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In defence of close reading and writing as forms learning and assessment

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  Marginalia from page 72 of the Códice Emilianense 60, San Millán de la Cogolla. Photograph by Rafael Nieto, via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. Three fingers write, but the whole body labours . Medieval scribal proverb found in manuscript colophons Language and learning after GenAI Education after GenAI may depend less on proving who can speak and write unaided and more on creating the conditions for experience in the world, attention, close reading, and writing to generate understanding. Rather than treating learning mainly as a performance to be authenticated, higher education may need to return to something older and slower ( and more expensive ) that has been one of the primary methods of teaching in the humanities: designing environments where meaningful encounters with the world are followed by reflection, articulation, and dialogue. In these environments, reading and writing do not just record knowledge; they become the medium through which understanding takes shape and ...
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GenAI, axiology and learning design: being human is not a given

Something you learn from the humanities is that being human is not a given. It changes with time and in our personal lives. We fail at it. It’s something complex that you must work towards. So there’s a new challenge where education helps us do that with GenAI. As higher education revisits older epistemological languages—particularly those linking embodied experience, reflection, and lived value—it becomes clearer that the centre of gravity of learning is shifting. In a context where GenAI increasingly permeates platforms, workflows, and even habits of thought, we seem to be at a point of crisis and therefore choice—daily, and not particularly sexy—as this translates into a myriad of working groups, policies, and programme reviews. We see this as a branching choice: an in viva voce approach to assessment and a doubling down on a campus-based model, or one where the value of education no longer lies primarily in information access and immediate recall (do you remember a time before web...
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The GenAI monster and the limits of reason

There’ll never be a door. You’re inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling wall nor secret centre. “Labyrinth”, Jorge Luis Borges AI is becoming HE's Monster, in the centre of a Borgesian labyrinth.  It is a perfect fit: this technology immediately colonised our imaginary, our day-to-day, and it actually requires very little digital capability beyond an actualisation of old, critical approaches rehashed from the recent days of Twitter professionally drawn prestige, and a consumer-level, childlike curiosity.  So “human in the centre” lands as a steampunk metaphor: it recalls how we once imagined driving cars, then astronauts in rocket ships, a metaphor dreamt up by a generation raised on The Jetsons . In higher education, it functions as an ecclesiastic, quasi-geocentric assertion of authority and control. And yet, AI? It moves.  What we as a sector cannot, do not do systemically — because of our feudal, ecclesiastic, neoli...
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Digital learning, now with robot voices, chatbots, and AI girlfriends

I remember the first time I heard ChatGPT speak. It reminded me of a scene from Halt and Catch Fire : the Apple Lisa boots up and announces, “Hello. I am Macintosh.” The moment is uncanny not because the machine talks, but because it claims presence when it does. This raises a basic question for education: do our learning environments speak with our voices? And, just as importantly, do they listen? Beyond topic structures, many digital learning environments remain essentially mute. Their architecture offers content and teaching presence is inferred rather than experienced. Guidance is assumed rather than articulated. Listening is even rarer. Where, in most digital curricula, are learners actually heard? End-of-module surveys? Occasional assessment feedback? Perhaps a discussion forum that rarely closes the loop. These are not dialogue; they are administrative echoes. Outside education, however, our digital ecosystem listens constantly. Commercial UX and platform design have evolved in...
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