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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:08:58 +0000</pubDate>
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<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/?p=21</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds. It Depends – […]]]></description>
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<p>This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It Depends – Gary Hockin</h2>
<p>After a short welcome to the conference (and the new venue), Gary Hockin gave a talk about how decisions that we make every day have different outcomes based on the context. There are always trade-offs to consider for every choice we make and because one option is not chosen in one instance, it doesn’t mean it is unsuitable for all situations.</p>
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</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Know Your Enemies: Live Exploit of a PHP Engine Security Breach – Alexandre Daubois</h2>
<p>Alexandre presented an interesting talk on real exploits or attempted exploits in PHP. The most interesting example to me was an attempt to add malicious code that would allow executing any code on a server running PHP as long as it’s connected to the internet. This was done by interpreting a specific header on incoming requests as code to run when given a certain prefix. It even made it to a release candidate before it was noticed by other contributors. This was done by exploiting a vulnerability in the version control server that allowed the malicious actor to submit the code changes under a different user. Luckily the code was spotted and removed before becoming widely available in a full release. This also influenced the decision to move the code into GitHub, so maintainers didn’t have to worry as much about the security of the code.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Packets, Protocols and PHP: Networking Fundamentals for Developers – Jessica Smith</h2>
<p>This next talk discussed what happens behind the scenes whenever a network request is made over the internet. Jessica covered a lot during the 45 minutes and even though it isn’t knowledge that I’d usually consider a key part to my job, I think it is very useful to understand what is happening in the background when users are accessing your website. It still amazes me how we can send information across the world in seconds (or less) over the internet. Even with an explanation on how data is split into packets and how they are routed, it’s still hard to comprehend.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Four Pillars of Observability – Florian Engelhardt</h2>
<p>Next came a guide to monitoring live applications and how to quickly find when something is wrong with Florian. I found a lot of the tips to be relevant to websites I have worked on within the university such as the Short Courses Platform (SCP). Occasionally we have a bug in the site, and it can be very difficult to find what the actual cause of it is. Using metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling we can get a better idea of what is causing an issue and why it has started happening. As a developer, I’m used to using logs and error messages to get an idea about what is going wrong when something breaks, but Florian gave some interesting ideas that aren’t completely code related like monitoring live sales (or course enrolments for the SCP) and visualising them. If the numbers start to drop rapidly, then something has probably broken which means people can’t use the website properly.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Saving Time by Using a Debugger – Derick Rethans</h2>
<p>Derick gave a demonstration on ways to use Xdebug to improve developer efficiency. Once setup, it can be a useful tool for stepping through PHP code and inspecting the current state of the web application to find out what is happening. Personally, I have used debuggers with C# and C++ code and found it useful there since I don’t have to recompile anything to add in some logs and inspect data. In interpreted languages like PHP, this isn’t something I have considered before, however I will definitely be finding it useful in my future work. Even though some technical issues disrupted the live demonstrations, Derick still managed to inspire me to check out Xdebug for myself and use with both personal and work projects.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Stepping away from the code… but not quite… – Wim Godden</h2>
<p>This was one of my favourite talks of the day from Wim about how stakeholders in a project should approach the code, particularly emphasising when people in management or non-development roles need to <em>step away from the code</em> and let developers do their job. He talked about how people from outside of development teams, especially those with development experience, can often try to dictate the implementation of a feature rather than what the result of having that feature should be which can cause issues with development and often makes the process of adding a feature take longer. Providing high quality user stories that have good coverage of what the users need to be able to do on the application will be far more valuable to developers. He also talked about how the career progression of a developer doesn’t have to be continuously upwards within an organisation. Instead, it’s ok to move up and down or stay where we’re comfortable.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Escaping the Code Maze – Yannick Chenot</h2>
<p>To finish off the day, Yannick discussed how we can make our code easier to understand by reducing the assumptions that can be made. Some languages are already stricter on some of the methods of explaining code such as providing types to variables with static types, whereas languages like PHP don’t enforce many rules like this. He demonstrated a few PHP classes and how the assumptions can be reduced by making simple changes that can greatly improve the readability of the code.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">In conclusion</h2>
<p>There were lots of interesting topic discussed throughout the day and plenty to think about afterwards. I will definitely be looking into Xdebug and different tools for monitoring and observing web applications. I found Wim Godden’s talk about how we should see code in different roles across an organisation interesting. I’d highly recommend watching/listening to the recording as this one is also relevant to less technical people who work with developers.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Elephants </h2>
<p>I’ve also started a collection of PHP elephants with two from this conference.</p>
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<title>PHPUK Conference 2025</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:09:19 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[In February, a colleague and I got the chance to attend the PHPUK conference 2025. Throughout the day, we attended talks from various contributors to the PHP community. The conference had two tracks, which allowed us to split up and cover as much as possible with plenty of breaks to discuss what we’ve learnt about. […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In February, a colleague and I got the chance to attend the PHPUK conference 2025. Throughout the day, we attended talks from various contributors to the PHP community. The conference had two tracks, which allowed us to split up and cover as much as possible with plenty of breaks to discuss what we’ve learnt about.</p>
<p>Before splitting into separate tracks, Daniel Terhorst-North gave a talk on behaviour driven development (BDD) and the 20 years of history behind it. He showed how even though it was started by one person, the community has kept it going.</p>
<p>The next speaker I listened to was Wim Godden who spoke about deploying software at both small and large scales and automating the processes behind it as much as possible. He showed a real-world example of deploying software to rental lockers for a Belgium based company. They used a tool called Ansible to remotely connect to each computer and run tasks for setting up the computer, installing software, and running the company’s software that operates the lockers. This talk felt especially relevant to the Short Courses Platform I am currently working on, since we are also using Ansible to deploy the website onto multiple servers and update it when required.</p>
<p>After a quick break and discussion about the talks we’d listened to, I attended a talk about how large codebases can be compared to onions from Katy Ereira. She explained how large systems can be broken down into smaller, more understandable parts and comparing them to different parts of an onion to help understand their function.</p>
<p>Nils Adermann gave a talk on securing software supply chains. When most people add a library to their codebase, they don’t always think about the security of the library itself, and especially not the dependencies required by it. However, a dependency of a dependency of a library used for something as simple as logging messages could have a security vulnerability that affects the whole codebase. Nils talked about ways to protect against that using tools like GitHub Dependabot or Conductor, which Private Packagist is currently developing. He also revealed how many widely used and often open source libraries receive extremely little funding, which can make it difficult finding volunteers to maintain security.</p>
<p>Over lunch, we discussed the speakers we had listened to and spoke to other attendees of the conference.</p>
<p>Next was a talk from Gina Banyard about discovering edge cases in the PHP language. As a PHP core maintainer, they had an interesting perspective on how bugs are diagnosed and discussions about the expected functionality. Some examples of recently addressed bugs were demonstrated, along with how PHP now handles them.</p>
<p>After the final break, I attended a talk about OpenAPI from Lorna Mitchell, which discussed what the OpenAPI specification is and how it can benefit both developers and users of APIs. The specification assists developers in designing APIs and creating extensive documentation for them through a schema written in either JSON or YAML. Since it is language agnostic, it can be applied to any API.</p>
<p>The conference provided some interesting perspectives and ideas that I will be sharing with other colleagues and may encourage us to consider in current or future projects. Many of the talks were not just relevant to PHP, so can be applied to other projects such as the short courses platform, which already uses Ansible for deployment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Information about all the speakers and recordings of the talks can be found on the <a href="https://www.phpconference.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PHPUK Conference website</a></p>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:08:58 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Conference]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/?p=21</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds. It Depends – […]]]></description>
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<p>This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It Depends – Gary Hockin</h2>
<p>After a short welcome to the conference (and the new venue), Gary Hockin gave a talk about how decisions that we make every day have different outcomes based on the context. There are always trade-offs to consider for every choice we make and because one option is not chosen in one instance, it doesn’t mean it is unsuitable for all situations.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" src="about:blank" data-bs-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w5Ja7Gysm_w?feature=oembed" width="660" height="544" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Know Your Enemies: Live Exploit of a PHP Engine Security Breach – Alexandre Daubois</h2>
<p>Alexandre presented an interesting talk on real exploits or attempted exploits in PHP. The most interesting example to me was an attempt to add malicious code that would allow executing any code on a server running PHP as long as it’s connected to the internet. This was done by interpreting a specific header on incoming requests as code to run when given a certain prefix. It even made it to a release candidate before it was noticed by other contributors. This was done by exploiting a vulnerability in the version control server that allowed the malicious actor to submit the code changes under a different user. Luckily the code was spotted and removed before becoming widely available in a full release. This also influenced the decision to move the code into GitHub, so maintainers didn’t have to worry as much about the security of the code.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Packets, Protocols and PHP: Networking Fundamentals for Developers – Jessica Smith</h2>
<p>This next talk discussed what happens behind the scenes whenever a network request is made over the internet. Jessica covered a lot during the 45 minutes and even though it isn’t knowledge that I’d usually consider a key part to my job, I think it is very useful to understand what is happening in the background when users are accessing your website. It still amazes me how we can send information across the world in seconds (or less) over the internet. Even with an explanation on how data is split into packets and how they are routed, it’s still hard to comprehend.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" src="about:blank" data-bs-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z-sYEwWdBrM?feature=oembed" width="660" height="544" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Four Pillars of Observability – Florian Engelhardt</h2>
<p>Next came a guide to monitoring live applications and how to quickly find when something is wrong with Florian. I found a lot of the tips to be relevant to websites I have worked on within the university such as the Short Courses Platform (SCP). Occasionally we have a bug in the site, and it can be very difficult to find what the actual cause of it is. Using metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling we can get a better idea of what is causing an issue and why it has started happening. As a developer, I’m used to using logs and error messages to get an idea about what is going wrong when something breaks, but Florian gave some interesting ideas that aren’t completely code related like monitoring live sales (or course enrolments for the SCP) and visualising them. If the numbers start to drop rapidly, then something has probably broken which means people can’t use the website properly.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Saving Time by Using a Debugger – Derick Rethans</h2>
