A roundup of what the Jisc Digital Practice team have been doing and discovering over the last few weeks. This edition has been edited by Chris (CT) and Cat (CB).
Digital Tools and Spaces
We passed on some guidance to organisations using Anthology products this month after filing for voluntary bankruptcy protection while they reorganised their business around their teaching and learning portfolio and divested a range of other products. In the follow-up post Anthology’s regional director of customer service answered the points we raised. (CT)
Is AI slop on the rise? I’ve been watching Kurzgesagt videos for years now. They’ve always been very open about their process for research and verification, so this is an interesting take on how AI “slop” is making their job harder and what they’re doing about it. The question Lis in our team has got me reflecting on is whether this all means info literacy is more important or that it changes the nature of info lit skills more fundamentally. (CT)
Leon Furze provides some clarification about what the AI Assessment Scale he co-created is and how it works best. He links to the full open access article at the end. (CT)
This one’s a bit niche and nerdy, but as a music technology hobbyist, the fact that Steinberg has made the VST standard and the ASIO driver format available as Open Source standards really interest me. (VST is the format that enables people to make virtual digital instruments and effects that run as software. ASIO is a framework that reduces audio latency (delay) in computers being used to produce music.) It makes it substantially easier for educators and researchers to use these industry standard tools for teaching and software development. Full press release here. (CT)
Skills and Capabilities
Human error is the point in teaching and learning. Much of the espoused benefits of AI in education are about making things more efficient, so I really liked this as a reminder that sometimes the inefficiency is the point. (CT)
Collaboration and cooperation
Our colleague, Glyn, discusses the importance of “glue roles” in an organisation, people that work across boundaries, collaborate and bind different teams together. (CT)
Why open educational resources should form a central part of university strategies for public engagement. Authors Niamh Tumelty and Caroline Ball say, “Rising subscription fees, restrictive licensing, and digital rights management (DRM) technologies have created significant barriers for students and academics alike. Commercial textbooks are often prohibitively expensive piling further pressure onto students already stretched thin by rising living costs.” (CT)
Cat and Zac from the Digital Practice team, Jisc licensing and Adobe got together in London for the first session of the Transforming Together programme. (CB)
Cat and Kathryn both spoke at ALTC in Glasgow about the development of a digital learning tool piloting framework and the Jisc Extended reality maturity toolkit. You can read more about the digital learning tool piloting framework on the ALTC blog. (CB)
Expanding our horizons
A failure in systems thinking? “The idea that we can understand, control, and optimise complex systems is an illusion born of hubris. The world is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be engaged with. Instead of systems thinking and leadership, we need a way of being that prioritises humility, adaptability, and relationality. By acknowledging our limits and embracing uncertainty, we may not perfect the world—but we might just learn how to live in it more wisely.”
I think there are some important lessons here for us about how we achieve change in organisations and how a reliance on understanding the world through data will only get us so far. (CT)