higher education | Open World

higher education | Open World
Open World
Lorna M Campbell
For three days this week, colleagues at the University of Edinburgh are striking as part of
UCU Edinburgh
‘s ongoing industrial dispute with university management. Colleagues are protesting against the threat of mass redundancies resulting from a manufactured financial crisis. Many hidden redundancies have already taken place through non-renewal of contracts and staff opting to leave rather than face ongoing uncertainty.
I can’t join this week’s strikes as I’m still off work recovering from cancer treatment, however I was able to show support by
lobbying my MSPs
to ask them to take action on behalf of staff and students at the university. UCU Edinburgh provided a short template but encouraged members to
“Share the impact being made redundant will have on your colleagues, your health, your family/loved ones/community. Share your fears for future students, the future of your discipline, and the reputation of the university.”
This is the letter I sent to all eight of my MSPs (Members of Scottish Parliament).
Dear _________,  I am one of your constituents in Glasgow Region. I’m emailing to express my concerns about mass redundancies at the University of Edinburgh where I work.
I have been an employee of the University of Edinburgh since 2015. I work as a Learning Technology Service Manager in Information Services Group where I run the university’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Service. The OER Service shares teaching and learning materials freely under open licence for the benefit of all. This is a role I have a deep personal commitment to.
In February of this year I was diagnosed with stage 2 throat cancer and I have been off work ever since. Treatment has been gruelling, but thankfully successful, and I am due to return to work next month. During my absence I have followed events at the university with increasing anxiety and I am now extremely concerned about returning to an employer who is threatening to make hundreds of unnecessary job cuts in order to meet the bottom line of a highly contested financial plan. These threatened cuts are nothing more than wanton vandalism at an institution that has considerable financial reserves.
I also have a daughter who is a student at the University of Edinburgh and I’m really worried about the impact of these cuts on her learning experience and education. Just recently I referred her to student support provided by the Institute of Academic Development only to learn that it is being shut down and staff being made redundant. This week she is missing almost all her classes due to UCU Edinburgh’s industrial action, however she understands the necessity for these strikes and supports staff who are fighting to save not just their jobs, but our university.
I find it hard to express my anger and concern at this needless situation. Understandably, this is taking a considerable toll on my mental and physical health at a time when I should be focused on recovery and returning to work. However the stress I am experiencing is nothing compared to that of my colleagues who have already had their roles cut, who have had to re-apply for their jobs, and who are facing redundancey. My thoughts are with them.
I am asking you as my MSP for Glasgow Region to:
Call on your colleagues in the Education Committee to launch an inquiry into the University of Edinburgh’s finances, failure to avoid redundancies, and the competency of the senior management team.
Provide a statement of support for staff and students that asks management to rule out compulsory redundancies. This statement will be added to UCU Edinburgh’s website. You can email your statement to me or directly to the UCU Edinburgh branch at ucu@ed.ac.uk.
Write to Principal Peter Mathieson, principal@ed.ac.uk, urging him to reconsider the scale and pace of cuts and to rule out compulsory redundancies.
You are also invited to come to the rally outside the parliament on Wednesday 19th, 1-2pm, to show support to University of Edinburgh staff and students, and to protest this reckless vandalism that threatens to damage the reputation not just of the University of Edinburgh, but the Scottish Higher Education sector as a whole.
What I didn’t add to this email, as it was already getting rather long, is that in my 35 year career in Higher Education I have experienced compulsory redundancy twice, as a result of “restructuring” and real and imagined financial crises. When we work in education we tend to identify strongly with our institutions and their mission and I don’t think anything quite prepares you for the shock of realising that they will throw you under a bus with barely a second thought.  No matter how many extra hours you put in, how many evenings, weekends and important life events you sacrifice, it will make little difference.  Things can be particularly difficult for colleagues with line management responsibilities who may find themselves in the unenviable position of having to support their staff through the painful process of redundancy, while being made redundant themselves.  I’ve been there, and I think I still hold a lot of unresolved trauma from that time. These are all reasons why I urge you to join a union now and to resist the threat of compulsory redundancies wherever the axe might fall.
ETA 18/11/25
So far, other than automated replies, I’ve only received responses from two of my MSPs.  Humza Yousef’s (SNP) constituency office sent an email asking for my address and contact details so my case could be logged and a case worker assigned. And Patrick Harvie’s (Scottish Greens) office responded with a lovely supportive email from a real live human being who expressed sympathy and said they would pass my email on to Ross Greer the portfolio holder on Education for the Scottish Greens. Haven’t heard a peep from Labour or the Tories.  Make of that what you will.
ETA 24/11/25
I’ve now had additional responses from Humza Yousaf’s office (SNP), Annie Wells (Conservative) and Dr Sandesh Gulhane (Conservative).  Humza Yousaf’s office said they were seeking further information and guidance about the issues I raised and would get back to me as soon as possible with a more detailed response. Dr Sandesh Gulhane said that Miles Briggs, Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Education, is advocating for an Education Committee session at the Scottish Parliament, with the University of Edinburgh, to have full scrutiny and transparency in regards to their financial position. Annie Wells repeated this message along with additional information.  All three expressed their personal concern for staff and students of the university and their sympathy for my health issues.  I must admit I’m touched and pleasantly surprised by the responses I’ve received so far. They’ve restored my faith in politicians a little.  Still no response from Labour…
(This post was previously published on the
Open.Ed Blog
.)
With many image and media applications now integrating AI tools, it’s easier than ever to generate all kinds of eye-catching graphical content for your presentations, blog posts, teaching materials, and publications. Want a picture of a cartoon mouse to liven up your slides?  No problem! Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL-E, or
Media Magic
can create one for you. And if your AI generated rodent happens to bear a striking resemblance to another well known cartoon mouse, well that’s just a coincidence, no?
Copyright and AI
The relationship between ownership, copyright and AI is still highly contested both in terms of the works ingested by the data models driving these tools, and also the content they generate.  Many of these data models ingest content that has been scraped from the web, with scant regard for intellectual property, copyright and ownership. Whether this constitutes legal use of protected works is a moot point. Creative Commons position is that
“training generative AI constitutes fair use under current U.S. law”
.  Not everyone agrees;  several
artists
and
media organisations
are attempting to sue various AI companies that they claim have used their creative works without their consent. Creative Commons believe that
preference signals
could offer a way to enable creators to indicate how their works can be used above and beyond the terms of the licence, and are exploring the practicalities of this approach (
Preference signals for AI training
.) It remains to be seen whether this is likely to be an effective solution to an intractable problem.
The European Union have taken a slightly different approach to copyright and AI with their EU
Artificial Intelligence Act
. Broadly speaking, the Act permits GenAI providers to use copyright content to train data models under the terms of the text and data mining exceptions of the existing Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (
DSM Directive
).  However, rights holders are able to reserve their rights to prevent their content from being used for text and data mining and training genAI. Furthermore, providers must keep detailed records and provide a public summary of the content used to train their data models. In short, it’s a compromise; Gen AI models can scrape the web, but they must keep a public record of all the content they use, and they must allow copyright holders to opt out.  How this will work in practice, remains to be seen.
