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Showing posts from January, 2026

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...

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...