<p>Derick gave a demonstration on ways to use Xdebug to improve developer efficiency. Once setup, it can be a useful tool for stepping through PHP code and inspecting the current state of the web application to find out what is happening. Personally, I have used debuggers with C# and C++ code and found it useful there since I don’t have to recompile anything to add in some logs and inspect data. In interpreted languages like PHP, this isn’t something I have considered before, however I will definitely be finding it useful in my future work. Even though some technical issues disrupted the live demonstrations, Derick still managed to inspire me to check out Xdebug for myself and use with both personal and work projects.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Stepping away from the code… but not quite… – Wim Godden</h2>
<p>This was one of my favourite talks of the day from Wim about how stakeholders in a project should approach the code, particularly emphasising when people in management or non-development roles need to <em>step away from the code</em> and let developers do their job. He talked about how people from outside of development teams, especially those with development experience, can often try to dictate the implementation of a feature rather than what the result of having that feature should be which can cause issues with development and often makes the process of adding a feature take longer. Providing high quality user stories that have good coverage of what the users need to be able to do on the application will be far more valuable to developers. He also talked about how the career progression of a developer doesn’t have to be continuously upwards within an organisation. Instead, it’s ok to move up and down or stay where we’re comfortable.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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</div></figure>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Escaping the Code Maze – Yannick Chenot</h2>
<p>To finish off the day, Yannick discussed how we can make our code easier to understand by reducing the assumptions that can be made. Some languages are already stricter on some of the methods of explaining code such as providing types to variables with static types, whereas languages like PHP don’t enforce many rules like this. He demonstrated a few PHP classes and how the assumptions can be reduced by making simple changes that can greatly improve the readability of the code.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" src="about:blank" data-bs-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0emNLJAsfcM?feature=oembed" width="660" height="544" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">In conclusion</h2>
<p>There were lots of interesting topic discussed throughout the day and plenty to think about afterwards. I will definitely be looking into Xdebug and different tools for monitoring and observing web applications. I found Wim Godden’s talk about how we should see code in different roles across an organisation interesting. I’d highly recommend watching/listening to the recording as this one is also relevant to less technical people who work with developers.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Elephants </h2>
<p>I’ve also started a collection of PHP elephants with two from this conference.</p>
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<title>PHPUK Conference 2025</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:09:19 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorised]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[In February, a colleague and I got the chance to attend the PHPUK conference 2025. Throughout the day, we attended talks from various contributors to the PHP community. The conference had two tracks, which allowed us to split up and cover as much as possible with plenty of breaks to discuss what we’ve learnt about. […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In February, a colleague and I got the chance to attend the PHPUK conference 2025. Throughout the day, we attended talks from various contributors to the PHP community. The conference had two tracks, which allowed us to split up and cover as much as possible with plenty of breaks to discuss what we’ve learnt about.</p>
<p>Before splitting into separate tracks, Daniel Terhorst-North gave a talk on behaviour driven development (BDD) and the 20 years of history behind it. He showed how even though it was started by one person, the community has kept it going.</p>
<p>The next speaker I listened to was Wim Godden who spoke about deploying software at both small and large scales and automating the processes behind it as much as possible. He showed a real-world example of deploying software to rental lockers for a Belgium based company. They used a tool called Ansible to remotely connect to each computer and run tasks for setting up the computer, installing software, and running the company’s software that operates the lockers. This talk felt especially relevant to the Short Courses Platform I am currently working on, since we are also using Ansible to deploy the website onto multiple servers and update it when required.</p>
<p>After a quick break and discussion about the talks we’d listened to, I attended a talk about how large codebases can be compared to onions from Katy Ereira. She explained how large systems can be broken down into smaller, more understandable parts and comparing them to different parts of an onion to help understand their function.</p>
<p>Nils Adermann gave a talk on securing software supply chains. When most people add a library to their codebase, they don’t always think about the security of the library itself, and especially not the dependencies required by it. However, a dependency of a dependency of a library used for something as simple as logging messages could have a security vulnerability that affects the whole codebase. Nils talked about ways to protect against that using tools like GitHub Dependabot or Conductor, which Private Packagist is currently developing. He also revealed how many widely used and often open source libraries receive extremely little funding, which can make it difficult finding volunteers to maintain security.</p>
<p>Over lunch, we discussed the speakers we had listened to and spoke to other attendees of the conference.</p>
<p>Next was a talk from Gina Banyard about discovering edge cases in the PHP language. As a PHP core maintainer, they had an interesting perspective on how bugs are diagnosed and discussions about the expected functionality. Some examples of recently addressed bugs were demonstrated, along with how PHP now handles them.</p>
<p>After the final break, I attended a talk about OpenAPI from Lorna Mitchell, which discussed what the OpenAPI specification is and how it can benefit both developers and users of APIs. The specification assists developers in designing APIs and creating extensive documentation for them through a schema written in either JSON or YAML. Since it is language agnostic, it can be applied to any API.</p>
<p>The conference provided some interesting perspectives and ideas that I will be sharing with other colleagues and may encourage us to consider in current or future projects. Many of the talks were not just relevant to PHP, so can be applied to other projects such as the short courses platform, which already uses Ansible for deployment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Information about all the speakers and recordings of the talks can be found on the <a href="https://www.phpconference.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PHPUK Conference website</a></p>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:08:58 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Conference]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds. It Depends – […]]]></description>
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<p>This February I was back at the PHPUK conference in London. The venue this year was 1 America Square with a historic wall through the middle of one of the rooms. There were three tracks to follow so unfortunately we couldn’t go to all the talks, but managed to cover two thirds.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">It Depends – Gary Hockin</h2>
<p>After a short welcome to the conference (and the new venue), Gary Hockin gave a talk about how decisions that we make every day have different outcomes based on the context. There are always trade-offs to consider for every choice we make and because one option is not chosen in one instance, it doesn’t mean it is unsuitable for all situations.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Know Your Enemies: Live Exploit of a PHP Engine Security Breach – Alexandre Daubois</h2>
<p>Alexandre presented an interesting talk on real exploits or attempted exploits in PHP. The most interesting example to me was an attempt to add malicious code that would allow executing any code on a server running PHP as long as it’s connected to the internet. This was done by interpreting a specific header on incoming requests as code to run when given a certain prefix. It even made it to a release candidate before it was noticed by other contributors. This was done by exploiting a vulnerability in the version control server that allowed the malicious actor to submit the code changes under a different user. Luckily the code was spotted and removed before becoming widely available in a full release. This also influenced the decision to move the code into GitHub, so maintainers didn’t have to worry as much about the security of the code.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Packets, Protocols and PHP: Networking Fundamentals for Developers – Jessica Smith</h2>
<p>This next talk discussed what happens behind the scenes whenever a network request is made over the internet. Jessica covered a lot during the 45 minutes and even though it isn’t knowledge that I’d usually consider a key part to my job, I think it is very useful to understand what is happening in the background when users are accessing your website. It still amazes me how we can send information across the world in seconds (or less) over the internet. Even with an explanation on how data is split into packets and how they are routed, it’s still hard to comprehend.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Four Pillars of Observability – Florian Engelhardt</h2>
<p>Next came a guide to monitoring live applications and how to quickly find when something is wrong with Florian. I found a lot of the tips to be relevant to websites I have worked on within the university such as the Short Courses Platform (SCP). Occasionally we have a bug in the site, and it can be very difficult to find what the actual cause of it is. Using metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling we can get a better idea of what is causing an issue and why it has started happening. As a developer, I’m used to using logs and error messages to get an idea about what is going wrong when something breaks, but Florian gave some interesting ideas that aren’t completely code related like monitoring live sales (or course enrolments for the SCP) and visualising them. If the numbers start to drop rapidly, then something has probably broken which means people can’t use the website properly.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Saving Time by Using a Debugger – Derick Rethans</h2>
<p>Derick gave a demonstration on ways to use Xdebug to improve developer efficiency. Once setup, it can be a useful tool for stepping through PHP code and inspecting the current state of the web application to find out what is happening. Personally, I have used debuggers with C# and C++ code and found it useful there since I don’t have to recompile anything to add in some logs and inspect data. In interpreted languages like PHP, this isn’t something I have considered before, however I will definitely be finding it useful in my future work. Even though some technical issues disrupted the live demonstrations, Derick still managed to inspire me to check out Xdebug for myself and use with both personal and work projects.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Stepping away from the code… but not quite… – Wim Godden</h2>
<p>This was one of my favourite talks of the day from Wim about how stakeholders in a project should approach the code, particularly emphasising when people in management or non-development roles need to <em>step away from the code</em> and let developers do their job. He talked about how people from outside of development teams, especially those with development experience, can often try to dictate the implementation of a feature rather than what the result of having that feature should be which can cause issues with development and often makes the process of adding a feature take longer. Providing high quality user stories that have good coverage of what the users need to be able to do on the application will be far more valuable to developers. He also talked about how the career progression of a developer doesn’t have to be continuously upwards within an organisation. Instead, it’s ok to move up and down or stay where we’re comfortable.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Escaping the Code Maze – Yannick Chenot</h2>
<p>To finish off the day, Yannick discussed how we can make our code easier to understand by reducing the assumptions that can be made. Some languages are already stricter on some of the methods of explaining code such as providing types to variables with static types, whereas languages like PHP don’t enforce many rules like this. He demonstrated a few PHP classes and how the assumptions can be reduced by making simple changes that can greatly improve the readability of the code.</p>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading">In conclusion</h2>
<p>There were lots of interesting topic discussed throughout the day and plenty to think about afterwards. I will definitely be looking into Xdebug and different tools for monitoring and observing web applications. I found Wim Godden’s talk about how we should see code in different roles across an organisation interesting. I’d highly recommend watching/listening to the recording as this one is also relevant to less technical people who work with developers.</p>
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Elephants </h2>