The UK is one step behind the EU, the government is undertaking an
open consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
, which appears to be broadly
following the EU’s approach
Copyright of AI Generated Content
Then there’s the issue of who owns the copyright of AI generated content. One common assumption is that AI generated images are not subject to copyright because they are not creative works produced by humans. Creative Commons perspective is that “creative works produced with the assistance of generative AI tools should only be eligible for protection where they contain a significant enough degree of human creative input to justify protection.” (
This is not a bicycle: Human creativity and generative AI
.) The problems start when AI tools generate images that are almost indistinguishable from the content they have ingested.  Take that AI generated cartoon mouse for example.  The reason it’s so similar to Disney’s famous, and famously copyright mouse is that the AI data models are likely to have scraped millions of images of Mickey Mouse from the web, with little regard for Disney’s intellectual property.  Rights holders may be able to argue that an AI generated image infringes their copyright on the basis of substantial similarity (
The complex world of style, copyright, and generative AI
.) This represents a risk which AI application developers are keen to shift on to their users. It’s not uncommon for AI applications to explicitly make no copyright claim over the images generated by their tools.  For example with regards to the copyright of AI generated images,
Canva states
“The treatment of AI-generated images and other works under copyright law is an open question and the answer may vary depending on what country you live in.
For now, Canva does not make any copyright claim over the images you create with our free AI image generator app. As between you and Canva, you own the images you create with Text to Image (subject to you following our
), and you give us the right to host them on our platform and to use them for marketing our products.”
So if Disney does happen to spot your AI generated cartoon mouse and decides to sue, it’s you, or your employer, that’s going to be liable, not the tool you used to generate the image.
OER Service Guidance
The University of Edinburgh’s
OER Service
currently provides the following advice and guidance on using AI generated images:
We also recommend consulting the University of Edinburgh’s
Generative AI Guidance for Staff
Public Domain Images
A more ethical, and environmentally friendly, alternative to using AI generated images is to use public domain images, of which there are millions, with more entering the commons every year.  Public domain works, are creative works that are no longer under copyright protection because copyright has expired and they have entered the public domain, or they have been dedicated to the public domain by creators who choose to give up their copyright.  This means that they can be used free of charge, by anyone, for any purpose, without any restrictions whatsoever.  You don’t even have to provide attribution to the creator, though we always recommend that you do.
There are many fabulous sources of easily discoverable public domain images on the web, including:
Flickr Commons
Wikimedia Commons
Rijksmuseum
Getty Museum Open Content Program
Europeana
Openverse
British Library
on Flickr
Public Domain Review
Public Domain Image Archive
Public Domain Day
is
celebrated
on
the 1
st
of
January
each year.
In many countries,
his is the day that copyright expires
on creative
works,
and they become part of
the public domain.
This year, on Public Domain Day, the Public Domain Review launched a new interface to their
Image Archive
to enable users to search and explore their collections.
Public Domain Image Archive
And if you do happen to be looking for a cartoon mouse to use in your slides you’ll find one in the public domain that you can use with no restrictions or risk of copyright infringement, either for you or your employer. The original version of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 cartoon
Steamboat Willie
entered the public domain in 2024.
Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney, public domain image from the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie.
Further Reading
CC Responds to the United States Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
AI Act of the European Union
AI, the Artificial Intelligence Act & Copyright
European Parliament Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market
The complex world of style, copyright, and generative AI
This is not a bicycle: Human creativity and generative AI
Preference signals for AI training
The Power of Open Culture
Happy Public Domain Day 2025
Mickey’s Adventure into the Public Domain
Mickey Mouse Is Now in the Public Domain After 95 Years of Disney Copyright
Seated Woman Blogging, after Albert Reuss
” by Mike Licht, CC BY 2.0 on Flickr.
I was supposed to be running a workshop on blogging for my Digital Skills, Design and Training colleagues this week.  For various reasons, that won’t be happening but I wanted to collate some of the links I’d planned to share so I don’t loose them and in case they’re useful for others.
As the social media landscape has become more and more toxic and fragmented, people are increasingly seeking other channels to share their ideas and practice, connect with their peers, and build community.  As a result, there’s been a welcome resurgence in blogging, newsletters and small-scale podcasting over the last year or so.  These forms of communication are less tied to specific social media platforms, giving creators more control over their work and who they share it with.  At times like these it’s been really encouraging to see familiar communities and independent voices reemerging across the web.  So if you’re new to blogging, or if you just need a boost to get started again, here’s some resources that might help.
Reclaim Hosting Blogging Community of Practice.
An informal community of practice for academic bloggers.
“Now, we
believe
academic blogging is not just for the holidays or indeed the odd conference, but for life (#4life), and that is why we are setting out to support a new community of practice for all education bloggers out there looking for a bit of support and motivation along the way.”
The community has a Discord server that aims to:
share blogging tips and inspiration via the channel;
collate open resources and contribute our own;
organise monthly live sessions with guest presenters;
encourage everyone to share blog posts, what works for their blogging practice or what is stopping them from blogging.
(Blogging) Challenge Accepted
by Maren Deepwell. A lovely post by Maren about what inspires her to blog.
You should get a blog
by Hugh Rundel. A brilliant post that answers almost every conceivable question you could ask about blogging. `
CPD Webinar Series 2025: Thinking about blogging?
22 April 12.30 – 13.30. This webinar, led by members of the
#altc blog team,
will provide some practical guidance on getting started with blogging.
Blogging About Blogging
by Alan Levine.  Many wise words about blogging from one of the best bloggers out there.
From the archives
Have No Fear: Learning to love your blog
. I wrote this blog post years ago to address some of the common fears and anxieties about blogging.  It was quite popular at the time and I think it’s still really useful.
Blogging to Build your Professional Profile
. These are the resources for an old digital skills workshop I used to run on academic blogging.  All the links are way out of date but some of the content, particularly around
benefits of blogging
privacy, openness and licensing
, and
writing for blogs
, is still pretty relevant.
And lastly…
I want to finish with this lovely quote from Alan Levine, which perfectly captures what I think is so important about blogging.
“…it’s the writing out loud that makes me feel best, the part of the process before I click “Publish”, not what happens after. Anything after is a bonus.”
I [still] blog therefore I [still] am
by Alan Levine.
It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did
not
go as expected.
View from the ward
At the beginning of the year I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my hands properly. That was the start of the rapid onset of a bewildering and debilitating range of symptoms. After numerous scans, tests, and two hospital admissions, I was eventually diagnosed with a
rare autoimmune disease
. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, with a lot of medication and mixed success.  I’ve been lucky to be more or less fit and healthy for most of my life, so to suddenly lose the ability to do so many things that I previously took for granted has been challenging to say the least.  I can no longer dance, sew, or wear my fancy shoes, writing is a challenge, walking is slooooow some days, and traveling any distance without assistance is difficult. Having to slow down has forced me to recenter and I’m still trying to figure out what life will be like from this point on, who I’ll be when I can no longer do so many of the things that make me who I am.  There’s very little data about how this condition is likely to progress, hopefully things will improve once we get the medication right, but who knows?  I’m just trying to take it as it comes.
