Kelly Smith

It’s early but…
My Christmas wrap is now available to pre-order
www.gailmyerscough.co.uk/christmas-ca...

One of my favorite professors in grad school kept harping on how wonderful it is to be wrong. Being right is the end of an investigation. But being wrong opens up new avenues to explore. Why was I wrong? What would it mean if I were right? How has being wrong helped me zero in on truth? It's great.

Something I never thought I would ever say - I will he talking to Carlus Acosta and Tony Iommi about the Black Sabbath ballet in Birmingham next week. www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/to...

He’s the exception that proves the rule. In so many ways!

Home Office grants extra visas for UCL international students told to defer Hundreds of students with promised places had been left in limbo after university exceeded its visa allocations

"Home Office grants extra visas for UCL international students told to defer"

What exactly is freshers' flu - and why do so many get it? It's not the actual flu, and it's rarely serious, but when thousands of students arrive on campus they bring a cocktail of viruses.

Somewhat ironic that when I was interviewed for this article on fresher's flu I was just getting over a nasty cold myself potentially acquired in various teaching activities. Some quick takes on this for all new students (and not just freshers). 🧪🧵
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It has to be torrential for Daz to refuse a walk. He’s never refused to leave the house and has only turned around and taken us home early because of rain twice. If we delay his walk until the rain stops he complains loudly. Our boy NEEDS his walk!

"Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't- and it surprises me how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown."
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"A Field Guide to Getting Lost", by Rebecca Solnit

*gasp*

Fantastic story on many levels. Well worth a read of this thread.

I so need this word. My kind of bread and butter treat.

It is isn’t it!

I’m exhausted with the effort but at least I have a good plan if I ever do miss lectures I didn’t know I had to give!

But that wasn’t the end. Over the next few hours in and out of sleep. I worked out I could use last year’s Canvas pages and recordings, and produced a plan to ask timetabling if there were slots I could use to give optional repeats of the lectures. FOR A LECTURE SERIES THAT’S NOT REAL.

I went away prepared to do lots of extra work I wasn’t expecting, drafting messages in my head to apologise to students, and feeling very guilty I’d let everyone down for something I didn’t know I had to do…

For some reason, they’d adapted it to have an extremely strong Yorkshire accent - in text as well as sound - and to insult the user if they made a mistake. They’d given it a paper-clip type avatar of a cartoon horse. This all seemed perfectly normal in the dream and good decisions to make…

They weren’t there but several others came to the reception desk to tell me what to do - everyone saying something different. I was finally directed down to IT who showed me a new prototype of a AI-based VLE they were now using where I would need to record my lectures to from scratch…

I checked my emails but nothing there to ask or tell me I was doing it again this year. And nothing to say I’d missed anything But, when I checked my online timetable again, there it was. I went straight to the department and asked to speak to their Director of Education…

I have a recurring dream where I’m late or completely miss giving a lecture for an another department because I’d forgotten about it. Last night it came back with a vengeance. I dreamt I found out - by chatting to a colleague who’d found out from students - that I’d missed two weeks of lectures…

I’m glad you do!

The widespread adoption of large language model-assisted writing across society This study explores AI-generated writing adoption across consumer complaints, corporate press releases, job postings, and international organization communications, revealing widespread use following ...

Very nice article co-authored by one of my former students, Mihai Codreanu, discovering how much of many documents eg press releases, job postings, have been written using LLMs (10-20% depending on type of document but it might have stabilised in late 2024) www.cell.com/patterns/ful...

Interesting exploration of how this happened and the implications for both UCL and the sector.

I was born in Monmouthshire to locally-born parents and at least two English-born grandparents. For centuries Monmouthshire’s status was ambiguous and it was only legally accepted as Welsh in 1972, before that many considered it English. I have chosen to be Welsh.

NEW on Wonkhe: Students are reaching out to AI tools and chatbots for support. For Kieran Phelan, it’s time to start thinking about the risks buff.ly/5C2yjGT

“Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. … It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.”

Meet our Fellow Prof Rebecca Riley, Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Regional Engagement & Co-Director of @city-redi.bsky.social! Rebecca is dedicated to driving positive change & is a leading voice in civic engagement, regional development & innovation policy. ➡️ acss.org.uk/professor-re...

Another problem with the LEO is it does not properly account for graduate entrepreneurship and business ownership where earnings not only lag but may not be included.

NEW on Wonkhe: The Office for Students is planning to begin using longitudinal educational outcomes (LEO) data in regulation. For Richard Puttock the principal problem is one of lag. buff.ly/LPGW81K

Cycled to work and back to the station today. I was very slow and it was hard work but worth every puffing minute. Should get fitter and faster over time. Helmet worked fantastically well! Proud of myself. Little victories.

Gave my first two lectures of the new academic year. Same lecture repeated twice as the module is so big - up to 800 students! It’s the first lecture our brand new Business Management students will have at University and I put so much into it to set the scene. Went well. Got applause. Very happy.