Author: Graham Attwell

One of the major concerns about ethics and accountability with the fast growing adoption of AI in all areas of society including education is the transparency of algorithms. We know that they can suffer from bias: datasets for training AI often reflect wider prejudices withing society and amplify those prejudices. Nut perhaps even more concerning is that it is often impossible to understand how an algorithm is working: it is a black box. The European Commission has recently announced that it is establishing the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) which it says will contribute to a safer, more predictable and trusted online […]

AI Pioneers is a new Erasmus+ Large Scale project. Building on the successful Taccle AI project, AI pioneers is scheduled to start early in 2023. I’ll be posting more details about how you can get involved in teh near future. But here for teh moment is the project summary as in the application form. UNESCO says AI has the potential to accelerate the process of achieving the global education goals through reducing barriers to accessing learning, automating management processes, and optimizing methods to improve learning outcomes. Education will be profoundly transformed by AI. A high performing digital education ecosystem will […]

Over the years education and training has developed a vocabulary of its own. And I remember some years ago when I was doing a training the trainers course, we had long debates about the meaning of terms like curriculum and pedagogy and even assessment. So it is not surprising that adding Artificial Intelligence into the mix, makes things pretty tricky. So much so, that the UK Jisc National Centre for AI has undertaken to develop a glossary of terms association with AI in educational technology. Jisc say “Like any field, AI is full of specialist terms. There are quite a […]

I used to be critical at the failure / slowness of sociology to develop critical accounts of the impact of digitalisation and the rise of the internet, This seems to be fast changing, especially in the growing critiques of the use of technology for learning. I just received an email about a new book by Christian Fuchs entitled ‘Digital Humanism. A Philosophy for 21st Century Digital Society.’ Christian says: Our contemporary global digital society is not always a good place to live. Authoritarianism, hatred, false news, post-truth culture, the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and political polarisation are organised […]