Despite all of the above, I’m still working with the
OER Service
at the University of Edinburgh. I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues for their support, and to my managers who have put adjustments in place to enable me to keep working from home. I really miss going over to the office in Edinburgh, but the four hour round trip is beyond me for the time being. I never thought I’d miss that Scotrail commute but here we are.
OER24 Conference
MTU Cork
At the beginning of the year, before things took a turn for the worse, I went to the OER24 Conference in Cork with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto, to present a paper on
Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education
.  It was great to be there with Mayu and there was a lot of interest in her experience as a student working with the OER Service. The highlight of the conference for me was undoubtedly Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s inspiring keynote,
The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at the crossroads
, which explored their own lives and experiences as open educators and the possibilities generated by their profound and timely
Higher Education for Good
.  You can read my reflection on the the conference here
OER24: Gathering Courage
. Also! MTU has some really interesting architecture.
Their Finest Hour
Their Finest Hour
project came to an end in June with the launch of the University of Oxford’s
online archive
of 25,000 new stories and artefacts from the Second World War, all of which have been shared under open licence.  I’m very proud that our
Edinburgh collection day
gathered and contributed 50 stories and many hundreds of photographs, thanks to the incredible work of project intern Eden Swimer.  You can read Eden’s thoughtful reflection on his internship here
Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’
.  I nominated Eden for an ISG Recognition Award in September and was delighted that he won the award for
Student Staff Member of the Year
Learning Analytics
A fair chunk of my time last year was taken up with setting up and acting as business lead for a new learning analytics project. As part of the university’s
VLE Excellence
programme, the project aims to identify the learning analytics data available in Learn and other centrally supported learning technology applications, and enable staff and students to access and use it to support their teaching and learning.  It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in anything related to learning analytics so it’s been interesting to get my head back into this space again, particularly as the project is focused on empowering staff and students to access their own learning analytics data..
EDE to DSDT
In October we had a small restructuring at work and my team moved from Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) into a new section, Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT). I’ve really enjoyed working in EDE over the last 5 years, and we’ll continue working closely with many of the services there, but I’m also excited about the opportunities the new section will bring.  I’m particularly looking forward to working with our Wikimedian in Residence again and exploring new open textbook projects with our Graphic Design Team.
AI and the Commons
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the murky waters of ethics, AI and the commons and have written a couple of blog posts on the ethics of AI in relation to
OER
and
contested museum collections
All the other stuff…
Because my health has been so ropey, I’ve had to step back, hopefully temporarily, from most of the additional voluntary work I do, including assessing CMALT, sitting on award panels, contributing to City University of London’s MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, and attending policy events.  I really miss the connections these activities used to bring so I’ve been trying to focus more on reconnecting through social media networks….
…which has been “interesting” given the hellscape of most social media platforms these days. I’ve barely used facebook for over a decade, though I still have an account there, primarily for finding last cats (long story). Twitter was always my main social media channel, I’ve had an account there since 2007, and it’s where I found my open education community. Seeing twitter degenerate into a fascist quagmire has made me so angry, however it was still a wrench to leave.  In March we mothballed the femedtech account, I stepped back from my own account later in the year, before finally deleting it. This was one of my last retweets. It seems fitting.
I’ve been slowly migrating to
Bluesky
and
Mastodon
over the course of the year and it’s been great to start building new and old communities there. I like the different pace of the two platforms.  Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations.
This enforced slowing down, together with the changing social media landscape, has also prompted me to start blogging again. I hadn’t abandoned this blog completely but I’d definitely got out of the habit of writing here regularly. It’s been good to take the time to think and reflect again, and to try and express some of that reflection in words. At the end of the year I wrote a post about
Slowing Down
which really seemed to strike a chord with people. Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever.
Beginnings and Endings
On a personal level September was a month of beginnings and endings. My daughter went off to university and it’s been great to see her stretch her wings and find her people. It’s also been illuminating to see the university’s systems from the student side.
In September we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Josh.  He was magnificent, and he was my best boy, despite his habit of going round the neighbourhood scrounging for food and pretending to be a stray. He turned up twice on a local lost cats facebook group.  The shame.  I miss him terribly.
Josh 2014 – 2024
I also had to say goodbye to our family home in Carriegreich on the Isle of Harris. This was my grandparents and then my father’s home and I spent a lot of time here during my childhood.  This is where I learned how to cast a line, set an (illegal) net and row a boat, collect the eggs and feed the sheep, tell a guillemot from a razorbill, pick up Russian klondykers on the ancient shortwave radio, and keep an eye out for the grey fishery protection vessels sliding out of the mist.  It’s where I spent hours wandering over the croft and the shore lost in other worlds. I very rarely remember dreams, but I still dream about this house and this shore.  We had hoped to visit the house one last time, but sadly that wasn’t possible because Josh was so unwell.  We said goodbye to Josh and to Carriegreich within the week.
Carriegreich
To try and make some sense of where I am now, I’ve been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s
Tehanu
.  It’s always been one of my favourite Le Guin books, I love the writing and the pacing and the fact that it centres the experiences of an older woman finding her place and her power in a changing world through the different phases of her life.
“Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am sure there will always be something to be done.
(This post previously appeared on the
Open Scotland
blog and on
Open.Ed
.)
The
3rd UNESCO
World
OER Congress
took place in Dubai last week.  The previous two congresses, held in Paris in 2012, and Ljubljana in 2017, resulted in the
Paris OER Declaration
and the
Ljubljana OER Action Plan
, which was the forerunner of the 2019
UNESCO Recommendation on OER
.  The output of the 3rd OER Congress is the
Draft Dubai Declaration on OER
The theme of the Dubai congress was “Digital Public Goods: Open Solutions and AI for Inclusive Access to Knowledge”.  Digital public goods (DPG) are defined by the UN’s
Roadmap for Digital Cooperation
, as
“open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the sustainable digital goals (SDGs)”.
In this context open education resources are regarded as digital public goods that “support the enrichment of the global knowledge commons”.
In addition to the
Sustainable Development Goals
, the
UNESCO Recommendation on OER
, and the
Road Map for Digital Cooperation,
the Dubai Declaration also references Commitment 7 of
Our Common Agenda
: to “Improve digital cooperation”.
Key themes of the Declaration are harnessing the opportunities afforded by emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain to create new OER, curate and index existing OER, translate OER, and “ensure the provenance, integrity, and lawful use of OER”.
The Declaration outlines Recommendations in five areas (paraphrased from the draft):
Capacity Building
Support professional development for educators, content creators and those working on Gen AI projects, on copyright (inc. exceptions and limitations) and open licensing, to understand challenges posed by emerging technologies and ensure sharing and collaboration that respect copyright laws.
Promote digital literacy for users and developers to engage in the responsible creation and use of emerging technologies for OER.
Develop technologies such as cryptographic signing, semantic interoperability, and machine learning to improve attribution and discoverability of OER. E.g. Embedding metadata into OER, identifier generation standards, author-identity credentials, time-stamping mechanisms and signing OER packages.
Prioritise digitally signed works for OER repositories, and their use in the training open AI models.
