May

18

Facing up to Father: The pleasures and pains of a Cotswold childhood

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New book by David Worlock. Pre-order now at Marble Hill Publishers or Amazon.

A small Cotswold farm is the setting for a classic struggle of wills. Robert Worlock, eccentric and demanding, resolutely maintains the old ways, determined above all to make his son into a farmer fit to take over the family acres. His son, David, is equally determined not to be bullied into something he neither wants nor likes. His childhood becomes a battleground: can he find a way to make his father love him without denying his right to determine his own life?

Mar

28

On starting to get worried about freedom of scientific expression.

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I have known Jan Velterop  for 30 years. At Elsevier, at Springer, at Nature ( before the two were conjoined) and the Academic Press. Always the admirable enthusiast for change and development. Always the man  of principle. When he warns, I listen. I was appalled by his latest warning:https://blog.scielo.org/en/2025/03/26/global-science-in-danger/. I think that everybody should read this and take it seriously.

I try not to write here about political issues. Each to his own. “Great leaders” are full of bombast, empty press releases and ambitious but often impractical executive commands. often the more important things that governments do are never taken seriously at the time. I think for example that since the time in the 1990s when the US government of the day made its defence network Darpanet  available to the world as the Internet, seeking the science communication, the trade and information advantages which would arise from such a gift. A subtle blend of generosity and self interest.The world has altered as a result in a way  which public and political society has never fully recognised. We can talk about globalisation and supply chains, but we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, now a global communication society. Different. countries may try to handle this in different ways, but, by and large, this genie cannot be put back into the bottle. In science, and in the science ecosystem of communication and knowledge transfer with which I have been greatly concerned for at least 40 years, this is particularly true. Science is collaborative and global. Whatever demands are made by politicians, scientists have two speak to each other: they blog, they share thoughts and hypotheses, often sharing data as well as insights. When politicians try to constrain the thinking of one group in one country there are impacts on all groups everywhere .

Jan in his article raises the issues of the NSF list of terms which, if found in the funding proposals or research papers of US scientist dependent upon federal funding will raise questions and provoke examination by officials. This is what  particularly worries me. The list has been widely quoted, but here are a selection of the terms:

  Readers will readily see the agenda. Some, I have no doubt, will sympathise with it and some will not. As an historian and writer and the worker for many years in information and communication, I have to say that the worrying thing for me is not the words to be“examined“. It is the idea of the examination itself. Just as I know that the big noises at the top of the political tree will one day exhaust themselves, so I fear deeply the release of an enduring examining bureaucracy with narrowly framed ideas and aims seeking to censor, restrict and discriminate. The Western world rightly decried the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, of Stalin and of Mao. Looking back on those dreadful periods of history, it is the thought control, and the bureaucratic apparatus created by willing men and women serving  these leaders.  They proved adept at finding  new ways to effectively stifle unrestricted expression in their society. All of this starts in every instance with a list of words, things that you must not say, things that mark you out as “different“. The Orwellian overtones are what I find so chilling. Surely we are not about to replay 1984 from an election result in 2024?

In the last 15 years of blogging “From the bottom of my Garden“ there has been one consistent theme. Trust and identity. We need to know who we are communicating with and we have to trust that their communications have not been pressured framed, adjusted or tampered with in any way. if this is what is threatened by the various moves of the US administration in recent months, then the situation is very serious indeed.

Please find out from your for yourself:

https://www.defendresearch.org

Mar

10

Learning to Learn with AI

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it has been a depressing week in a fairly depressing month. The television screens are full of burly men in suits and red ties verbally abusing smaller men in military fatigues. and then I had this dream, in which President Putin demanded Alaska back, pointing out that the sale price to the USA in 1867 of $7.2 million was far too little, the place had always been intended to be part of Russian imperial sovereignty, and anyway he needed the minerals and rare earth. in my dream I think that I suggested to William Seward that we offer him Greenland instead, but I was told that this was already taken.

