Hello 🐈‍⬛

The AI I use every day The simplest question is always the best It’s been nearly two years since I started fiddling with LLMs. In many ways, they’re the perfect technology to tinker with: zero up-front cost, straight-forward documentation, with plaintext input and output. As with most overhyped start-ups, my tinkering has largely been in the form of writing fancy wrappers around an API. I’ve tested out a few - some silly, some deadly serious, and some making use of my day-job pedagogy to channel the Magic Talking Computers into something useful. ...

Making a private radio podcast for fun and (definitely no) profit An exercise in pettiness, podcasts and programming A boy needs his bongs I love the BBC. But I do not love BBC Sounds. It is clunky, it lacks automatic downloads, and it has an unbearable habit of advertising the podcast you are listening to during said podcast, with a bonus reminder that you can listen to the podcast on the app you are currently using. ...

AI for Me, but not for Thee When it comes to using LLMs, educators need to lead by example. The temptation to ‘just get ChatGPT to do it’ is as strong for teachers as it is for students. So should we be surprised when pupils reach for the AI to finish their homework, when we do the same with our paperwork? The end of term is always a rush, with exams to mark, units to finish, reports to write. That last bulletpoint on the to-do list is often the most arduous: at a modest 100 words per pupil, per subject, subject teachers can soon find themselves churning out close to ten thousand words (double that if you’re a sole trader like a drama or music lead). ...

Why I love Markdown Let the writing do the talking No matter how often you do it, starting the process of writing is agonising. It is slow and full of false starts. Not because we don’t know what to write, but because we could write anything. The blank page is infinite, without footholds or signposts. So we start doodling in the margins. ...

Hello Pico.sh Trying new things, one CLI at a time. This is my first Pico.sh blog post, created and posted entirely from the terminal. echo " # Hello world! " >> hello-world.md scp hello-world.md prose.sh:/ # Post published at # https://mxb.prose.sh/hello-world TO-DO: tweak CSS fix footer write more

AI will eat your English Department And Humanities will be for pudding. TL;DR: The Times has been good enough to publish my letter on this topic - so just read that if you want. Otherwise: given the infinite space afforded by a personal blog, I thought it worth elaborating my thinking here.** Given all the problems faced by British head teachers - the yawning gulf between pay and inflation, opaque inspection frameworks, cratering teacher training and retention rates - one could forgive them for choosing to focus on the current fire-fighting, rather than the looming pall of smoke on the horizon. ...

The case for banning Google You’re Bard, sunshine: the danger ’new search’ poses to the Googling student We can’t control the tides, but we can at least stop our students playing on the sandbars It seems incredible to say now, but I once received lessons in How To Google. And yesterday, Google rang the death-knell for that way of traditional searching. ...

Trial by Error Learning the hard way, failing the right way This website is a place about learning and a place for learning: as the playground page testifies, this is as much a learning experience for me as it is a resource for anyone else. Based on my previous musings, I’ve tried to put the principle into practice. Allow me to introduce my latest experiment in GPT and JS: What Am I Doing Wrong? ...

Coding on The Titanic If the robots can do it better, why bother learning at all? Less “rearranging the deckchairs” and more “putting on your white tie, sitting down in the flooded dining room and wondering if there’ll be scallops to start.” You can’t move for the doom-laden coding headlines at the moment: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ’learn to code’ Meta layoffs show how coding jobs are no longer safe Will A.I. Steal All The Code And Take All The Jobs? (And given what they’ve gone through, one should really allow the media precariat this little crumb of schadenfreude.) ...

Hello World You have to start somewhere. As it says on the tin: I’m a teacher. It’s an incredible career, and one I’m proud to be part of. But a niggling feeling started to at the back of my mind a few months ago. Teachers don’t do much learning. That’s perhaps unfair - hardly anyone, really, does much learning past the age of 25. I don’t mean in the self-knowledge, incremental gains kind of way; I mean in the taking on of a fundamentally new skill or new domain, something you don’t already do. ...