Implement strategies grounded in human rights that are open, accessible, multistakeholder and gender inclusive to ensure respect for user generated data, metadata, privacy and attend to ethical practices and respect copyright rules.
Policy
Policy environments should focus on the protection and verifiability of authorship of OER and other Digital Public Goods.
Open licensing should be incorporated into the Terms of Use of AI applications specifying that it is only to be used by humans to generate openly licensed content.
Support embedding licensing information of training content in the output generated by AI tools. When open licensed materials are used to train AI models, the resulting generated content should be made available under compatible open licenses, and attribution to the copyright owner(s) of the training materials should be reflected in the generated content.
Encourage and support research into next generation attribution systems to enable tracing the use and re-use of OER.
Ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER
Support the development of AI-enabled OER that is accessible in low-bandwidth scenarios and designed to enhance the accessibility of vulnerable groups.
Include cryptographic signing into quality criteria for the production of OER. Emphasise the connection of signatures to real-world identity of authors – to create incentives for publication and counter misinformation.
Support the translation and contextualisation of OER with the participation of different user communities.
Encourage the engagement of diverse participants in communities of open practice.
Sustainability Models for OER
Support approaches IPR protection & OER development driven by the
ROAM-X
principles of human rights, openness, accessibility, and multi-stakeholder participation.
Promote sustainable environmental approaches for digital public goods to minimise energy consumption and reduce the carbon footprint, recognising when the use of AI-tools is not necessary or appropriate.
Practice participatory governance, active transparency, public reporting and regular audits for the complete OER ecosystem (including technological, legal, and pedagogical aspects) to build trust among stakeholders.
Prioritise public infrastructure and public-private partnerships, while also supporting private initiatives for OER using emerging technologies, that adhere to the principles of digital public goods and openness.
International cooperation
Promote human centered use of emerging technologies, including AI, for the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER
Engage with the open community and legal experts on open licensing and IP law to ensure that emerging technologies adhere to legal terms and address the demands of diverse stakeholders.
Develop ethical frameworks and new technologies to promote OER, including more effective identification of provenance and tracking using AI-based techniques.
Encourage OER repositories and content source to implement policies that prioritize digitally signed works, and define how they may be processed and used, including criteria for the training of AI models.
Develop AI platforms to create and OER adhering to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER.
A few thoughts
As with previous congresses, there were no representatives present from UK government ministries, education authorities, or institutions. While this is disappointing, we do hope that the new Declaration will prompt the education sector in Scotland to reconsider the benefits and affordances of open educational resources. It was the Paris OER Declaration that originally inspired the development of the Scottish Open Education Declaration, and Joe Wilson and I were fortunate to attend the 2nd World Congress in Ljubljana to represent Open Scotland. Though we had limited success persuading the Scottish Government of the benefits of supporting OER, the Scottish Open Education Declaration did prove to have some influence further from home, particularly in Morocco, where it informed the development of a similar initiative.  I was pleased to see that Morocco were active participants in the Dubai Congress where they highlighted their “national OER and Open Science strategy that aims to modernise education and expand research accessibility, driven by strong engagement from educators.” (
Latifa bint Mohammed inaugurates 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress in Dubai.
I’m very encouraged that the Declaration highlights the importance of developing digital skills and copyright literacy to ensure everyone is able to understand the impact of AI and emerging technologies.  Supporting digital skills development has always been one of the cornerstones of the University of Edinburgh’s OER Policy and OER Service.  Our approach is to empower staff and students to develop the skills and confidence to make informed decisions about creating and using open educational resources and open licensed content.
I’m also pleased that the Declaration recognises the importance of supporting diverse communities of open practice, though I do feel that supporting open practice should underpin
all
the recommendations of the Declaration.
I’m a bit surprised by the prioritisaton of digital signatures and cryptographic technologies and I’m alarmed by the recommendation that signatures should connect to authors’ real-world identities.  While this approach does have the potential to address issues relating to attribution and verification, and to combat misinformation, it’s also potentially ripe for abuse.
It’s interesting that embedding metadata in open content and tracking OER have reappeared.  Both are great ideas, but neither are straightforward to implement.  I know, I worked with educational metadata standards for many years, and also managed a programme of small OER tracking projects way back on 2010. Part of the problem is that open educational resources are such a diverse class of things and, by their very nature, they are scattered all over the internet.  I can’t help feeling that many of these recommendations pre-suppose that OERs exist in curated repositories. While some do, the vast majority don’t, and never will. Semantic search services have long been seen as the key to enable cross searching and discovery of heterogenous resources distributed across the web, but I’m not sure how much progress has been made towards making this a reality.
While I’m not surprised that the Declaration focuses on the affordances and challenges of generative AI and emerging technologies, I am concerned that it rather glosses over the many problematic ethical issues, including algorithmic bias, exploitative and extractive labour practices, and environmental impact. The Declaration does reference the
ROAM-X
principles, sustainable environmental approaches and highlights the importance of recognising when the use of AI-tools is not necessary or appropriate, but I feel it could have gone a lot further.  I would like to have seen some acknowledgement of the risks of rapidly embracing these new technologies, risks that is not evenly distributed across the globe, and to focus instead on human centred approaches to achieve the aims of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Resources
3rd UNESCO World OER Congress
3rd UNESCO World OER Congress livestream recordings
Draft Dubai Declaration on OER: Digital Public Goods and Emerging Technologies for Equitable and Inclusive Access to Knowledge
Latifa bint Mohammed inaugurates 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress in Dubai
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the debate about open education and AI over the last few weeks.  I stepped back from this space earlier in the year both for personal reasons and because I was getting a bit dispirited by the signal to noise ratio. It’s still a very noisy space, more so if anything, but there are some weel-kent voices emerging that are hard to ignore.
David Wiley laid out his stall last month in the webinar
Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education
, and his views have been predictably polarising. There have already been several thoughtful response to David, which I can highly recommend reading:
Openness isn’t just about product
~ Martin Weller
Is Open Education becoming Gen-AI Education?
~ Robert Schuwer
The Soul of Open is In Danger
~ Heather M. Ross
I don’t want to repeat the very pertinent points that have already been made, but I do want to add my concerns about the staring point of David’s argument which is
“the primary goal of the open education movement has been to increase access to educational opportunities. The primary strategy for accomplishing this goal has been to increase access to educational materials. And the primary tactic for implementing this strategy has been to create and share OER.”
Why Generative AI Is More Effective at Increasing Access to Educational Opportunity than OER
This is certainly one view of the open education movement, (which is by no means a homogenous entity), but open education isn’t just about goals, strategies and tactics, there are other perspectives that need to be taken into consideration.  I find this content centric view of open education a bit simplistic and reductive and I had hoped that we’d moved on from this by now.  I would suggest that the primary purpose of open education is to improve knowledge equity, support social justice, and increase diversity and inclusion. While content and OER have an important role to play, the way to do this is by sharing open practice.
