Author Archives: roycross

1. First up today, Ethan Mollick’s ‘Tasting notes’ on Google’s new “long-awaited powerful AI” large language model, Gemini Advanced https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/google-gemini-advanced-tasting-notes Don’t forget to click to enlarge the images – lots of interesting stuff hiding there! 2. From Daisy Christodoulou for … Continue reading →

1. What’s the point of school? (according to 600 kids) is a blog post by Ewan McIntosh, the founder of No Tosh https://medium.com/notosh/whats-the-point-of-school-according-to-600-kids-392f8f0bd981 Teachers and students agree what the point of school should be, by and large, but there’s quite … Continue reading →

1. Short notice of this short (45”) webinar, Dyslexia Awareness for Language Teachers with Boelo van der Pool tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7th at 12:00 UK time. Free registration here, “to understand how to help the 10 to 15% of your … Continue reading →

1. Just under 25 minutes into this episode of Matt Chorley’s Politics Without The Boring Bits podcast you’ll find an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of education in the UK since the 1944 Education Act which introduced free secondary education – … Continue reading →

1. Thanks are due, as so often, to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily for this one: AI for Teachers: an Open Textbook https://www.ai4t.eu/textbook/ Here’s a bit more about the project that produced it https://www.ai4t.eu/about/ PDF below. OLDaily home page here https://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm 2. Still on … Continue reading →

1. A Bit of a Stretch is a podcast by Chris Atkins, a documentary maker who went to prison for tax fraud in 2016. After his release, he interviewed twenty ex-prisoners about their time in jail, and turned the recordings … Continue reading →

1. Ethan Mollick’s blog, One Useful Thing, focuses on AI and its impacts on work and education. Here’s his latest post, The Lazy Tyranny of the Wait Calculation: taking AI timelines seriously https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wait-calculation I’m now debating whether I can afford … Continue reading →

1. The Faculty of Education at Cambridge University often highlights interesting recent research on their website https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/news/index.html#2dd826a9 Try this one, Fewer than 1% of schools have school-wide policies on second languages, language learning and English https://content.educ.cam.ac.uk/news/23-forbes-language-policy or this one, Disadvantaged … Continue reading →

1. “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the YouTube sensation that is Mr Beast” is the first sentence of this article that I read last week. I’ve clearly been living under a rock! https://www.unilad.com/celebrity/news/mrbeast-x-elon-musk-youtube-earnings-835450-20240111 Intrigued … Continue reading →

1. In my first week at university reading English (in my own case, a much more appropriate verb than studying or writing), along with all my friends from school, we went to hear Jeremy Prynne lecture: one of our group, … Continue reading →