The other disturbing part of the week was the continued insistence from all quarters that AI was going to be the universal solvent of all problems, economic, social and climatical. And to listen to the news broadcasts one would believe that AI is the sole property of a group of billionaires who are going to use it as a new way to “monetise“ all of our needs and requirements. Yet in the UK, it did seem that the winter was receding at last, there was real evidence of the arrival of spring, and I want to use this blog to spread hopefulness and optimism, despite the pessimism and gendered by every other news bulletin.

So the hopeful theme of the last month and especially of the last week has been education. In my FutureScapes video interview series for Outsell I had the great pleasure of speaking to Professor Rose Luckin, now just retiring from the role of professor of learner centred design at the Institute of education and  University College London. One of the pioneers, Rose has, over 30 years, demonstrated the way in which intelligent machines, and more importantly, intelligently used  machines ,can support and enhance the learning process. One of the elements of the interview that I loved was her insistence that learning had to be hard. The object of the machine – quite contrary to what you would expect in the smartphone world of today – cannot be a way of reducing the struggle to accomplish a skill or overcome a body of knowledge and gain complete understanding of it. The intelligent machine at your elbow can make it easier, and we spoke at length about personalisation and the way that machines can learn how an individual best learns, and what are the appropriate resources to place in the way of a learner embarking upon the next steps in a learning journey. but facilitating learning  cannot involve removing the struggle: knowledge still needs to be hard  won.

I have a vision of a world in which the “teacher“ can step away from standing in front of 30 people front of different learning abilities and chalking things on a blackboard, and return to the roles of guru, guide and mentor, maximising individual time face-to-face with individual pupils throughout the learning week. While the politicians shouted about power and the importance of not being “disrespected“ (whatever that may mean) our infrastructure is metaphorically burning down. I learned this week that here in the UK 30% of pupils taking public  examinationss at 16 and 18 are supported by a private tutor. I will return to this below, but I am sure that this is emulated in Europe and the US and says to me that these self same politicians are entirely neglectful of our greatest natural resource – the brains of our people.

The tech industries are manifestly at the front of revolution change, emulating and far surpassing the web revolution of the early years of the century. This week I encountered a set of figures from IMPLAN that indicate that every job created in computer storage and equipment leads to the creation of 12.2 jobs in the supply chain that supports it in the USA. A job in motor manufacturing create 6.7 supply chain roles by comparison. In other words we are a society fully committed to interaction with and support from intelligent machines. Last week was the week when Estonia, one of the most advanced education systems in the world, mandated the integration of Chat GPT into the Estonian school curriculum by September 2025. In other words you have to know it and you have to use it.

A press release at the end of the week came as I learned about Medly AI. This refers back to the tutoring issues already mentioned. Two young men, both graduates from UCL, coincidentally, and both trained and now qualified as medical doctors, launched a start-up which has now received $1.7 million in initial funding.(Many congratulations are due as well to the UCL incubator,BaseKX– the Hatchery). Concentrating on the public examinations, Medly AI has created personalised tutoring systems that are  proving very effective in getting students qualified at higher grades. Kavi Shamra and Paul Jung should be congratulated . They charge their students £25 a month, or £240 a year. Human tutors can cost f £400-£500 a month. our society, in North America, as in Europe, depends entirely upon getting the best brains and using them effectively. The late developers, the difficult learners, the children characterised as  non-academic at age 11 – these are so often the best minds in society when they reach maturity. Medley AI. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/news/2025/feb/ucl-startup-raises-ps17-million-bring-ai-private-tutor-more-students) gives them a leg up.

Of course, personalisation is only at its very beginning. Imagine the world in which every toddler receives an intelligent learning machine in childhood which remains with them throughout their lives. A machine which learns the way in which the individual learns, the preferences and the pace. An intelligent machine which can feedback to the teacher in the classroom, while planning ways of lighting up the subject matter using content and techniques which most appeal to the individual learner. In this world, assessment is continual, and the individual gets the confidence of real lifelong learning – that new skills can be acquired at any time alongside new knowledge to cope with the ever changing requirements of living in our digitally designed and networked  world.


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