This slide in particular made me pause…
Leaving aside the use of the
Two Concepts of Liberty
, which is not unproblematic, I’m presuming “users” equates here to teachers and learners, which is a whole other topic of debate. It’s certainly true that open licences alone don’t grant the skills and expertise needed to engage in “high-demand revise and remix activities”, but I’m not sure anyone ever claimed they did? And yes GenAI
could
be a way to provide users with these skills, but at what cost? There’s little discussion here about the ethical issues of copyright theft, algorithmic bias, exploitation of labour, and the catastrophic environmental impact of AI. Surely a more responsible and sustainable way to gain these skills and expertise is to connect with other teachers and learners, other human beings, and by sharing our pedagogy and practice? While there’s a certain logic to David’s hypothesis, it doesn’t take into account the diversity of practice that can make open education so empowering.
Aside from the prediction that Generative AI Education will save / replace / supersede OER, I couldn’t help feeling that there is still an underlying assumption that OER = open textbooks. (This was also an issue I had with one of the keynotes at this year’s
OER24 Conference
) It shouldn’t need saying, but there are myriad kinds of open resources above and beyond open textbooks.  What about student co-created OER for example? It’s through the process of creation, of gathering information, of developing digital and copyright literacy skills, of formulating knowledge and understanding, that learning takes place.  The OER, the content created, is a valuable  tangible output of that process, but it’s not the most important thing. If we ask GenAI to produce our OER, what happens to the process of learning by doing, creating and connecting with other human beings?
This issue was touched on by Maren Deepwell and Audrey Watters in the most recent episode of Maren’s brilliant
Leading Virtual Teams
podcast.  It’s been really inspiring  to see Audrey
re-enter the fray
of
education technology criticism
.  We need her clear incisive voice and fearless critique now more than ever.
Touching on the language we use to talk about AI, Audrey reminded us that “Human memory and computer memory are not the same thing.” And in her
The Extra Mile
newsletter she says:
“I do not believe that the machine is or can be “intelligent” in the way that a human can. I don’t think that generative AI and LLMs work the same way my mind does.”
This very much called to mind Helen Beetham’s thoughtful perspective on ethics and AI at the
ALT Winter Summit
last year where she said that “generative”, “intelligence”, and “artificial” are all deeply problematic concepts.
“Every definition is an abstraction made from an engineering perspective, while neglecting other aspects of human intelligence.”
Towards the end of the podcast, Maren and Audrey talked about the importance of the embodied nature of being and learning, how we tap into such a deep well of embodied knowledge when we learn. It’s unthinkable to outsource this to AI, for the simple reason that AI is stupid.
The embodied human nature of learning was also the theme of Marjorie Lotfi’s beautiful six-part poem,
Interrogating Learning
, commissioned by Edinburgh Futures Institute for the inaugural event of their Learning Curves
Future of Education
series. Marjorie weaves together the voices of displaced women and, I believe, speaks more deeply about what it means to learn than any disembodied “artificial intelligence” ever could.
What have you learned?
When asked this question how will a woman answer?
For a moment she’s back in her mother’s belly
a heart beating out a rush of cortisol
or a warm dream of sleep listening through a barrier of skin and blood
before even her own first breath.
And then the day she’s born
blinking at the bright of daylight, candle, bulb,
hearing the low buzz of electric
and the sudden clarity of a voice she knows already.
Learning it again.
There have been a thousand things to learn in every day I’ve been alive,
the woman thinks,
and I am 53 this year.
Hands of Hope, Cork, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
Last week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto.
The themes of this year’s conference were:
Open Education Landscape and Transformation
Equity and Inclusion in OER
Open Source and Scholarly Engagement
Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI and OER Creation
Innovative Pedagogies and Creative Education
The conference was chaired with inimitable style by MTU’s Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrelly, the (in)famous Gasta Master.
The day before the conference I met up with a delegation of Dutch colleagues from a range of sectors and organisations for a round table workshop on knowledge equity and open pedagogies. In a wide ranging discussion we covered the value proposition and business case for open, the relationship between policy and practice, sustainability and open licensing, student engagement and co-creation, authentic assessment and the influence of AI.  I led the knowledge equity theme and
shared experiences and case studies from the University of Edinburgh.
Many thanks to Leontien van Rossum from SURF for inviting me to participate.
A Cautionary Fairy Tale
The conference opened the following day with Rajiv Jhangiani’s keynote, “
Betwixt fairy tales & dystopian futures – Writing the next chapter in open education
“, a cautionary tale of a junior faulty member learning to navigating the treacherous path between commercial textbook publishers on the one hand and open textbooks on the other.  It was a familiar tale to many North American colleagues, though perhaps less relatable to those of us from UK HE where the model of textbook use is rather different, OER expertise resides with learning technologists rather than librarians, OER tends to encompass a much broader range of resources than open textbooks, and open resources are as likely to be co-created by students as authored by staff. However Rajiv did make several point that were universal in their resonance.  In particular, he pointed out that it’s perverse to use the moral high ground of academic integrity to defend remote proctoring systems that invade student privacy, and tools that claim to identify student use of AI, when these companies trample all over copyright and discriminate against ESL speakers. If we create course policies that are predicated on mistrust of students we have no right to criticise them for being disengaged. Rajiv also cautioned against using OER as a band aid to cover inequity in education; it might make us feel good but it distracts us from reality. Rajiv called for ethical approaches to education technology, encouraging us not to be distracted by fairy tales, but to engage with hope and solidarity while remaining firmly grounded in reality.
Rajiv Jhangiani, OER24, CC BY Lorna M. Campbell.
Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI and OER Creation
Generative AI (GAI) loomed large at the conference this year and I caught several presentations that attempted to explore the thorny relationship between openness and GAI.
UHI have taken a considered approach by developing policy, principles and staff and student facing guidance that emphasises ethical, creative, and environmentally aware use of generative AI. They are also endorsing a small set of tools that provide a range of functionality and stand up to scrutiny in terms of data security.  These include MS Copilot, Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, Satlas and Semantic Scholar. Keith Smyth, Dean of Learning & Teaching at UHI, outlined some of the challenges they are facing including AI and critical literacy, tensions around convenience and creation, and the relationship between GAI and open education. How does open education practice sit alongside generative AI? There are some similarities in terms of ethos; GAI repurposes, reuses, and remixes resources, but in a really selfish way. To address these ambiguities, UHI are developing further guidance on GAI and open education practice and will try to foster a culture that values and prioritises sharing and repurposing resources as OER.
Patricia Gibson gave an interesting talk about “Defending Truth in an Age of AI Generated Misinformation: Using the Wiki as a Pedagogical Device”.  GAI doesn’t know about the truth, it is designed to generate the most most accurate response from the available data, if it doesn’t have sufficient data, it simply guesses or “hallucinates”. Patricia cautioned against letting machines flood our information channels with misinformation and untruth. Misinformation creates inaccuracy and unreliability and leads us to question what is truth.  However awareness of GAI is also teaching us to question images and information we see online, enabling us to develop critical digital and AI literacy skills. Patricia went on to present a case study about Business students working collaboratively to develop wiki content, which echoed many of the findings of Edinburgh’s own Wikipedia in the curriculum initiatives.  This enabled the students to co-create collaborative knowledge, develop skills in sourcing information, curate fact-checked information, engage in discussion and deliberation, and counter misinformation.
