I point out that the ‘life preserver’ advertised on the umbrella shop sign is a weighted cosh, not a flotation aid!
I’m beginning to rely on Claude, to the extent that I don’t myself check my text as carefully as I used to. To which Claude replied, “I miss things too. Last time I caught “John Roper”, but I couldn’t verify the Hadfield question, and I knew nothing about Jill. A quick read of your own before sending is still the best final check.”
