GAI and education July 2025 YouTube video by Phil Wood

A summary recording based on a keynote I gave recently exploring the link between education and AI
youtu.be/MBf-MiaB7_w?...

Research on narcissistic leadership suggests people gravitate to leaders who are confident and who offer clear, simple narratives in contexts of instability BEFORE they get into power. Once there, people tend to then dislike them quite quickly because they are actually v poor at their jobs!!

It's the natural consequence of having two narcissists both believing them have the ultimate power!!

Seems quite obvious - if you pursue economic policies which enrich a small group of people at the expense of the majority, then you can't expect that majority to feel secure enough to start families. It's the endgame of free market economics!!

It's sadly the mainstream now as far as I can see. If you're at all interested my inaugural essentially included elements of this a few weeks ago. ntu.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page...

This is an amazing use of language. It's basically calling for a serious downgrading of people's pension rights while selling it as positive innovation. No mention of the potential deficit in people's eventual pension levels. Rather than an umbrella, they should have put lipstick on the pig!!

(processual) complexity is adopted as the main way of thinking about and encountering tense problems. Otherwise it will be treated as a complicated engineering problem rather than a complex ecosystemic problem

@rethinkingjames.bsky.social interesting discussion of polycrisis on your podcast - absolutely spot on. But until folk actually spend time understanding complexity, and preferably processual complexity it will become a fairly unhelpful metaphor. The revolution you discuss can't happen until

And with indifference from Labour concerning HE, and the threat of Reform in the wings, the UK is not too far behind. Amazing how countries seem more than willing to throw the advantage to China in the global research stakes.

Perhaps someone could take them to visit an FE college since they apparently don't know they exist. As soon as you read that someone has studied an Oxford degree with politics in the name you know there'll be a fundamental misconception about something quite mundane!

Half Man Half Biscuit - Horror Clowns Are Dickheads [Official Art Track] YouTube video by Half Man Half Biscuit

@hywelroberts.bsky.social came across this today and thought you might like the horror angle 😉 youtu.be/apYwBHKkhdM?...

I'm finding that the Atlantic is an excellent and sane window on the USA. They have excellent, thoughtful reporting.

I think part of the problem is that Farage is the only one articulating what the future will look like. It's a mean and negative narrative based on conflict and division, but it's a vision. Labour seem to think that being good accountants is enough.

Listening to Farage's speech today - a carbon copy of Trump's approach before the last presidential election. Saddening that so many will be taken in by it. He's even got a version of DOGE going - because it's been so successful in the USA!!

The Debt Is About to Matter Again When interest rates outpace growth, very bad things can happen.

It'll just speed up a realignment of international trade away from the USA. The uncertainty is damaging and other nations will just lose patience. Great article in the Atlantic about how he's likely to crash the economy. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

Although a more developed way to show them is in a framework - simple enough to draw on the back of a napkin and useful as a way of explaining a set of ideas as the start of a dialogue

Yes 😄

Sorry, when I say models, I mean mental models.

universal solutions to processually complex contexts

In terms of ideas being connected, it can mean a number of things, but the heuristic allows for an opening up of this as a dialogue rather than trying to create a complete answer. It's one of the reasons I find the edu cogsci debate a little unhelpful - there are attempts to close down and give

idea of models after listening to David Snowden talk about this. Models will always be incomplete and will offer incomplete explanations. Frameworks can act as heuristics and aid dialogue and opening up. It's why he also argued there are no such things as biases only heuristics.

It is useful - as a rule of thumb. It will never be wholly accurate, but from a processually-complex perspective it never can be as anyone explaining this will only ever give a partial explanation. A framework is a simplification to aid dialogue. It can never be more - that's why I've abandoned the

thumb from which to expand your own explanation and understanding.

capturing Hernes' work on meaning structures. It is an abstracted glimpse of a much more complex and continuously flowing emergent complex adaptive system. This then means that the diagram can be understood in a number of different ways dependent on your ontological position, and is just a rule of

said, this is seen as a tangle of processes flowing through time. Hence, the notion of nodes and links is a very simplified way of beginning to make sense of learning, but you have to add a great deal of complexity and meaning, as well as temporal aspects to it. Like the diagram I mentioned

So, when I think of schema in this way, I see it as a conceptual representation, i.e. that knowledge is made up of parts, but to understand, you need to think about how they fit together, what the emergent complex adaptive system of our learning landscape looks like. It is also important that, as I

Heuristics are simply a rule of thumb. Hence I see the nodes and connections representation as such a useful rule of thumb - the reality is much more complex but as an aide memoire the representation gives us a handle on the core aspects of that complexity.

I think quite a lot of the education cogsci stuff I see doesn't really take time seriously - I wonder if that's because much of it appears to implicitly see learning as an outcome rather than an ever emerging process. Is learning ever an outcome??

idea of meaning structures being the core of organisations, perhaps a useful analogy??

From a process philosophical perspective, I'd say they are emerging events - a schema as a nodes and lines image is a useful heuristic, but in reality they are not permanent, constantly being realigned and added to - so any diagram needs a time axis. At a different scale it's a bit like Hernes's