Tag Archives: higher education

Copyright and Cartoon Mice – Gen AI Images and the Public Domain⤴

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(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 terms), 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:

OER Service advice on using Gen AI Images: AI generative software cannot create “original” images out of nothing. ​ ​ Its models are created from pre-existing data to generate derivative ​ images for your prompts. ​ ​ The origin of the pre-existing data is crucial not only in determining copyright ownership for the generated images, but to avoid rights infringement of pre-existing works. ​ ​ When Generative AI is trained using works created and owned by a third party without permission, the results may infringe on the rights of the third-party creator or artist.​

OER Service advice on gen AI images: Questions to consider:​ Does the Generative AI provider confirm that the data used to train the model has been legally accessed or licensed?​ 2. Will the provider own any rights over the creations?​ ​ Don't use AI Generated images unless they confirm that the images being generated come from an ethically-trained model which respects copyright and creators.​

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:

Public Domain Day is celebrated on the 1st of January each year. In many countries, this 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. 

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.

Black and white image of Mickey Mouse from the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie.

Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney, public domain image from the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie.

Further Reading

For those about to blog⤴

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Abstract image of female figure with laptop.

“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.

2024 End of Year Reflection⤴

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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. 

Draft Dubai Declaration on OER⤴

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(This post previously appeared on the Open Scotland blog and on Open.Ed.)

3rd UNESCO World OER Congress: Open Solutions and AI for Inclusive Access to Knowledge

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 

Open Education and AI: Proselytisers, prophets and poets.⤴

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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: 

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.

OER24: Gathering Courage⤴

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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.

OER24 Conference: Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education⤴

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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.

2023 End of Year Reflection⤴

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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. 

Photograph of Open Scotland Plenary Panel at the OER23 Conference.

Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.
Here, the closing Panel Plenary session

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 collecting 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. 

Image of the coast with the words of Scotia Deserta by Kenneth White.

Generative AI – Ethics all the way down⤴

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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.”
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 

Open Scotland @10 Plenary Panel synthesis & outputs⤴

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To mark 10 years of the Open Scotland initiative, Joe Wilson and I ran two events as part of the OER23 Conference at UHI in Inverness, which provided an opportunity for members of the education community 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 Pre-Conference Workshop

Joe has already written up our pre-conference Open Scotland workshop, which brought together around 40 colleagues, in person and online, to discuss key challenges and priorities. You can read Joe’s summary of the workshop here: Open Scotland Reflections on Pre-Conference Workshop.

 

OpenScotland @10 Plenary Panel

The closing plenary panel of OER23 brought together open education practitioners from within Scotland and beyond.  Panel participants were Lorna M. Campbell, Open Scotland and University of Edinburgh; Scott Connor, UHI;  Maren Deepwell, ALT; Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh; Robert Schuwer, consultant and former UNESCO Chair on Open Educational Resources; Joe Wilson, Open Scotland and City of Glasgow College.  Each member of the panel was invited to briefly share their thoughts on future directions for Open Education, before we opened the discussion to the floor. 

Photograph of Open Scotland Plenary Panel at the OER23 Conference.

Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.

Stuart Nicol, Head of Educational Design and Engagement at the University of Edinburgh, acknowledged that while it’s disappointing that there hasn’t been more support from Scottish Government, there has been a support for open education at a number of institutions, including the University of Edinburgh.  Stuart highlighted the important role of committed people who have pushed the open agenda within institutions.  Short of having government level commitment and policy, Stuart suggested we need to provide opportunities for people to come together to share practice and to encourage institutions to work together.

Scott Connor, Digital and Open Education Lead at UHI’s Learning and Teaching Academy, outlined UHI’s strategic commitment to open education which is underpinned by an OER Policy and a framework for the development of open educational practices. Scott highlighted lack government mandates and funding as a barriers to engagement with open education and suggested that real impact would come through the government adopting the Scottish Open Education Declaration and using it to mandate that resources created with public funding should be shared openly to benefit everyone. 

Both Scott and Stuart highlighted the OER policies adapted and adopted by the University of Edinburgh and UHI as a prime example of open education collaboration.

Photograph of Open Scotland Plenary Panel at the OER23 Conference.

Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.