<p>I’ve also started a collection of PHP elephants with two from this conference.</p>
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<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/egreen2/2025/08/19/phpuk-conference-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Green]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:09:19 +0000</pubDate>
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<p>Before splitting into separate tracks, Daniel Terhorst-North gave a talk on behaviour driven development (BDD) and the 20 years of history behind it. He showed how even though it was started by one person, the community has kept it going.</p>
<p>The next speaker I listened to was Wim Godden who spoke about deploying software at both small and large scales and automating the processes behind it as much as possible. He showed a real-world example of deploying software to rental lockers for a Belgium based company. They used a tool called Ansible to remotely connect to each computer and run tasks for setting up the computer, installing software, and running the company’s software that operates the lockers. This talk felt especially relevant to the Short Courses Platform I am currently working on, since we are also using Ansible to deploy the website onto multiple servers and update it when required.</p>
<p>After a quick break and discussion about the talks we’d listened to, I attended a talk about how large codebases can be compared to onions from Katy Ereira. She explained how large systems can be broken down into smaller, more understandable parts and comparing them to different parts of an onion to help understand their function.</p>
<p>Nils Adermann gave a talk on securing software supply chains. When most people add a library to their codebase, they don’t always think about the security of the library itself, and especially not the dependencies required by it. However, a dependency of a dependency of a library used for something as simple as logging messages could have a security vulnerability that affects the whole codebase. Nils talked about ways to protect against that using tools like GitHub Dependabot or Conductor, which Private Packagist is currently developing. He also revealed how many widely used and often open source libraries receive extremely little funding, which can make it difficult finding volunteers to maintain security.</p>
<p>Over lunch, we discussed the speakers we had listened to and spoke to other attendees of the conference.</p>
<p>Next was a talk from Gina Banyard about discovering edge cases in the PHP language. As a PHP core maintainer, they had an interesting perspective on how bugs are diagnosed and discussions about the expected functionality. Some examples of recently addressed bugs were demonstrated, along with how PHP now handles them.</p>
<p>After the final break, I attended a talk about OpenAPI from Lorna Mitchell, which discussed what the OpenAPI specification is and how it can benefit both developers and users of APIs. The specification assists developers in designing APIs and creating extensive documentation for them through a schema written in either JSON or YAML. Since it is language agnostic, it can be applied to any API.</p>
<p>The conference provided some interesting perspectives and ideas that I will be sharing with other colleagues and may encourage us to consider in current or future projects. Many of the talks were not just relevant to PHP, so can be applied to other projects such as the short courses platform, which already uses Ansible for deployment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Information about all the speakers and recordings of the talks can be found on the <a href="https://www.phpconference.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PHPUK Conference website</a></p>
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<title>The witterings and musings of a learning technologist</title>
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<title>More adventures with Claude</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:31:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=433</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my first blog post about Claude. We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/">first blog post about Claude</a>.</p>
<p>We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ which are AI summaries of the people recorded in the database where we have the most data and a few new visualisations and bug fixes.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-435 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png" alt="Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 'Ask the database' screenshot." width="1024" height="847" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-300x248.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-768x635.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-242x200.png 242w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853.png 1138w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>I tried to build an <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/oer/">OER search</a> – it was fun but I think it’s a good example of how to do things really badly. OER repositories sometimes have APIs to allow outside code to search them but not all of them do. So in the cases where there were no APIs or we couldn’t get an API key, we are scraping search results which is pretty horrible. I think this is one I’d need a bit more time to sort out – I’d need to go and grab some API keys and honestly think I’d need to speak to repository owners because scraping search results is a really horrible way to do what’s needed and they might not like it very much.</p>
<p>Finally, as I mentioned in <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/">my previous blog post</a>, I’m leaving the University and I was thinking, what could I leave Myles, the new Head of DLAM, as a present? When I initially started the role myself, I always thought, what would <a href="https://ammienoot.com/about-2/">Anne-Marie</a> do in this situation? Well. I still don’t really know for certain what Anne-Marie would have done (I could take a guess) but Myles needs not to wonder what Karen would do because ….. I’m leaving him <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/karen-bot/">‘Karen-Bot’</a> to help guide him in his first few days/weeks.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-434" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png" alt="Karen-Bot in action. Purple AI chatbot." width="961" height="924" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png 961w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-300x288.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-768x738.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-208x200.png 208w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 961px) 100vw, 961px" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Please use her wisely and also ask your questions now. She, like myself, will be leaving soon.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
</span>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
</item>
<item>
<title>What’s a couple of decades between friends?</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:02:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=428</guid>
<description><![CDATA[After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot up on other areas I’m interested in such as sustainability and AI (or even the sustainability OF AI). In the last few days, I thought I’d think about how much things have changed since I started in Biological Sciences in October of 2004 as an eLearning Project Officer ….</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Roles</h1>
<p>I was initially brought in funded by a Principal’s eLearning Fund project officer and I was on a fixed term contract to encourage the uptake of ‘eLearning’ in the School because the Principal believed it was something useful to be invested in. There were quite a few of us across the Schools at the University which made it a nice environment but it was a bit ‘new’ and some parts of the University were maybe not massively enthusiastic about it. Nowadays ‘eLearning’ is just synonymous with learning. It’s just part of what we do at the University. The University now has a much larger number of learning technologists and related roles – both centrally and in Schools.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Hardware</h1>
<p>There have been massive changes in tech since 2004 unsurprisingly. Everything is much smaller now and despite being smaller, can do much more. I was very involved in a college project to roll out ‘clickers’ when I was in Biology, supporting Schools across the college and even in Biomedical Sciences. We had to hand out these infrared devices to students, either on loan (I developed a barcode reading application to allow them to be signed out) or hand them out at the start and back in at the end of the lecture. If you want a wee blast from the past, you can <a href="http://www.stg-inc.com/prs.shtm">see how they look and an old web page with marketing information</a> about them. I can’t believe pages this old still exist!</p>
<p>Ironically, one of the procurements my team did when I took on my Head of DLAM role was to replace our audience response system, 18 years later! We procured <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/learning-and-teaching-technologies/electronic-voting-system/wooclap">Wooclap</a> which has no infrared and no separate keypad because everyone just uses their smart phones to interact with it. To explain why we had these infrared ‘clickers’ in 2004, this is the sort of phone I had in 2004. The only thing ‘smart’ about it was that it had a retro game called ‘Snake’ on it and the battery lasted for about 6 times as long as my new iPhone’s does.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-429" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg" alt="An old Nokia mobile phone" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-150x200.jpg 150w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02/3184340500" rel="noopener noreferrer">2009 01 06 – Russett – Old Nokia 1</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02" rel="noopener noreferrer">thisisbossi</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Platforms</h1>
<p>Our VLE used to look like this:</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-430 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg" alt="WebCT, our old VLE from yesteryear." width="1023" height="345" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg 1023w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-300x101.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-768x259.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-593x200.jpg 593w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1023px) 100vw, 1023px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03/4048343544" rel="noopener noreferrer">WebCT</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03" rel="noopener noreferrer">michaelseangallagher</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>. [How clever of the University’s own <a href="https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/people/dr-michael-gallagher">Michael Gallagher</a> to make an openly licensed graphic of WebCT for future posterity, way back in 2009! ]</p>
<p>Now it looks way better (although we have higher expectations!). Platforms are generally more accessible. So that’s all good. But some changes have been less positive as time has passed – our websites need to be far more secure and locked up now and sometimes more recent developments have meant sites are more bloated in terms of the size and impact on the environment. I think we are more aware of this now but one of my fabulous interns, Otis, compared the size of some websites now vs the late 90s early 2000’s and found the size had massively increased. We have more stuff now, things look better but as a result often the size has grown. There was a time where we had to compress files we used for websites or uploading to the VLE because we’d have killed our internet or printers if we didn’t. Now we mostly have faster internet and much more generous storage allocations, we’ve forgotten that it’s good to compress things/throw digital things away. It’s something I, myself, need to be better at and working with Otis has shown me where small changes can make big impacts.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Data</h1>
<p>In 2004, data was hard to come by and not joined up. People ran different systems and things were pretty messy. Data analysis was hard. Now, things aren’t perfect but they are better and improving all the time. Tools like PowerBI make it easier for non-data-specicalists to join and visualise data in ways which tell deeper stories. An intern in DLAM, Hera, has been doing just that with loads of our data, putting it into PowerBI so we can share it with Schools. It’s amazing what she’s done in a small amount of time. If you are based in a School and want to look at the LTW data we have about the school, please put a call into the IS Helpline and ask for access to the LTW Dashboards.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Accessibility</h1>
<p>I’m ashamed to say that back in 2004, accessibility wasn’t a big feature of my life. I was aware of basic website accessibility and the tools to check it (<a href="https://jimthatcher.com/bobbyeval.htm">remember Bobby</a>?) but I didn’t truly get it. I have done a lot of work in the area now and do understand it a lot better – sometimes I wonder if we are so focused on the regulations that we forget about the people. We have our intern David working on accessibility and his project on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/07/31/educated-prompting/">making music accessible</a> for his friend, really brings a tear to my eye. This is what our goals should be in terms of accessibility.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Digital Safety and the Truth</h1>
<p>So much is better and has moved on since 2004 but not everything is a positive. There’s more digital crime – hacking, fraud, scams and now we have to contend with fake news, deep fakes, online bullying and harassment. It’s a digitally dangerous place out there. We have training and support but this was never something I really worried about very much in 2004. We have a Digital Safety Officer here in LTW (<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dsdt/author/rfillhar">Ricarda Fillhardt</a>) to keep us all in the know about Digital Safety. She has a huge job on her hand….</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So, a lot has changed – some good, some bad. The world is a different place. The main thing is that in the 22 years I’ve worked at Edinburgh University, I’ve learned so much and have a wealth of experience to take away with me as well as some brilliant colleagues and friends, who I’ll miss very much indeed.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
