I’ve long been interested in the value of AI and where and when it is particularly useful or gimmicky.  Given the impact of AI on the environment (and costs), I often reflect on whether the AI input is worth-the-impact. I have been using ELM to help tidy up and reword …

Many of you will be aware of our FLORA project (if you aren’t, find out more on Melissa’s helpful FLORA blog post).  Named after Flora Stevenson, a pioneer of education for girls and women but also a quirky acronym – Feedback, Learning, Online Rubrics and Assessment.  FLORA was really our …

  We’ve been really lucky to work with two amazing recent graduates (Martina Emmerich & Zoë Brunner) from the Natural Language Processing Unit in Informatics as part of our Captioning Service Project, who’ve been looking at how we might be able to use GenAI to improve the accuracy of automated transcripts and captions on lecture […]

A guest blog post from one of our human-captioners, Ellie Kerr. Ellie joined us back in 2023 and is one of our original captioners – when we only had a team of 2. Now we have 20 part-time captioners who work on correcting automated captions across our lecture recordings and other media.   I never […]

When I went to university, we didn’t have lecture recording. To be honest, I’ll admit that when I went to university, the ‘AV kit’ in a room was an overhead projector and a chalk board.  I struggled with lectures.  They were often boring to my 18 year old self and …

AI is getting more accessible (as in more easily available or pushed-down-our-throat, depending on your perspective).  My home Windows 11 laptop now has the ‘free’ version of copilot on it, in the taskbar, pretty obviously it’s also available in the Bing search and I’m expecting Apple Intelligence to drop onto …

After a conversation with Tracey Madden in the dim and distant past, I’ve been more and more interested in the impact our services have on the environment.  Our Web and Communications Section in LTW have had some very talented ‘green’ interns this summer and I’ve been lucky enough to get …

On the 19th of July (past Friday) we had a global IT outage which impacted hospitals, trains, air travel, supermarkets and many other businesses.  It seems like it was caused by a small/inconspicuous update to a bit of anti-virus software for Windows operating systems which seemed to ‘break’ Windows.  Although …

I’ve lived on cake for the past two days including a cake fuelled breakfast yesterday, and lunch today.  It’s all about eating a balanced diet (one of the cakes had apricot in it, surely that counts?). What would drive Karen to eat so much cake I hear you ask (although anyone who knows me will […]

I’ve not blogged for a while but I went to an event today which has inspired me to write a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while.  I’ve got another blog post coming about the event itself (which was run by JISC and was about Accessibility in Procurement …