Ben Williamson

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

Woolgar, tho I also like Star and Bowker on how technical infrastructures require users to be "hustled" into shape to operate fully

Introduction to AI - Training Introduction to AI

If you too want to get AI skills "training" through a series of micro-lessons from "Andrew", Microsoft's pedagogic avatar and "AI-generated expert" on AI, you don't even need to sign up to the government's AI Skills Hub, you can just laugh at it here instead learn.microsoft.com/en-us/traini...

As a university professor, my heart sinks. Children from poorer backgrounds desire so much better than this—from a Labour government especially.

It's a lot to keep track of, isn't it, often just in a single day (like today)!

No, the DfE has an "AI content store" of curriculum materials - inc some student-created "content" - that it makes available to tech developers for AI training and finetuning models. I presume that's what Google would get, plus access to schools for live testing tst-aicontentstore.education.gov.uk

Curious if the recent MoU between Google DeepMind and the Dept for Ed on an AI tutorbot is part of the below announcement, given the TES reported "Trials of the AI tutoring tools will begin later this year with children in secondary schools across the country" www.tes.com/magazine/new...

"Our curriculum is crafted by big tech to ensure as many people as possible pay for their products - without ever questioning whether there are any downsides to doing so."

AI Shills Hub Upskill in AI using our range of free courses, all paid for by big tech!

Today I'm announcing the AI Shills Hub - free AI training, available now for every adult in the UK 🇬🇧

You'll learn:

- Torrenting pirate libraries
- AI scamming
- Ensloppification
- Misinformation 101

and much more!

aishillshub.org.uk

None of the AI Skills Boost courses are bespoke. It's literally a government wrapper around microlearning courses that industry have been promoting to habituate new users to AI - making the user friendly to it - for years now. Also, you have to doubly sign up to AWS, Google etc to access them 😬

That it's from one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, and a massive booster of AI for teaching and learning too, doesn't fill me with hope!

Sadly yes. It's one of the first courses in the AI Skills Hub "catalogue", which you can select once you sign up.

Screenshot of "Andrew", an AI-generated trainer delivering a Microsoft-produced course about AI concepts

JFC "Andrew" the "AI-generated expert on artificial intelligence" on this Microsoft course is the worst teacher and my already dim view of AI in education and training has plummeted even further now.

Screenshot of a review of a course on the AI Skills Boost Hub, reading: "A pretty good introduction to the concepts. However, I find it incredible that an AI generated video that extols the virtues of synthesised speech does not give me the choice of listening in my own language - not American English."

The thread was right though - the first course I clicked on (Microsoft "Introduction to AI concepts") is led by an AI-generated pedagogic avatar and the first review is not glowing

I signed up to the government's AI Skills Boost Hub to check its suite of courses and I am sad to report that the free AI training looks even worse than the thread below suggests aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/

To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to AI Students are taking new measures, such as dumbing down their work, spying on themselves and using AI “humanizer” programs, to beat accusations of cheating with artificial intelligence.

“Amid accusations of AI cheating, some students are turning to a new group of generative AI tools called ‘humanizers.’ The tools scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI. Some are free, while others cost around $20 a month.”

Has to be said that for a UK government policy program, the new AI Skills Hub certainly looks like an app store of tech and finance industry product tutorials

Context includes firms such as Microsoft whining that they won’t recoup their hundreds of billions of AI investment because non-tech firms aren’t adopting AI sufficiently

Big tech upskilling

After announcing it in the summer, today the UK government launched free training courses to AI upskill workers. It's free because it's funded by big-tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others, and not by local organisations in the UK who have been working with communities->

This is the biggest targeted training programme since Harold Wilson started the Open University (note).

Open to all UK adults online, taking as little as under 20 minutes, the courses will give

founding partners - Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, SAS and Salesforce to take the Al Skills Boost programme to the next level and upskill 10 million workers with Al skills by 2030.

The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.

in the 2 years since management announced a target of brutal cuts, only one group has even tried to give a clearheaded public narrative of the uni's financial situation, and it hasn't been management

How Silicon Valley built AI: Buying, scanning and destroying millions of books Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

New: Unsealed court docs detail Big Tech’s yearslong, secret race to ingest the collective works of humanity, including Anthropic’s project to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Gift link: wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Agentic AI and education - Education Technology Society Carlo Perrotta (University of Oxford) was researching GenAI in education long before it hit the headlines. We talk about the latest hype around ‘Agentic AI’ and whether this is genuinely a game-c...

Agentic AI in education is a "ruse" - its promises of efficiency and productivity will really lead to an intensification of educators' work. Great to have @carloper.bsky.social on here now, and this is a smart short conversation with @neilselwyn.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

I hope all the AI boosters understand that they’re training their kids that only chumps do things the hard way—by working diligently and going through the discomfort and hassle of learning and acquiring skills.

And also teaching them that a 30% error rate is good enough.

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB).…

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

'Grok' Chatbot Is Bad for Kids, Review Finds The chatbot on X suggests risky behavior, and is unsafe for teens, Common Sense Media says.

You don’t say.

AI-generated British schoolgirl becomes far-right social media meme Amelia, created to deter young people from extremism, has been subverted and is breaking out of niche online silos

AI-generated British schoolgirl becomes far-right social media meme

I am not being snarky. I need my colleagues who wrote on covid school lockdowns to engage with this. To be as loud as they have been about prior "learning loss." Hell, you can cite Tom & Mark's AERJ paper so you feel better that there's some econ somewhere in your argument.

Et tu, universities? And that was before the mad scramble, in the absence of sustained pilots or systematic evidence, to insert costly generative AI into every aspect of teaching and learning, to prepare 'job-ready' prospective employees (for companies declining to invest in the rising generation).

Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless Independent research identifies few learning gains

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com.

‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’
economist.com/united-state...