</span>
]]></content:encoded>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
</item>
<item>
<title>My new pal Claude…</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:19:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=406</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been using ELM at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been using <a href="https://elm.edina.ac.uk/">ELM</a> at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t had a look at it, I’d highly recommend it. I never copy what it says verbatim but it often gives a really helpful starter for ten for report or paper writing – the hardest bit can be just getting started.</p>
<p>However, I’ve spent a few evenings, the past couple of weeks, playing with Claude Code. I’ve heard a few people talking about how amazing it is. I came at it from a very sceptical place – I mean, <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1">Claude (as Claudius) couldn’t even run a small vending machine</a> without going bankrupt… so how on earth could it do anything complicated. I’m also worried about the impact of AI on the environment and on how it has been trained, I didn’t want to like it. This blog post will (at least start) cover what I tried and how it went…</p>
<p>Executive summary…. I’m a bit blown away…..</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Some background information</h2>
<p>So, you know, we have some pretty ancient but really interesting data at Edinburgh University. My favourite dataset of all time is our Survey of Scottish Witchcraft data. If you haven’t seen it, I’d strongly recommend you have a look. It is a digitised dataset, which was collected from primary source materials more than 20 years ago, really led by <a href="https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/julian-goodare">Professor Julian Goodare</a> from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and a large number of other contributors over the more than two decades the dataset has existed. It’s a dataset which provides information about those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. There are a number of different sites where you can find out more, I’ll list them below:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> – this is the modernised version of the original web interface to the data and it has a great ‘about’ page which talks about the project and who’s contributed over the years.</li>
<li><a href="https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft map site</a> – a sister/companion site which we developed here in IS with an interactive map showing all the locations talked about in the original database.</li>
</ul>
<p>The data is so so interesting and I’d really urge you to read about it but I won’t say much more in this post about it because having a 30 page long post will be unmanageable. I’ll add a few interesting links to the bottom of this post if you want to find out more.</p>
<p>The data is Creative Commons licensed and available on <a href="https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/45">Edinburgh’s DataShare service</a>. The other brilliant thing about this data is that it’s a reasonable sized dataset but it’s well structured and has a corresponding database schema. You can download the database tables as CSV files and the schema tells you how they link together. It is also available as a Microsoft Access Database too if you like Access.</p>
<p>I wanted to test out Claude Code but I wanted to use a dataset which contained no personal data and so this well structured data was ideal – there is personal data but it’s for people who existed hundreds of years ago so I think it’s safe from a data protection perspective.</p>
<h2>What I did</h2>
<p>I grabbed all the data from the dataset (CSVs) and the schema and started reading about Claude code. I signed up for a Pro license (£20 a month), installed it all on my personal laptop at home using Visual Code Studio as an editor and installing a plugin to allow Claude to work through the editor. That was literally the trickiest part, mainly because for a few hours Claude didn’t seem to understand that I had a pro license, but once it got over itself, I was flying…..</p>
<p>I fed in all the CSV files and the schema and asked it to set me up with a website to allow me to view the data with an administrator interface which would allow me to edit the data. It needed to be in PHP and using a MariaDB – mainly because it’s what I know but also people in my team who are better developers than me (which isn’t hard) know it too. It’s a set up that’s available on our University web servers. It went into planning mode, reviewed the CSV and the schema and came back with some suggestions which I asked it to implement. It (with my permission) installed a XAMPP stack on my local computer for testing out the site and then happily started beavering away. With Pro you have a limit so that first project took a few evenings – although mainly I just got on with my life whilst Claude was doing its work. A few nights later, it was ready and I ran it on my localhost and to say I was gobsmacked was an understatement. Whilst I’d made my dinner, played with my dogs and vegged out in front of the telly, Claude had been busy designing a website, writing the code and creating style sheets. I’ve done 9 different iterations of the site now – just trying things out to see how it coped. Some of these features are not necessarily features I’d have in a live site but together Claude and I have added:</p>
<ul>
<li>an image for each of the accused. Each accused has a different image. I wouldn’t do this on a live site, it makes the site feel less serious (and it should be serious, it’s a shameful part of our past) should have but there are nearly 4000 accused people in the database, and they all have an individual image now. That took about 10 minutes.</li>
<li>I added an accused witch AI chatbot. I hooked it up to ELM and it’s now possible to have a conversation with an AI with a very basic prompt to respond as a Scottish Accused witch. Again, not necessarily something I’d do on a real version of the site but it was so easy to do, just plugging the ELM API key in and it worked.</li>
<li>for the admin interface, I had to wait until I had SSO installed on the web server and Claude didn’t really understand how that would work at first but once I explained it, again, I just uploaded the files it had created and it just worked.</li>
<li>I had a request to add dark mode which I asked Claude to do. This took a bit of wrangling – mainly just pointing out bits where it hadn’t quite worked right, but was quickly resolved.</li>
<li>I’ve (or should I say Claude….) changed the list pages so they can be ordered by any column on the pages.</li>
<li>We added in some more static pages (not currently populated) and a simple WYSIWYG editor for them (About)</li>
<li>Last night, we added in some visualisations including a basic map (with only the data in the original database, not the data from the more recent map site).</li>
</ul>
<p>I have not shared any of the passwords or keys with Claude. They are all safely stored and not accessible to Claude and I’m manually moving the files onto the server.</p>
<p>All in all, I’m pretty amazed with what Claude did. I had to provide clarity or guidance a few times – for example, I wanted the database connection file outside of the webroot on the server for security and I had to suggest things like that. But apparently you can train it so it learns how you want to work so I need to look into doing that too.</p>
<p>Next thing I’ll be looking at is getting it set up to push code to github – I can then share it with my team – and specifically Andrew and the others in his team who are PROPER REAL DEVELOPERS who I’ve asked to do a code review and give me some feedback – so we can see what they say, and that will probably be another blog post.</p>
<p>You can see what Claude and I built together – <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">Test Survey Site</a>.</p>
<p>At some point I’ll close this site down, it’s just a prototype/experiment so after that date, I’m leaving a few screenshots so you can see how it looks. Amazingly responsive too on a mobile device.</p>
<p>Now I need to think about …. what is next?? I may be a Claude-Addict. If that’s not a thing, it soon will be.</p>
<p>Screenshots are clickable so you can see more of the detail:</p>
<p><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-408 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013-150x150.png" alt="AI Chat Bot" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-409 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028-150x150.png" alt="Basic map" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-410 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043-150x150.png" alt="Basic timeline" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-411 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109-150x150.png" alt="Admin interface - edit a person" width="150" height="150" /></a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-412 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817-150x150.png" alt="Front page of the site" width="150" height="150" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Other links with background info</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/witchcraft_visualisation/">The Witchfinder General blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://curiousedinburgh.org/history-of-witchcraft-in-edinburgh/">History of Witchcraft in Edinburgh Tour</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6054672/">Julian has also been involved in a few TV shows</a> that are definitely worth watching</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
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<time datetime="2026-03-04" itemprop="dateModified">Mar 4, 2026</time>
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<title>Goodbye Argyle House..</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:27:52 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[hybridworking]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=399</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_401" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-401" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-401 size-medium" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg" alt="Brutalist Argyle House from the outside" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-267x200.jpg 267w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-401" class="wp-caption-text">Argyle House (photo by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg">Richard Webb</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>)</figcaption></figure>
<p>I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually enjoyed it – it helped me feel part of something bigger. It’s quieter now since COVID but there’s still a lot going on and LTW does more social things on the wing now like bake sales, charity food collection (thanks to prize winner Stratos!), bring a dish type events (so it’s not all about cake… although my favourite things do always revolve around cake….) which is really nice.</p>
<p>Lots of things happened in Argyle House in the time I’ve been with IS.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>We were based on the west side for the first few years I was with IS and I remember being totally freaked out when I realised the fire escape route was out onto the roof….</li>
<li>COVID happened – I got the train home with a monitor under my arm thinking ‘this will all blow over in a week or two’ (what an idiot eh!!)</li>
<li>When we eventually did return, there was the great flood of Argyle House which caused significant damage to our space.</li>
<li>There was the incident in the lobby. If you know, you know. *shudder*</li>
<li>New staff inductions usually ended up with me stranded in the basement with our new staff member as I showed them where the bike store was. The basement is a little bit like the scene of a zombie apocalypse movie, so thanks to everyone who rescued me (and the new person) over the years. The zombies never got us.</li>
<li>We got an impromptu concert by Suede and the Manics one afternoon, a rehearsal in advance of their evening show. It was awesome.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>My last day in Argyle House was Tuesday, it’s closing for us, forever, today. I have a tinge of sadness – not a fan of the brutalist architecture but it looked better from the inside.</p>
<p>The meeting rooms have been amazing (thanks Lesley and team!), I’ve eaten so much good cake over the years in AH and the view….</p>
<p>… I leave you with this final photo of that glorious view, the sun shone on Tuesday – I think it knew…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-400 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg" alt="View of Edinburgh Castle from Argyle House on a sunny day." width="1024" height="387" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-300x114.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-768x291.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-529x200.jpg 529w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
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<time datetime="2026-02-20" itemprop="dateModified">Feb 20, 2026</time>
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<title>A review of 2025 from a DLAM perspective</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[virtual classroom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=393</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year.</p>
<p>It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and frustrating alongside balancing it all against the rise of AI and how quickly technology is changing as a result of it.</p>
<p>However, as usual, my team have achieved so much. Our Director asks us for our 6 top achievements before our LTW all staff which happens on a 6 monthly basis. It’s a brilliant way to remind ourselves of what we’ve been up to (because it’s so easy to focus on the next thing and forget everything that’s happened).</p>