Interestingly, the Open Data Institute presented at the conference for what I think may be the first time. Tom Pieroni, ODI Learning Manager, spoke about a project to develop a GAI tutor for use on an Data Ethics Essentials course:
Generative AI as an Assistant Tutor: Can responsible use of GenAI improve learning experiences and outcomes?
CC BY SA, Tom Pieroni, Open Data Institute
One of the things I found fascinating about this presentation was that while there was some evaluation of the pros and cons of using the GAI tutor, there was no discussion about the ethics of GAI itself. Perhaps that is part of the course content? One of the stated aims of the Assistant AI Tutor project is to “Explore AI as a method for personalising learning.” This struck me because earlier in the conference someone, sadly I forget who, had made the sage comment that all too often technology in general and AI an particular effectively remove the person from personalised learning.
Unfortunately I missed Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann’s session on
A data ethics and data justice approach for AI-Enabled OER
, but I will definitely be dipping in to the slides and resources they shared.
Student Engagement and Co-Creation
Leo Havemann, Lorna M. Campbell, Mayu Ishimoto, Cárthach Ó Nuanáin, Hazel Farrell, OER24, CC0.
I was encouraged to hear a number of talks that highlighted the importance of enabling students to co-create open knowledge as this was one of the themes of the talk that OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto and I gave on
Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education
. Our presentation explored the transformative potential of engaging students with open education through salaried internships, and how these roles empower students to go on to become radical digital citizens and knowledge activists. There was a lot of interest in Information Services Group’s programme of student employment and several delegates commented that it was particularly inspiring to hear Mayu talking about her own experience of working with the OER Service.
Open Education at the Crossroads
Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin opened the second day of the conference with an inspiring, affirming and inclusive keynote
The Future isn’t what it used to be: Open Education at a Crossroads OER24 keynote resources
.  Catherine and Laura have the unique ability to be fearless and clear sighted in facing and naming the crises and inequalities that we face, while never losing faith in humanity, community and collective good. I can’t adequately summarise the profound breadth and depth of their talk here, instead I’d recommend that you watch to their
keynote
and read their accompanying
essay
.  I do want to highlight a couple of points that really stood out for me though.
Laura pointed out that we live in an age of conflict, where the entire system of human rights are under threat. The early hope of the open internet is gone, a thousand flowers have not bloomed. Instead, the state and the market control the web, Big Tech is the connective tissue of society, and the dominant business model is extractive surveillance capitalism.
AI has caused a paradigmatic shift and there is an irony around AI and open licensing; by giving permission for re-use, we are giving permission for potential harms, e.g. facial recognition software being trained on open licensed images.  Copyright is in turmoil as a result of AI and we need to remember that there is a difference between what is legal and what is ethical. We need to rethink what we mean by open practice when GAI is based on free extractive labour.  Having written about the contested relationship of invisible labour and open education in the past, this last point really struck me.
HE for Good
was written as an antidote to these challenges.  Catherine & Laura drew together the threads of
HE for Good
towards a manifesto for higher education and open education, adding:
“When we meet and share our work openly and with humility we are able to inspire each other to address our collective challenges.”
CC BY NC, Catherine Cronin & Laura Czerniewicz, OER24
Change is possible they reminded us, and now is the time.  We stand at a crossroads and we need all parts of the open education movement to work together to get us there.  In the words of Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and current Chair of the Elders:
“Our best future can still lie ahead of us, but it is up to everyone to get us there.”
Catherine Cronin & Laura Czerniewicz, OER24, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell.
The Splintering of Social Media
One theme that emerged during the conference is what Catherine and Laura referred to as the “splintering of social media”, with a number of presenters exploring the impact this has had on open education community and practice.  This splintering has lead people to seek new channels to share their practice with some turning to the fediverse, podcasting and internet radio. Blogging didn’t seem to feature quite as prominently as a locus for sharing practice and community, but it was good to see Martin Weller still flying the flag for open ed blogging, and I’ve been really encouraged to see how many blog posts have been published reflecting on the conference.
Gasta!
The Gasta sessions, overseen by Gasta Master Tom Farelly, were as raucous and entertaining as ever.  Every presenter earned their applause and their Gasta! beer mat. It seems a bit mean to single any out, but I can’t finish without mentioning Nick Baker’s
Everyone’s Free..to use OEP,
to the tune of Baz Luhrmann “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, Alan Levine’s
Federated
, and Eamon Costello’s hilarious
Love after the algorithm: AI and bad pedagogy police
.  Surely the first time an OER Conference has featured Jon Bon Jovi sharing his thoughts on the current state of the pedagogical landscape?!
Eamon Costello, Jon Bon Jovi, Tom Farrelly, Alan Levine, OER24, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell
The closing of an OER Conference is always a bit of an emotional experience and this year more so than most. The conference ended with a heartfelt standing ovation for open education stalwart Martin Weller who is retiring and heading off for new adventures, and a fitting and very lovely impromptu verse of
The Parting Glass
by Tom. Tapadh leibh a h-uile duine agus chì sinn an ath-bhliadhna sibh!
Martin Weller, Tom Farrelly, Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell, OER24.
The title of this blog post is taken from this lovely tweet by Laura Czerniewicz.
This week I’m looking forward to traveling to Cork with OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto for the OER24 Conference. The conference is being hosted by the Munster Institute of Technology this year and chaired by the Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrelly.  The theme this year is digital transformation in education and Mayu and I will be presenting a research paper on Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education.
At the University of Edinburgh student engagement is a fundamental aspect of our strategic support for OER and open education and our institutional commitment to digital transformation.  As part of Information Services Group’s programme of student employment, the university’s OER Service and Online Course Production Service regularly employ student interns in a number of roles including Open Content Curators, OER support officers, media studio assistants, and open textbook co-creators.  These roles enable students to gain a wide range of core competencies and transferable attributes including digital and information literacy skills, which open the door to new careers and employment opportunities, while also providing the opportunity to develop open practice and digital competence, and improve knowledge equity
Our research paper will explore the transformative potential of engaging students with open education through salaried internships, exploring how these roles empower students to go on to become radical digital citizens and knowledge activists, not just passive consumers of information, but active and engaged creators of open knowledge.   We will also provide guidance on how other institutions can adopt and adapt this model to engage students with open education and transform their digital skills.
Posting an end of year round up at the end of January might seem a bit daft, but I’m already one step ahead of last year, when I posted my end of year reflection in February!
The beginning of the year was a succession of real highs and lows.  UCU entered a long phase of industrial action which came at a particularly challenging time for me as January and February is usually when I’m preparing for Open Education Week and the OER Conference.  However I also took some time out for a trip to New York with friends, which turned out to be one of the high points of my year.
Open Education Week
For Open Education Week we ran a webinar that celebrated
10 years of open course development at the University of Edinburgh
and shared the open course creation workflow that we’ve developed and refined over the years.
OER23 Conference
It was great to see the OER Conference returning to Scotland in March when it was hosted by UHI in Inverness.  Inverness is a place that is very close to my heart as it’s the main city in the Highlands and it’s also were we used to go on holiday when I was a kid.  Inverness is still a stopping off point on the journey home when I go to visit family in Stornoway so I had a slightly weird feeling of nostalgia and home-sickness while I was there, it was odd being in Inverness and not traveling on further north and west.
