Author: DavidWebster
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Dead University Theory?
This is a short LinkedIn post that I’ll post here as a reminder to expand! You’ve heard of ‘dead internet theory’?* Which seems to get more persuasive every day. The idea that the internet is now largely driven by bots and algorithms interacting with each other, and as the automations and AI take up more…
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Disciplinary Specificity and Domain Expertise: Why Generative AI systems need scholars.
Does anyone need to remember or know anything anymore? We carry the sum of all human knowledge in our pocket, so can’t we just look stuff up? But this atomised attitude towards knowledge as mere lists of discrete facts is hugely inadequate. Not only is there the matter of knowing what to ask, but most…
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Why Being Polite to AI Matters (And Not For the Reason You Think)
Cross-Posted from where I put it on LinkedIn: I am writing a longer piece on politeness to AI and ethics, but in light of Sam Altman’s recent comments – I asked Claude GAI (very nicely) to extract a 250 word summary from my draft – which I have (quite heavily) edited and is here: We…
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GAI Podcast on Desire in Pali Buddhist Canon
NotebookLM and podcast generation: A test… So – to really test NotebookLM’s function of generating a ‘Deep Dive Conversation’ , I uploaded my book on Desire in Pali Buddhist texts, and asked it to generate the conversation – and it took under 5 minutes – and here we go – a 20 minute (US- accented)…
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Restraining the Uncanny Guest? Video…
I recently did a blog post called ‘Restraining the uncanny guest: AI ethics and university practice‘ for the Society for Research into Higher Education – following up my post about the idea of GAI as such a figure in HE. I expanded on these ideas as part of the University of Liverpool’s GAI-Fest a couple…
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Learning to AI – podcast series
Just a quick post to note that I am now leading a Podcast series from the University of Liverpool. The first episode features, as the notes say: In this episode, Professor David Webster from the University of Liverpool talks to Professor Jon Dron of Athabasca University in Canada. They discuss the mood in Higher Education…
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How technology turns the wheel on scholarly expectations in an AI age.
In this post I want to reflect on how technology changes what is expected from scholars and scholarship – and I include students and their work in this. It’s important here to remind ourselves that the emergence of Generative AI is not the first time that technology has changed these expectations, and in that reminder…
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The Uncanny Guest: Artificial Intelligence and the University
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?[1] [Follow up post at SRHE Blog: https://srheblog.com/2024/08/27/restraining-the-uncanny-guest-ai-ethics-and-university-practice/ ] Is Generative AI an uncanny and uninvited guest at the table of Higher Education? For Nietzsche the uncanny guest at the door is nihilism. This guest has arrived to undermine our existing sense of purpose…
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Quality Assurance and Learning Technology
I recently spoke at the Advance HE Curriculum Symposium, and they kindly asked me to write up the talk, integrating reflections from the audience, for their blog. You can read the post HERE. The title was Hybrid learning and teaching: the role of Quality Assurance in ensuring accessible and equitable provision – and I tried…
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THES Digital Universities – reflections
On 20th May I took part in the Times Higher Education Digital Universities Week 2021 event entitled: ‘What could university look like for the class of 2030? Despite the last year changing higher education in ways we never thought possible, there are still years of transformation ahead of us.” Below are some of my reflections, both…
Dave Webster 