<p>So here is a little reminder or us DLAMers (Digital Learning Applications and Media) on our achievements over the last year. Give yourselves a pat on the back and a cheer.</p>
<ul>
<li>Working with other parts of LTW and units around the University, we created a web catalogue for our new <a href="https://shortcourses.ed.ac.uk/">Short Courses Platform</a> (SCP). This has all been a huge amount of work but it’s such a fantastic service. It provides an easy workflow for those who want to be able to offer these courses. Prior to our SCP, units and Schools were pretty much on their own. There was no central place to advertise or find them, no easy way for learners to pay and no online teaching & learning platform for those who needed it.</li>
<li>Our writing up of our digital exams project (<a href="https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/FLORADigitalExams">FLORA</a>). Although paused for now, we pulled a huge amount of data together, the Project Board worked really well together to develop a collection of recommendations and a business case for a follow on project. Hopefully we’ll get the ok to move on with that project at some point. The FLORA findings are on SharePoint, so only available to users within the University but if you are interested and are from outside the University, drop me a line.</li>
<li>We had a record breaking academic year for lecture recording, when I looked at our numbers in June, we’d had the biggest number of captures in the history of the service for the 24-25 academic year. Although I don’t have the official stats from our supplier yet for December, i can see that the calendar year numbers for 2025 are almost the same as the full 2024 numbers so I’m confident we’ll be celebrating the biggest calendar year yet for lecture recording at Edinburgh.</li>
<li>2025 has also been a great year for interns in DLAM. They’ve just been so awesome giving us insights into caption and lecture recording quality, sustainability, accessibility and extracting new views of our services (through data) which we’ve never seen before. I’m hoping we can continue this work going forward.</li>
<li>We also did a huge amount of work (with support from Info Sec and folk in Apps and ITI) to switch MFA on for our services.</li>
<li>Our development team rewrote a feed from our timetabling system to push groups into our Learn VLE. It had been misbehaving a bit and it wasn’t providing logging with the detail we needed. It’s now way more efficient, sustainable (and environmentally friendly as an unexpected bonus!) and just much easier to manage.</li>
<li>We restructured our unidesk queues too – this sounds minor but it’s been in my to-do list since I started this job back in 2020. I can’t claim the credit and need to credit Mark Findlay (with our Service Management Team) for getting it over the line.</li>
<li>And we did more work (with colleagues in Applications Directorate) on data retention and deletion. And more will follow in 2026. Trying to keep our services cost effective and sustainable.</li>
<li>And we had the best DLAM Festive Quiz ever. Joe is an excellent quiz host and is 19 Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers tall. Read into that what you will.</li>
<li>And of course, we did what we do every year, managing our services, working with suppliers, helping users with issues. Keeping the show on the road.</li>
</ul>
<p>And obviously there’s loads more I haven’t mentioned, but I’ll stop there.</p>
<p>Phew. A big round applause for everyone. Well done! See you in 2026.</p>
<p> </p>
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<time datetime="2025-12-22" itemprop="dateModified">Dec 22, 2025</time>
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<title>An appeal to HE suppliers</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:28:34 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=389</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc.</p>
<p>That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us to consider the priority of those compared to a shiny new AI tool. Yes, the tool might be very cool and we might agree it’s a tool we want but you might be surprised if you ask us to make an ordered list in priority order, and force us to think about which we want most.</p>
<p>One mistake I’ve seen made year after year (with some suppliers, not all) is getting us into a workshop and saying ‘blue sky thinking, whaddya want?’. We go mad and write down every idea we’ve ever had. The workshop finishes and we go away and get on with our life. The supplier takes an unprioritised list and then makes a bit of a stab at prioritising themselves. We then moan about how they never fix the bugs or build the features we want.</p>
<p>A Head of School in a department I worked in before always used a beans metaphor. I thought this was a brilliant way to work with people – it simplifies the prioritisation task a lot. You only have 10 beans. How many beans would you allocate to that <insert feature/change/budget spend….>? Now you have 7 beans left, what about this one….? The beauty of this is it shows the reality of the world. There are limits to the beans, no one has unlimited beans, and everything needs to be prioritised.</p>
<p>So suppliers….before you go away and build something… make sure you count your beans!</p>
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<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
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<title>Some reflections on AI Agents</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:51:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=381</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/ai-agents/">helpful description by Amazon</a>). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to give them access to whichever systems you’d like them to support you with and that means providing them with access to the system(s). The agents might be built into the system you are using already but more likely an agent will sit outside and help you across different systems. In order to use the agent, you’ll need to share your login credentials for the system with it, so it can act on your behalf.</p>
<p>This is both where the strength of the agent and the problems lie. This is what allows it to do things seamlessly on your behalf. It’s logged in as you, the actions look like actions you are taking. Very hard to detect by the system the agent is running in as it just looks like you logged in and are doing whatever things you usually do.</p>
<p>Part of my brain thinks of all the useful things I could ask an agent to do for me. Things like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Set up a complicated group meeting, looking at busy diaries and finding the best time (avoid lunch time, be mindful of people who are part-time, these people are mandatory, these are optional, make it start 5 past the hour and end 5 to the hour to give everyone a comfort break) – this is always a time consuming job to do and it’d be so helpful to have an agent to give you the possibilities.</li>
<li>Log into our HR system, pull a report of my team’s leave and email all of those with more than 10 days of leave left to book before the end of the annual leave year to remind them. That’s a pretty clunky job to do manually.</li>
<li>Log into the VLE, that assignment that’s due on Friday… Write the essay and submit it.</li>
</ul>
<p>….Wait!! Stop!</p>
<p>The critical thing for me here is ….. you’ve given your login credentials to an agent to do stuff on your behalf! YOUR CREDENTIALS! It’s now logging into University systems and doing things, logged in as you. It can do anything you can do. Is it a reputable/safe agent? How do you know it is? Even reputable agents can do things you wouldn’t do…. worst case you use an agent that isn’t reputable and safe and it does a whole bunch of things behind the scenes you didn’t expect. Like a virus. You’ve given it an entry point and now it’s hacking your servers, sending rude emails to your boss and writing blog posts selling watches. You gave it access to our HR system, now it has all the personal data for your team. You gave it access to the VLE and it’s submitted the essay but it is not a good essay and you fail – it’s rubbish and clearly AI generated. Would you hand your password to a random person on the internet?</p>
<p>We need to work with staff and students to remind them of the risks of using AI like this. Remember the inherent issues with AI – bias, confusion about copyright, and the fact it gets things wrong even if it’s genuinely built for good and not evil. Some AI’s will be built specifically to help discover vulnerabilities in systems or steal your data – do you know which AIs are which?</p>
<p>If we are worried about students using AI to automatically write and submit assessments, isn’t this just the same as worrying about students using AI to generate submissions for assessments? There’s just the extra step of it all being automated. If this is a concern then maybe thinking about how we assess and whether it’s still fit for purpose is actually a big priority for HE.</p>
<p>So, to summarise:</p>
<ul>
<li>Agentic AI is not necessarily bad, but it might be, and really we need to make sure we educate students and staff to understand the risks.</li>
<li>If we are worried about students using it to cheat, there are many other ways they can cheat (and many other ways they can cheat using AI specifically). We have to remind students of the value of the learning process and consider how and what we are assessing – is it still fit for purpose, the world has changed quite a bit in recent years. Many of our students care deeply about the environment, we can also<a href="https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117"> remind them of the impact AI has on the world</a> – so use it carefully.</li>
<li>AI isn’t going away. And actually may feature pretty heavily in employability of our students going forward. We need to teach them how to use it properly.</li>
</ul>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
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<title>Kaltura Connect – November 2025</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:13:10 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=376</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). <a href="https://corp.kaltura.com/video-collaboration-communication/enterprise-video-portal/">Kaltura</a> is the service we use to provide our own <a href="https://media.ed.ac.uk/">Media Hopper Create</a> service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up with a few people we hadn’t seen for a while and met some new people who were using Kaltura in innovative ways. Kaltura is our Media Hopper Create service, providing our media streaming and management service.</p>
<figure id="attachment_377" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-377" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-377 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg" alt="The view by the Science Gallery at KCL (including the tip of the Shard in London and a nice blue sky)" width="600" height="264" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg 600w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-300x132.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-455x200.jpg 455w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-377" class="wp-caption-text">The view by the Science Gallery including the tip of the Shard on a glorious sunny, autumn day</figcaption></figure>
<p>The keynote first thing was very thought provoking, ‘The innovation masquerade’ – <a href="https://www.solent.ac.uk/staff/governor/sarah-jones">Sarah Jones (Southampton Solent University)</a> who was questioning whether innovation was really innovative and whether we needed to question why we were doing ‘innovation’ and make sure we are doing it for the right reasons. She was more inclined to be disruptive than innovative and her arguments were powerful. I think I particularly agreed with her view on questioning why we are doing things more regularly – we don’t ask this question enough.</p>
<p>There were presentations from the University of Bergen on <a href="https://www.vitentv.no/">Viten TV</a> (trusted academic video) and then from Rob Pashley at International Baccalaureate about digitising assessment by 2032, including media in the assessment possibilities. Interesting project which I hope to hear more about in the future.</p>
<p>We did a fun breakout activity in a group where we were thinking (blue sky) about the possibilities for AI in teaching & learning. We had a lot of different ideas around the room, some of which I agreed were a priority. I’m really keen we use AI to complete the less creative aspects of our jobs like writing metadata (with a human check) or checking accessibility. We did talk about it as being a possible way to help create more personalised content for students but there are a lot of risks and dangers with AI and I think we’d need to really think it through before we did something like that. But hey, this was blue sky thinking and we were trying to think about the positives……</p>
<p>Nelly and I presented on <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/accessibility/best-practice-for-making-media-accessible/captioning">our captioning service</a> – both the human captioners (our wonderful intern team, see this<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/04/14/captionediting/"> blog post by Ellie in the team</a>) and also the research we’ve been doing on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/05/01/correcting-academic-language-with-ai/">how to improve the accuracy of the automated captions</a> (without human intervention) and got some really good questions and comments, including someone who’d been using Google Gemini to create audio descriptions for media when it was requested (apparently it did a pretty good job). We also spoke to someone from the University of Amsterdam who were trying to solve a similar problem to us and then someone from <a href="https://www.sunet.se/en/about-sunet">SUNET</a> (who provide a national on premise version of Kaltura for HE in Sweden and are also coincidentally working on a ‘scribe’ service which creates more accurate transcripts and captions using Whisper.AI built on their own specialist infrastructure and they were interested in looking at what we’d been trying with LLMs to do some post processing to perfect the captions. We’ll definitely keep these conversations going.</p>