One of the themes of this years conference was Open Scotland +10 and Joe Wilson and I ran a number of sessions including a pre-conference workshop and closing plenary to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade, and to discuss potential ways to advance open education across all sectors of Scottish education.
Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Here, the closing Panel Plenary session
Open Scotland @10
OER23 Conference: Imagining Hopeful Futures
Open Scotland @10 Plenary Panel synthesis & outputs
Generative AI
Like many working in technical, educational and creative sectors I found it impossible to ignore the discourse around generative AI, though I hope I managed to avoid getting swept up in the hype and catastrophising.  In July I wrote an off-the-cuff summary of some of the many ethical issues related to generative AI and LLMs that are becoming increasingly hard to ignore:
Generative AI – Ethics all the way down
.  I appreciated having an opportunity to revisit these issues again at the end of the year when I joined the
ALT Winter Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
which provided much food for thought. Helen Beetham’s keynote
Whose Ethics? Whose AI? A relational approach to the challenge of ethical AI
was particularly thoughtful and thought provoking.
Student Interns
Much of the summer was taken up with recruiting and managing our Open Content Curator student interns.  It’s always a joy working with our interns, their energy and enthusiasm is endlessly inspiring, and this year’s interns, August and Mayu, were no exception. I suggested it might be fun for them to interview each other about their experience of working with the OER Service and, with the help of our fabulous Media Team, they produced this lovely video.
I was delighted when August and Mayu were shortlisted for the Student Employee of the Year Award in Information Services Group’s Staff Recognition Awards, in acknowledgement of their outstanding work with the OER Service and their wider contribution to ISG and the University.
Their Finest Hour
The OER Service welcomed another student intern in the summer, Eden Swimer, who joined us to help run a digital collection day as part of the University of Oxford’s
Their Finest Hour
, a
National Lottery Heritage funded project at the University of Oxford,
which
is
collect
ing
and
preserving
the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War.
Organising and running the digital collection day proved to be a huge undertaking and we couldn’t have done it without the help of 26 volunteers from across ISG and beyond who committed so much time and energy to the project.
The digital collection day took place in Rainy Hall, New College at the end of November and it was a huge success.
Over 100 visitors attended and volunteers recorded over 50 interviews and took thousands of photographs, all of which will be uploaded to an open licensed archive that will be launched by the University of Oxford in June this year.  It was a deeply moving event, many of the stories recorded were truly remarkable and the visitors clearly appreciated having the opportunity to share their families stories.  In some cases these stories were being told by the last surviving relatives of those who had witnessed the historic events of WW2 and there was a real sense of preserving their experiences for posterity.
Their Finest Hour digital collection day by Fiona Hendrie
The collection day was covered by STV and you can see a short clip of their news item here:
Second World War memories to be preserved at university collection day
Publications
It was a privilege to work with co-authors Frances Bell, Lou Mycroft, Guilia Forsythe and Anne-Marie Scot to contribute a chapter on the “FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education” to Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s timely and necessary
Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures.
“Quilting has always been a communal activity and, most often, women’s activity. It provides a space where women are in control of their own labour: a space where they can come together to share their skill, pass on their craft, tell their stories, and find support. These spaces stand outside the neoliberal institutions that seek to appropriate and exploit our labour, our skill, and our care. The FemEdTech-quilt assemblage has provided a space for women and male allies from all over the world to collaborate, to share their skills, their stories, their inspiration, and their creativity. We, the writers of this chapter, are five humans who each has engaged with the FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education in different ways, and who all have been active in the FemEdTech network.”
I was also invited to submit a paper to a special open education practice edition of
Edutec Journal
.  Ewan McAndrew, Melissa Highton and I co-authored a paper on “Supporting open education practice: Reflective case studies from the University of Edinburgh.”
“This paper outlines the University of Edinburgh’s long-running strategic commitment to supporting sustainable open education practice (OEP) across the institution. It highlights how the University provides underpinning support and digital capability for OEP through central services working with policy makers, partners, students, and academics to support co-creation and active creation and use of open educational resources to develop digital literacy skills, transferable attributes, and learning enhancement. We present a range of case studies and exemplars of authentic OEP evidenced by reflective practice and semi-structured ethnographic interviews, including Wikimedia in the Curriculum initiatives, open textbook production, and co-creation of interdisciplinary STEM engagement resources for schools. The paper includes recommendations and considerations, providing a blueprint that other institutions can adopt to encourage sustainable OEP. Our experience shows that mainstreaming strategic support for OEP is key to ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
Writing this paper was an interesting experience as Edutec is a research journal that expects evidence to be presented in a very particular way.  As a service division, we support practice rather than undertaking academic research, so the case studies we present are based on authentic reflective practice rather than empirical research, however it was useful to think about this practice from a different perspective.
Wikimedia UK
In July I was awarded Honorary Membership of Wikimedia UK in recognition of my contribution to the work of the charity during my six years as a Trustee. When my term as a trustee came to an end, I was hoping that I’d have more time to contribute to the Wikimedia projects.  That hasn’t quite happened, I didn’t manage to do any Wikipedia editing in 2023, but I did enjoy taking part in
Wiki Loves Monuments
again.  I also digitised some pictures I took of the Glasgow Garden festival way back in 1988 and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons to share them with the fabulous
After the Garden Festival
project, which is attempting to locate and archive the legacy of the festival.
Teddy Bears Picnic, sponsored by Moray District Council. CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell on Wikimedia Commons.
ALT
I made short-lived trip to the ALT Conference in Warwick in September.  Unfortunately I  had to leave early as I came down with a stinking cold. I was really disappointed to have to miss most of the conference as it was outgoing CEO Maren Deepwell’s last event and I was also due to receive an Honorary Life Membership of ALT award. It was a huge honour to receive this award as ALT has been a significant part of my professional life for over two decades now.  You can read my short reflection on the award here:
Honorary Life Membership of ALT.
For almost three decades Lorna has been a champion of equitable higher education and an open education activist. Lorna ‘s lifelong commitment to and passion for equality and diversity clearly is evident in her work, yet Lorna tends not to push herself forward and celebrate – or even self-acknowledge – her many achievements.
ALT press release
Kenneth White, 1936 – 2023
I was deeply saddened to hear of the death of Kenneth White in August.  Despite being an avid reader of Scottish poetry, and having studied Scottish Literature at Glasgow University for a couple of years, I hadn’t come across White until my partner introduced me to him in 2002.  His absence from Glasgow’s curriculum, and indeed his relative obscurity in his homeland, is striking given that he was a graduate of Glasgow University who went on to become the chair of 20th century poetics at
Paris-Sorbonne.
White, however, has always been a writer who
divides
the
critics
, particularly in Scotland. A poet, writer, philosopher, traveller, and self-identified transcendental Scot, White founded the International Institute of GeoPoetics and was a regular visitor to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I was fortunate to see him read.  To say that White’s writing, particularly his meditations on openness and the Atlantic edge, had a profound effect on me, is something of an understatement. This blog is named after the title of White’s collected poetic works and his lines frequently find their way into more unguarded pieces I’ve written.  I’ll leave you with a few words from the man himself.
