As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and … Read more
This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us … Read more
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to … Read more
I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people … Read more
I’ve had an exciting week so far (and it’s only Thursday), in a good way rather than a bad exciting week (which sometimes happens but is less fun….!). We had 3 new interns join us in DLAM (David, Hera and Otis) more about that in a future blog post) to join Tallulah who is continuing … Read more
I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky. Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact. I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword documents, I typically heavily edit … Read more
AI is getting more accessible (as in more easily available or pushed-down-our-throat, depending on your perspective). My home Windows 11 laptop now has the ‘free’ version of copilot on it, in the taskbar, pretty obviously it’s also available in the Bing search and I’m expecting Apple Intelligence to drop onto my phone imminently (I believe … Read more
I’ve not blogged for a while but I went to an event today which has inspired me to write a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while. I’ve got another blog post coming about the event itself (which was run by JISC and was about Accessibility in Procurement – very thought provoking). One … Read more
Today I had an almost meeting free day. I spent it doing some short listing, catching up with emails, and for the last hour today I picked up where I left off with my AI dabbling/reading. As you can see, I’ve been playing with Adobe Firefly for 20 mins and it’s outputs are pretty good. … Read more
This is a blog post that’s been brewing for a while. The landscape is changing so much that every time I go to write it, I’ve heard something new that has changed my perspective. So I’m writing this knowing full well that in a months time I’ll realise it’s a load of nonsense. Please … Read more