<p>I think it always surprises me when I go to conferences and chat to others that work in a similar role to me how we all seem to be trying to solve the same problem at the same time but completely oblivious to each other’s struggles. Queen Mary University have realised they have staff who forget to wear microphones and they are using posters to try and remind them. KCL are interested in lecture recording quality monitoring, just like us, but implementing it in a different way. I think it’s such a great opportunity at events like this to remember the world outside and hear about what other people are doing. I really enjoyed the day but it was slightly dampened by <a href="https://x.com/LNER/status/1985910248788394438?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">train issues</a> meaning I got home at 2.30am.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-05" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 5, 2025</time>
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<item>
<title>A Friday at ALT-C</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:06:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=373</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day.</p>
<p>Some brief highlights from me….</p>
<p>I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people have a bigger lifeload than others and lifeload needs to be considered when thinking about inclusivity. This was in a keynote by Gabi Witthaus where she was talking about rethinking inclusion. She made some really good points highlighting injustices as well as possible solutions and reflections.</p>
<p>Steph Comley and Cat Bailey from JISC ran a great workshop on piloting edtech tools – JISC are planning a framework and the workshop will feed into that. It was a great way to reflect on what works well/doesn’t work.</p>
<p>I then really enjoyed the presentation by Ruth Clark, Leeds Conservatoire, about how they moved from Mahara to WordPress for their student competency tracking. Mahara wasn’t popular and it went from being free (& open source) to having a charge and that was the trigger for a rethink. They felt WordPress was a good option and felt it also provided students with transferable skills given how much of the internet uses WordPress.</p>
<p>After that, another really enjoyable presentation by Johnny Briggs at Glasgow who was building immersive experiences but using simple technology like 360 images and video. Although low tech, was much more accessible and widely usable. Johnny had built some really cool stuff like a virtual tour of Wallace’s monument and was doing an accessibility tour of a new building at Glasgow, aiming to show building users with mobility difficulties how to navigate the building.</p>
<p>After lunch, a workshop about reviewing a <a href="https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/digital-education/vle-review-toolkit">VLE review toolkit developed by UCISA</a>. The penultimate session of the afternoon I went to was Joseph Spink from the University of Birmingham did a presentation on their business continuity plan. It was really interesting, and quite similar to what we’ve been doing – which is always a relief. He talked through their priority 1 incident process and what they did to create a Business Continuity Plan and Business Impact Assessment. He highlighted the importance of reviewing these documents regularly because things change.</p>
<p>The final session I found particularly interesting and useful. Andrew Larner from Manchester Metropolitan and his colleagues had been working to review and provide advice on assessment in the age of AI. They’d reviewed all the assessments in a department and attempted them with AI tools and then categorised them in a way which showed how easy it was to use AI to complete them and looked at the ones which had been harder and extracted the parameters of those to help them redesign the other assessments.</p>
<p><a href="https://aiinhighered.com/assessments">Summary of the work done and findings </a>(really worth a look).</p>
<p>Then I headed home. With thanks to Scotrail for getting me home …. Eventually…..</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-26" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 26, 2025</time>
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<item>
<title>Ada Lovelace Day – my reflections</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:56:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorised]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=364</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14<sup>th</sup> of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an even more packed schedule than usual.</p>
<p>I may be a bit biased but I had a thoroughly lovely day.</p>
<p>In a packed (standing room only) room in the Main library, we started with some lightning talks by students and staff which were amazingly interesting. Milly (PhD researcher, the Paleontology Society) talking about the challenges of being a woman while digging up dinosaurs in the Badlands of Montana. It was a really brave and honest discussion of topics rarely discussed and she came prepared with solutions! Next was a talk by Anna (CompSoc Vice President) about fleeing her war-torn home in Ukraine and sharing a stage with President Bill Clinton. Anna’s positive mindset made me feel quite emotional – always turning challenges into opportunities. A truly inspiring young woman.</p>
<p>Ariadna (PhD student, Natural Language Processing NLP) gave a really informational talk where she compared her time in industry to her time in academia. I found it particularly interesting from an NLP perspective, Ariadne worked on text to speech and in particular voice cloning which could be controversial but was also an absolute game changer for disabilities where people lost their ability to talk. Not only could they speak but they could get their own voices back.</p>
<p>I was also pleasantly surprised that Lucia (EFI) was doing a talk with Beccy (Society of Scottish Antiquaries). Lucia was a PhD student who I supported in my days working in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and I remembered her love of data and databases! She and Beccy are now working on a project to get more female Scottish antiquarians of the 19th and 20th centuries into Wikipedia, trying to navigate around complexities such as name changes after marriage, a difficulty I hadn’t considered at all prior to their talk.</p>
<p>We then had an editathon, arts and crafts (I made myself some new stickers for my computer), badges, <a href="https://html5.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/">our women in STEM interactive tour</a> and Cari worked with staff in uCreate to provide women in STEM activities such getting your photo taken with a well known woman in STEM. Here, Satu is showing exactly how it’s done, hanging out with another amazing woman in STEM, Mary Sommerville. I feel like Satu and Mary would be firm friends if Mary was still with us. Kudos to Cari Romans for the great photo.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-366 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg" alt="Satu in a photo with Mary Sommerville with a Spiral nebulae of 51 Messier in the background" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-356x200.jpg 356w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>And after all that excitement, as if that wasn’t enough, the evening concluded with a panel of women climate scientists.</p>
<p>Our Director, <a href="https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/">Melissa</a>, chaired the panel which featured <a href="https://www.waveenergyscotland.co.uk/about/more-on-elva-bannon/">Elva Bannon</a> Research and Engineering Manager at Wave Energy Scotland), <a href="https://www.nms.ac.uk/profile/hermione-cockburn">Hermione Cockburn</a> (Science communicator with a career spanning television, radio, teaching and writing), <a href="https://geosciences.ed.ac.uk/people/profile?person=1613">Gabi Hegerl</a> (Professor of Climate System Science) and last but not least <a href="https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/dr-encarni-medina-lopez">Encarni Medina-Lopez</a> (Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering who leads the ‘Coastal and Environmental Remote Sensing Group’). The conversation explored imposter syndrome and confidence, the importance of having male allies in STEM subjects, how to balance being a leader but not losing your own femininity and personality, the impact of climate change on women and girls and even the marketing and consumerism targeting women and how to resist it. I’m sure Elva then said it was ok for me not to clean my house. I’m sure she did. Or was it a warning about harsh cleaning chemicals and their impact on the environment? Either way, I got the message. Less house cleaning, more reading, blogging and litter picking.</p>
<p>It was such a great panel and I felt we could have continued to talk for many more hours but all good things must end. We finished on a high and had some snacks and individual chats. I had a thoroughly lovely time and felt the panel really chimed with my own experiences as a woman in IT. It gave me some other food for thought with respect to our own work in the area of digital sustainability too.</p>
<figure id="attachment_367" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367" style="width: 900px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-367 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg" alt="A photo of the particpants of the panel" width="900" height="758" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg 900w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-300x253.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-768x647.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-237x200.jpg 237w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367" class="wp-caption-text">From left to right: Hermione, Encarni, Elva, Melissa and Gabi</figcaption></figure>
<p>When I got home, I was exhausted but relieved it had all went well and so happy to have been part of the experience. I’ve got a recording of the panel and will try to make at least bits of it available for a listen. Watch this space.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-16" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 16, 2025</time>
</span>
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<title>More adventures with Claude</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:31:42 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my first blog post about Claude. We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/">first blog post about Claude</a>.</p>
<p>We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ which are AI summaries of the people recorded in the database where we have the most data and a few new visualisations and bug fixes.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-435 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png" alt="Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 'Ask the database' screenshot." width="1024" height="847" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-300x248.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-768x635.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-242x200.png 242w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853.png 1138w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>I tried to build an <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/oer/">OER search</a> – it was fun but I think it’s a good example of how to do things really badly. OER repositories sometimes have APIs to allow outside code to search them but not all of them do. So in the cases where there were no APIs or we couldn’t get an API key, we are scraping search results which is pretty horrible. I think this is one I’d need a bit more time to sort out – I’d need to go and grab some API keys and honestly think I’d need to speak to repository owners because scraping search results is a really horrible way to do what’s needed and they might not like it very much.</p>
<p>Finally, as I mentioned in <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/">my previous blog post</a>, I’m leaving the University and I was thinking, what could I leave Myles, the new Head of DLAM, as a present? When I initially started the role myself, I always thought, what would <a href="https://ammienoot.com/about-2/">Anne-Marie</a> do in this situation? Well. I still don’t really know for certain what Anne-Marie would have done (I could take a guess) but Myles needs not to wonder what Karen would do because ….. I’m leaving him <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/karen-bot/">‘Karen-Bot’</a> to help guide him in his first few days/weeks.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-434" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png" alt="Karen-Bot in action. Purple AI chatbot." width="961" height="924" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png 961w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-300x288.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-768x738.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-208x200.png 208w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 961px) 100vw, 961px" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Please use her wisely and also ask your questions now. She, like myself, will be leaving soon.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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<title>What’s a couple of decades between friends?</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:02:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=428</guid>
<description><![CDATA[After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot up on other areas I’m interested in such as sustainability and AI (or even the sustainability OF AI). In the last few days, I thought I’d think about how much things have changed since I started in Biological Sciences in October of 2004 as an eLearning Project Officer ….</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Roles</h1>
<p>I was initially brought in funded by a Principal’s eLearning Fund project officer and I was on a fixed term contract to encourage the uptake of ‘eLearning’ in the School because the Principal believed it was something useful to be invested in. There were quite a few of us across the Schools at the University which made it a nice environment but it was a bit ‘new’ and some parts of the University were maybe not massively enthusiastic about it. Nowadays ‘eLearning’ is just synonymous with learning. It’s just part of what we do at the University. The University now has a much larger number of learning technologists and related roles – both centrally and in Schools.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Hardware</h1>