How to respond to the affordances and challenges of generative AI is a pressing issue that many learning technologists and open education practitioners are grappling with right now and I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about the interface between AI, large language models and the Commons for some time. This isn’t that post.  I’ve been so caught up with other work that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the articles on my rapidly expanding reading list.  Instead, these are some short, sketchy notes about the different ethical layers that we need to consider when engaging with AI.  This post is partly inspired by technology ethics educator Casey Fiesler, who has warned education institutions of the risk of what she refers to as ethical debt.
“What’s accruing here is not just technical debt, but
ethical debt
. Just as technical debt can result from limited testing during the development process, ethical debt results from not considering possible negative consequences or societal harms. And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.”
~ Casey Fiesler,
The Conversation
Apologies for glossing over the complexity of these issues, I just wanted to get something down in writing while it’s fresh in my mind
Ethics of large language models and Common Crawl data sets
Most generative AI tools use data sets scraped from the web and made available for research and commercial development.  Some of the organisations creating these data sets are non-profits, others are commercial companies, the relationship between the two is not always transparent. Most of these data sets scrape content directly from the web regardless of ownership, copyright, licensing and consent, which has led to legitimate concerns about all kinds of rights violations. While some companies claim to employ these data sets under the terms of fair use, questions have been raised about using such data for explicitly commercial purposes. Some open advocates have said that while they have no objection to these data sets being used for research purposes they are very concerned about commercial use. Content creators have also raised objections to their creative works being used to train commercial applications without their knowledge or consent.  As a result, a number
copyright violation lawsuits
have been raised by artists, creators, cultural heritage organisations and copyright holders.
There are more specific issues relating to these data sets and Creative Commons licensed content.  All CC licenses include an attribution clause, and in order to use a CC licensed work you must attribute the creator. LLMs and other large data sets are unable to fulfil this crucial attribution requirement so they ride roughshod over one of the foundational principles of Creative Commons.
LLMs and common crawl data sets are out there in the world now.  The genie is very much out of the bottle and there’s not a great deal we can do to put it back, even if we wanted to. It’s also debatable what, if anything, content creators, organisations and archives can do to prevent their works being swept up by web scraping in the future.
Ethics of content moderation and data filtering
Because these data sets are scraped wholesale from the web, they inevitably include all kinds of offensive, degrading and discriminatory content. In order to ensure that this content does not influence the outputs of generative AI tools and damage their commercial potential, these data sets must be filtered and moderated.  Because AI tools are not smart enough to filter out this content automatically, the majority of content moderation is done by humans, often from the global majority, working under exploitative and extractive conditions. In May, content moderators in Africa who provide services for Meta, Open AI and others voted to establish the first
African Content Moderators Union
, to challenge low pay and exploitative working conditions in the industry.
Most UK universities have a commitment to ending modern slavery and uphold the terms of the
Modern Slavery Act
. For example the University of Edinburgh’s
Modern Slavery Statement
says that it is “committed to protecting and respecting human rights and have a zero-tolerance approach to slavery and human trafficking in all its forms.” It is unclear how commitments such as these relate to content workers who often work under conditions that are exploitative and degrading at best, and a form of modern slavery at worst.
Ethics of anthropomorphising AI
The language used to describe generative AI tools often humanises and anthropomorphises them, either deliberately or subconsciously. They are ascribed human characteristics and abilities, such as intelligence and the ability to dream. One of the most striking examples is the use of hallucinating.  When Chat GPT makes up non-existent references to back up erroneous “facts” this is often described as “
hallucinating
“.  This propensity has led to confusion among some users when they have attempted to find these fictional references. Many commenters have pointed out that these tools are incapable of hallucinating, they’re just
getting shit wrong
, and that the use of such humanising language purposefully disguises and obfuscates the limitations of these systems.
“Hallucinate is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong.”
~ Naomi Klein, The Guardian
Ethics of algorithmic bias
Algorithmic bias is a well known and well documented phenomenon (cf
Safiya U. Noble
‘s
Algorithms of Oppression
) and generative AI tools are far from immune to bias. Valid arguments have been made about the bias of the ‘intelligence” these tools claim to generate.  Because the majority of AI applications are produced in the global north, they invariably replicate a particularly white, male, Western world view, with all the inherent biases that entails. Diverse they are not.
Wayne Holmes
has noted that AI ignores minority opinions and marginalised perspectives, perpetuating a Silicon Valley perspective and world outlook. Clearly there are considerable ethical issues about education institutions that have a mission to be diverse and inclusive using tools that engender harmful biases and replicate real world inequalities.
“I don’t want to say I’m sure. I’m sure it will lift up the standard of living for everybody, and, honestly, if the choice is lift up the standard of living for everybody but keep inequality, I would still take that.”
~ Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO.
Ethics of catastrophising
Much has been written about the dangers of AI, often by the very individuals who are responsible for creating these tools. Some claim that generative AI will end education as we know it, while others prophesy that AI will end humanity altogether. There is no doubt that this catastrophising helps to feed the hype cycle and drive traffic to to these tools and applications, however
Timnit Gebru
and others have pointed out that by focusing attention on some nebulous future catastrophe, the founding fathers of AI are purposeful distracting us from current real world harms caused by the industry they have created, including reproducing systems of oppression, worker exploitation, and massive data theft.
“The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.”
Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter
Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s (
@DrTechlash) “
Taxonomy of AI Panic Facilitators
” A visualization of leading AI Doomers (X-risk open letters, media interviews & OpEds). Some AI experts enable them, while others oppose them. The gender dynamics are fucked up. It says a lot about the panic itself.
Not really a conclusion
Clearly there are many ethical issues that education institutions must take into consideration if they are to use generative AI tools in ways that are not harmful.  However this doesn’t mean that there is no place for AI in education, far from it.  Many AI tools are already being used in education, often with beneficial results, captioning systems are just one example that springs to mind.  I also think that generative AI can potentially be used as an exemplar to teach complex and nuanced issues relating to the creation and consumption of information, knowledge equity, the nature of creativity, and post-humanism.  Whether this potential outweighs the ethical issues remains to be seen.
A few references
AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’
~ Casey Fiesler, The Conversation
Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter
~ Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), Angelina McMillan-Major (University of Washington), Margaret Mitchell (Hugging Face)
Open letter to News Media and Policy Makers re: Tech Experts from the Global Majority
@safiyanoble
(Algorithms of Oppression),
@timnitGebru
(ex Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team)
@dalitdiva,
@nighatdad,
@arzugeybulla,
@Nanjala1,
@joana_varon
150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting
~ Time
AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are
~ Naomi Klein, The Guardian
Just Because ChatBots Can’t Think Doesn’t Mean They Can’t Lie
~ Maria Bustillos, The Nation
Artificial Intelligence and Open Education: A Critical Studies Approach
~ Dr Wayne Holmes, UCL
‘What should the limits be?’ The father of ChatGPT on whether AI will save humanity – or destroy it
~ Sam Altman interview, The Guardian
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