Robert Schuwer, independent consultant and former UNESCO Chair of OER, provided an overview of open education in The Netherlands where the government has supported a range of OER initiatives and stimulation grants since 2006. In 2014 the Education Ministry issued a  strategic agenda stating that by 2025 all teachers should share their learning materials. Although some institutions such as TU Delft are front-runners, other smaller institutions are just getting started. 

Robert suggested that the biggest challenge is to cross the chasm from early adopters and innovators to the majority of teachers to encourage them to adopt principles of openness in education.  He suggested connecting to teachers passion, which is teaching, not sharing materials, and highlighting how open education can help them to become better teachers. 

Maren Deepwell, CEO of the Association for Learning Technology, reminded us that we’re not just talking about openness in Higher Education we’re looking at all sectors including schools, training, vocational education, FE, HE, and research. UK Government looks at Open Access research and thinks the open box is ticked. ALT has tried to reach out to both Scottish Government and the Department of Education, but often there is no one with responsibility for open education policy beyond Open Access and Open Research funding. 

Maren noted that we tend to see open education as another challenge alongside Brexit, the cost of living crisis, climate change, sustainability, etc., and ultimately it is never at the top of the agenda.  She suggested that our opportunity is to present openness as a way to solve these challenges.  It’s ingrained in us that openness is the extra step that teachers need more time, more funding, more skills, to take.  Instead we need to highlight how openness could solve resource scarcity and training issues, and help small independent providers collaborate across sectors.  We need to show openness as a way to solve these challenges, rather than as a stand alone challenge in its own right.

Photograph of Open Scotland Plenary Panel at the OER23 Conference.

Open Scotland Plenary Panel by Tim Winterburn.

Opening the discussion to the floor, members of the community put forward a range of comments and suggestions including: 

  • Taking a whole population approach to education rather than a sectoral approach. Open education is a way to educate for all our futures, not just those who can afford a good education. Open educators should collaborate with demographic data experts to see how open education could address key challenges of our ageing population, including health and social care. 
  • Start with early interventions at primary school level. How do children learn, what do they learn, what role models  do they see? Start to train a new generation of people to think in different ways. Currently there is no mention of openness in the General Teaching Council programme, but a logical place to start would be with teaching staff who are teaching children how to learn.  However because of concerns about GDPR, teachers work in closed environments, there are challenges around safeguarding and managing digital identities. 
  • Scotland’s baby box has been an import mechanism for learning for both parents and children, why not add a leaflet about open education?
  • Scotland has always had a very egalitarian tradition of education, the principles of openness fit well with this tradition, from school all the way up, so it’s frustrating that we haven’t been able to introduce open education at school level.
  • Maybe we’re trying too hard to change policy, perhaps it would be better to focus on doing fun stuff and sharing open practice. Do what you can at the small level; small OER, rather than big OER. This can be really powerful. Sharing in small ways can make a difference.
  • People hear about Open Scotland and are interested in open education, but they’re constrained by their local authorities or their college marketing teams. 
  • The strength of open education is in the grass roots, as soon as it get sucked into politics, it gets watered down. There is a risk that comes with government policy and funding. You cede some control when policy is dictated at that level.  At grass roots level we can control it, shape it and manage it.  It’s hard work pushing upwards but there is a danger when it comes from the other direction that we lose something and open education gets co-opted by people we may not wish to work with. 
  • Robert Schuwer countered this point by noting that this has not happened in The Netherlands.  Government support is provided at all levels of education but there is a lot of autonomy within institutions. The only mandates were the 2014 strategic agenda and a 2020 Open Access research mandate, both of which have been beneficial.  Robert also noted that students lobbied the Education Minister and had directly input to the 2014 sharing agenda.  This was also the case at the University of Edinburgh, where EUSA encouraged the University to support open education and OER. 
  • We have a political problem in that our education ministers don’t know much about education, so openness is never a priority.  We need to trust ourselves and continue with the grass roots work.  We need to feed messages up to government ministers that open education can be a solution to sustainability and other strategic agendas.  We need to take our advocacy up a notch, perhaps take out an advert in the press. 

Next steps

The next step will be to continue synthesising the outputs of the workshop and plenary panel, captured in this Padlet, with a view to drafting a new Open Scotland manifesto to share with the community and move the open education agenda forward. 

 

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