<p>There have been massive changes in tech since 2004 unsurprisingly. Everything is much smaller now and despite being smaller, can do much more. I was very involved in a college project to roll out ‘clickers’ when I was in Biology, supporting Schools across the college and even in Biomedical Sciences. We had to hand out these infrared devices to students, either on loan (I developed a barcode reading application to allow them to be signed out) or hand them out at the start and back in at the end of the lecture. If you want a wee blast from the past, you can <a href="http://www.stg-inc.com/prs.shtm">see how they look and an old web page with marketing information</a> about them. I can’t believe pages this old still exist!</p>
<p>Ironically, one of the procurements my team did when I took on my Head of DLAM role was to replace our audience response system, 18 years later! We procured <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/learning-and-teaching-technologies/electronic-voting-system/wooclap">Wooclap</a> which has no infrared and no separate keypad because everyone just uses their smart phones to interact with it. To explain why we had these infrared ‘clickers’ in 2004, this is the sort of phone I had in 2004. The only thing ‘smart’ about it was that it had a retro game called ‘Snake’ on it and the battery lasted for about 6 times as long as my new iPhone’s does.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-429" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg" alt="An old Nokia mobile phone" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-150x200.jpg 150w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02/3184340500" rel="noopener noreferrer">2009 01 06 – Russett – Old Nokia 1</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02" rel="noopener noreferrer">thisisbossi</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Platforms</h1>
<p>Our VLE used to look like this:</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-430 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg" alt="WebCT, our old VLE from yesteryear." width="1023" height="345" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg 1023w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-300x101.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-768x259.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-593x200.jpg 593w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1023px) 100vw, 1023px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03/4048343544" rel="noopener noreferrer">WebCT</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03" rel="noopener noreferrer">michaelseangallagher</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>. [How clever of the University’s own <a href="https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/people/dr-michael-gallagher">Michael Gallagher</a> to make an openly licensed graphic of WebCT for future posterity, way back in 2009! ]</p>
<p>Now it looks way better (although we have higher expectations!). Platforms are generally more accessible. So that’s all good. But some changes have been less positive as time has passed – our websites need to be far more secure and locked up now and sometimes more recent developments have meant sites are more bloated in terms of the size and impact on the environment. I think we are more aware of this now but one of my fabulous interns, Otis, compared the size of some websites now vs the late 90s early 2000’s and found the size had massively increased. We have more stuff now, things look better but as a result often the size has grown. There was a time where we had to compress files we used for websites or uploading to the VLE because we’d have killed our internet or printers if we didn’t. Now we mostly have faster internet and much more generous storage allocations, we’ve forgotten that it’s good to compress things/throw digital things away. It’s something I, myself, need to be better at and working with Otis has shown me where small changes can make big impacts.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Data</h1>
<p>In 2004, data was hard to come by and not joined up. People ran different systems and things were pretty messy. Data analysis was hard. Now, things aren’t perfect but they are better and improving all the time. Tools like PowerBI make it easier for non-data-specicalists to join and visualise data in ways which tell deeper stories. An intern in DLAM, Hera, has been doing just that with loads of our data, putting it into PowerBI so we can share it with Schools. It’s amazing what she’s done in a small amount of time. If you are based in a School and want to look at the LTW data we have about the school, please put a call into the IS Helpline and ask for access to the LTW Dashboards.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Accessibility</h1>
<p>I’m ashamed to say that back in 2004, accessibility wasn’t a big feature of my life. I was aware of basic website accessibility and the tools to check it (<a href="https://jimthatcher.com/bobbyeval.htm">remember Bobby</a>?) but I didn’t truly get it. I have done a lot of work in the area now and do understand it a lot better – sometimes I wonder if we are so focused on the regulations that we forget about the people. We have our intern David working on accessibility and his project on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/07/31/educated-prompting/">making music accessible</a> for his friend, really brings a tear to my eye. This is what our goals should be in terms of accessibility.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Digital Safety and the Truth</h1>
<p>So much is better and has moved on since 2004 but not everything is a positive. There’s more digital crime – hacking, fraud, scams and now we have to contend with fake news, deep fakes, online bullying and harassment. It’s a digitally dangerous place out there. We have training and support but this was never something I really worried about very much in 2004. We have a Digital Safety Officer here in LTW (<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dsdt/author/rfillhar">Ricarda Fillhardt</a>) to keep us all in the know about Digital Safety. She has a huge job on her hand….</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So, a lot has changed – some good, some bad. The world is a different place. The main thing is that in the 22 years I’ve worked at Edinburgh University, I’ve learned so much and have a wealth of experience to take away with me as well as some brilliant colleagues and friends, who I’ll miss very much indeed.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
</span>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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<title>My new pal Claude…</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:19:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=406</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been using ELM at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been using <a href="https://elm.edina.ac.uk/">ELM</a> at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t had a look at it, I’d highly recommend it. I never copy what it says verbatim but it often gives a really helpful starter for ten for report or paper writing – the hardest bit can be just getting started.</p>
<p>However, I’ve spent a few evenings, the past couple of weeks, playing with Claude Code. I’ve heard a few people talking about how amazing it is. I came at it from a very sceptical place – I mean, <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1">Claude (as Claudius) couldn’t even run a small vending machine</a> without going bankrupt… so how on earth could it do anything complicated. I’m also worried about the impact of AI on the environment and on how it has been trained, I didn’t want to like it. This blog post will (at least start) cover what I tried and how it went…</p>
<p>Executive summary…. I’m a bit blown away…..</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Some background information</h2>
<p>So, you know, we have some pretty ancient but really interesting data at Edinburgh University. My favourite dataset of all time is our Survey of Scottish Witchcraft data. If you haven’t seen it, I’d strongly recommend you have a look. It is a digitised dataset, which was collected from primary source materials more than 20 years ago, really led by <a href="https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/julian-goodare">Professor Julian Goodare</a> from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and a large number of other contributors over the more than two decades the dataset has existed. It’s a dataset which provides information about those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. There are a number of different sites where you can find out more, I’ll list them below:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> – this is the modernised version of the original web interface to the data and it has a great ‘about’ page which talks about the project and who’s contributed over the years.</li>
<li><a href="https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft map site</a> – a sister/companion site which we developed here in IS with an interactive map showing all the locations talked about in the original database.</li>
</ul>
<p>The data is so so interesting and I’d really urge you to read about it but I won’t say much more in this post about it because having a 30 page long post will be unmanageable. I’ll add a few interesting links to the bottom of this post if you want to find out more.</p>
<p>The data is Creative Commons licensed and available on <a href="https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/45">Edinburgh’s DataShare service</a>. The other brilliant thing about this data is that it’s a reasonable sized dataset but it’s well structured and has a corresponding database schema. You can download the database tables as CSV files and the schema tells you how they link together. It is also available as a Microsoft Access Database too if you like Access.</p>
<p>I wanted to test out Claude Code but I wanted to use a dataset which contained no personal data and so this well structured data was ideal – there is personal data but it’s for people who existed hundreds of years ago so I think it’s safe from a data protection perspective.</p>
<h2>What I did</h2>
<p>I grabbed all the data from the dataset (CSVs) and the schema and started reading about Claude code. I signed up for a Pro license (£20 a month), installed it all on my personal laptop at home using Visual Code Studio as an editor and installing a plugin to allow Claude to work through the editor. That was literally the trickiest part, mainly because for a few hours Claude didn’t seem to understand that I had a pro license, but once it got over itself, I was flying…..</p>
<p>I fed in all the CSV files and the schema and asked it to set me up with a website to allow me to view the data with an administrator interface which would allow me to edit the data. It needed to be in PHP and using a MariaDB – mainly because it’s what I know but also people in my team who are better developers than me (which isn’t hard) know it too. It’s a set up that’s available on our University web servers. It went into planning mode, reviewed the CSV and the schema and came back with some suggestions which I asked it to implement. It (with my permission) installed a XAMPP stack on my local computer for testing out the site and then happily started beavering away. With Pro you have a limit so that first project took a few evenings – although mainly I just got on with my life whilst Claude was doing its work. A few nights later, it was ready and I ran it on my localhost and to say I was gobsmacked was an understatement. Whilst I’d made my dinner, played with my dogs and vegged out in front of the telly, Claude had been busy designing a website, writing the code and creating style sheets. I’ve done 9 different iterations of the site now – just trying things out to see how it coped. Some of these features are not necessarily features I’d have in a live site but together Claude and I have added:</p>
<ul>
<li>an image for each of the accused. Each accused has a different image. I wouldn’t do this on a live site, it makes the site feel less serious (and it should be serious, it’s a shameful part of our past) should have but there are nearly 4000 accused people in the database, and they all have an individual image now. That took about 10 minutes.</li>
<li>I added an accused witch AI chatbot. I hooked it up to ELM and it’s now possible to have a conversation with an AI with a very basic prompt to respond as a Scottish Accused witch. Again, not necessarily something I’d do on a real version of the site but it was so easy to do, just plugging the ELM API key in and it worked.</li>
<li>for the admin interface, I had to wait until I had SSO installed on the web server and Claude didn’t really understand how that would work at first but once I explained it, again, I just uploaded the files it had created and it just worked.</li>
<li>I had a request to add dark mode which I asked Claude to do. This took a bit of wrangling – mainly just pointing out bits where it hadn’t quite worked right, but was quickly resolved.</li>
<li>I’ve (or should I say Claude….) changed the list pages so they can be ordered by any column on the pages.</li>
<li>We added in some more static pages (not currently populated) and a simple WYSIWYG editor for them (About)</li>
<li>Last night, we added in some visualisations including a basic map (with only the data in the original database, not the data from the more recent map site).</li>
</ul>
<p>I have not shared any of the passwords or keys with Claude. They are all safely stored and not accessible to Claude and I’m manually moving the files onto the server.</p>
<p>All in all, I’m pretty amazed with what Claude did. I had to provide clarity or guidance a few times – for example, I wanted the database connection file outside of the webroot on the server for security and I had to suggest things like that. But apparently you can train it so it learns how you want to work so I need to look into doing that too.</p>
<p>Next thing I’ll be looking at is getting it set up to push code to github – I can then share it with my team – and specifically Andrew and the others in his team who are PROPER REAL DEVELOPERS who I’ve asked to do a code review and give me some feedback – so we can see what they say, and that will probably be another blog post.</p>
<p>You can see what Claude and I built together – <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">Test Survey Site</a>.</p>
<p>At some point I’ll close this site down, it’s just a prototype/experiment so after that date, I’m leaving a few screenshots so you can see how it looks. Amazingly responsive too on a mobile device.</p>
<p>Now I need to think about …. what is next?? I may be a Claude-Addict. If that’s not a thing, it soon will be.</p>
<p>Screenshots are clickable so you can see more of the detail:</p>
<p><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-408 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013-150x150.png" alt="AI Chat Bot" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-409 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028-150x150.png" alt="Basic map" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-410 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043-150x150.png" alt="Basic timeline" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-411 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109-150x150.png" alt="Admin interface - edit a person" width="150" height="150" /></a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-412 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817-150x150.png" alt="Front page of the site" width="150" height="150" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Other links with background info</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/witchcraft_visualisation/">The Witchfinder General blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://curiousedinburgh.org/history-of-witchcraft-in-edinburgh/">History of Witchcraft in Edinburgh Tour</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6054672/">Julian has also been involved in a few TV shows</a> that are definitely worth watching</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-03-04" itemprop="dateModified">Mar 4, 2026</time>
</span>
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<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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<title>Goodbye Argyle House..</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:27:52 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[hybridworking]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=399</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_401" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-401" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-401 size-medium" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg" alt="Brutalist Argyle House from the outside" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-267x200.jpg 267w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-401" class="wp-caption-text">Argyle House (photo by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg">Richard Webb</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>)</figcaption></figure>
<p>I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually enjoyed it – it helped me feel part of something bigger. It’s quieter now since COVID but there’s still a lot going on and LTW does more social things on the wing now like bake sales, charity food collection (thanks to prize winner Stratos!), bring a dish type events (so it’s not all about cake… although my favourite things do always revolve around cake….) which is really nice.</p>
<p>Lots of things happened in Argyle House in the time I’ve been with IS.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>We were based on the west side for the first few years I was with IS and I remember being totally freaked out when I realised the fire escape route was out onto the roof….</li>
<li>COVID happened – I got the train home with a monitor under my arm thinking ‘this will all blow over in a week or two’ (what an idiot eh!!)</li>
<li>When we eventually did return, there was the great flood of Argyle House which caused significant damage to our space.</li>
<li>There was the incident in the lobby. If you know, you know. *shudder*</li>
<li>New staff inductions usually ended up with me stranded in the basement with our new staff member as I showed them where the bike store was. The basement is a little bit like the scene of a zombie apocalypse movie, so thanks to everyone who rescued me (and the new person) over the years. The zombies never got us.</li>
<li>We got an impromptu concert by Suede and the Manics one afternoon, a rehearsal in advance of their evening show. It was awesome.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>My last day in Argyle House was Tuesday, it’s closing for us, forever, today. I have a tinge of sadness – not a fan of the brutalist architecture but it looked better from the inside.</p>
<p>The meeting rooms have been amazing (thanks Lesley and team!), I’ve eaten so much good cake over the years in AH and the view….</p>
<p>… I leave you with this final photo of that glorious view, the sun shone on Tuesday – I think it knew…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-400 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg" alt="View of Edinburgh Castle from Argyle House on a sunny day." width="1024" height="387" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-300x114.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-768x291.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-529x200.jpg 529w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
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<time datetime="2026-02-20" itemprop="dateModified">Feb 20, 2026</time>
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<title>A review of 2025 from a DLAM perspective</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[virtual classroom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=393</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year.</p>
<p>It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and frustrating alongside balancing it all against the rise of AI and how quickly technology is changing as a result of it.</p>
<p>However, as usual, my team have achieved so much. Our Director asks us for our 6 top achievements before our LTW all staff which happens on a 6 monthly basis. It’s a brilliant way to remind ourselves of what we’ve been up to (because it’s so easy to focus on the next thing and forget everything that’s happened).</p>
<p>So here is a little reminder or us DLAMers (Digital Learning Applications and Media) on our achievements over the last year. Give yourselves a pat on the back and a cheer.</p>
<ul>
<li>Working with other parts of LTW and units around the University, we created a web catalogue for our new <a href="https://shortcourses.ed.ac.uk/">Short Courses Platform</a> (SCP). This has all been a huge amount of work but it’s such a fantastic service. It provides an easy workflow for those who want to be able to offer these courses. Prior to our SCP, units and Schools were pretty much on their own. There was no central place to advertise or find them, no easy way for learners to pay and no online teaching & learning platform for those who needed it.</li>
<li>Our writing up of our digital exams project (<a href="https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/FLORADigitalExams">FLORA</a>). Although paused for now, we pulled a huge amount of data together, the Project Board worked really well together to develop a collection of recommendations and a business case for a follow on project. Hopefully we’ll get the ok to move on with that project at some point. The FLORA findings are on SharePoint, so only available to users within the University but if you are interested and are from outside the University, drop me a line.</li>
<li>We had a record breaking academic year for lecture recording, when I looked at our numbers in June, we’d had the biggest number of captures in the history of the service for the 24-25 academic year. Although I don’t have the official stats from our supplier yet for December, i can see that the calendar year numbers for 2025 are almost the same as the full 2024 numbers so I’m confident we’ll be celebrating the biggest calendar year yet for lecture recording at Edinburgh.</li>
<li>2025 has also been a great year for interns in DLAM. They’ve just been so awesome giving us insights into caption and lecture recording quality, sustainability, accessibility and extracting new views of our services (through data) which we’ve never seen before. I’m hoping we can continue this work going forward.</li>
<li>We also did a huge amount of work (with support from Info Sec and folk in Apps and ITI) to switch MFA on for our services.</li>
<li>Our development team rewrote a feed from our timetabling system to push groups into our Learn VLE. It had been misbehaving a bit and it wasn’t providing logging with the detail we needed. It’s now way more efficient, sustainable (and environmentally friendly as an unexpected bonus!) and just much easier to manage.</li>
<li>We restructured our unidesk queues too – this sounds minor but it’s been in my to-do list since I started this job back in 2020. I can’t claim the credit and need to credit Mark Findlay (with our Service Management Team) for getting it over the line.</li>
<li>And we did more work (with colleagues in Applications Directorate) on data retention and deletion. And more will follow in 2026. Trying to keep our services cost effective and sustainable.</li>
<li>And we had the best DLAM Festive Quiz ever. Joe is an excellent quiz host and is 19 Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers tall. Read into that what you will.</li>
<li>And of course, we did what we do every year, managing our services, working with suppliers, helping users with issues. Keeping the show on the road.</li>
</ul>
<p>And obviously there’s loads more I haven’t mentioned, but I’ll stop there.</p>
<p>Phew. A big round applause for everyone. Well done! See you in 2026.</p>
<p> </p>
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<time datetime="2025-12-22" itemprop="dateModified">Dec 22, 2025</time>
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<title>An appeal to HE suppliers</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:28:34 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=389</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc.</p>
<p>That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us to consider the priority of those compared to a shiny new AI tool. Yes, the tool might be very cool and we might agree it’s a tool we want but you might be surprised if you ask us to make an ordered list in priority order, and force us to think about which we want most.</p>
<p>One mistake I’ve seen made year after year (with some suppliers, not all) is getting us into a workshop and saying ‘blue sky thinking, whaddya want?’. We go mad and write down every idea we’ve ever had. The workshop finishes and we go away and get on with our life. The supplier takes an unprioritised list and then makes a bit of a stab at prioritising themselves. We then moan about how they never fix the bugs or build the features we want.</p>
<p>A Head of School in a department I worked in before always used a beans metaphor. I thought this was a brilliant way to work with people – it simplifies the prioritisation task a lot. You only have 10 beans. How many beans would you allocate to that <insert feature/change/budget spend….>? Now you have 7 beans left, what about this one….? The beauty of this is it shows the reality of the world. There are limits to the beans, no one has unlimited beans, and everything needs to be prioritised.</p>
<p>So suppliers….before you go away and build something… make sure you count your beans!</p>
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<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
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<title>Some reflections on AI Agents</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:51:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=381</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/ai-agents/">helpful description by Amazon</a>). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to give them access to whichever systems you’d like them to support you with and that means providing them with access to the system(s). The agents might be built into the system you are using already but more likely an agent will sit outside and help you across different systems. In order to use the agent, you’ll need to share your login credentials for the system with it, so it can act on your behalf.</p>
<p>This is both where the strength of the agent and the problems lie. This is what allows it to do things seamlessly on your behalf. It’s logged in as you, the actions look like actions you are taking. Very hard to detect by the system the agent is running in as it just looks like you logged in and are doing whatever things you usually do.</p>
<p>Part of my brain thinks of all the useful things I could ask an agent to do for me. Things like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Set up a complicated group meeting, looking at busy diaries and finding the best time (avoid lunch time, be mindful of people who are part-time, these people are mandatory, these are optional, make it start 5 past the hour and end 5 to the hour to give everyone a comfort break) – this is always a time consuming job to do and it’d be so helpful to have an agent to give you the possibilities.</li>
<li>Log into our HR system, pull a report of my team’s leave and email all of those with more than 10 days of leave left to book before the end of the annual leave year to remind them. That’s a pretty clunky job to do manually.</li>
<li>Log into the VLE, that assignment that’s due on Friday… Write the essay and submit it.</li>
</ul>
<p>….Wait!! Stop!</p>
<p>The critical thing for me here is ….. you’ve given your login credentials to an agent to do stuff on your behalf! YOUR CREDENTIALS! It’s now logging into University systems and doing things, logged in as you. It can do anything you can do. Is it a reputable/safe agent? How do you know it is? Even reputable agents can do things you wouldn’t do…. worst case you use an agent that isn’t reputable and safe and it does a whole bunch of things behind the scenes you didn’t expect. Like a virus. You’ve given it an entry point and now it’s hacking your servers, sending rude emails to your boss and writing blog posts selling watches. You gave it access to our HR system, now it has all the personal data for your team. You gave it access to the VLE and it’s submitted the essay but it is not a good essay and you fail – it’s rubbish and clearly AI generated. Would you hand your password to a random person on the internet?</p>
<p>We need to work with staff and students to remind them of the risks of using AI like this. Remember the inherent issues with AI – bias, confusion about copyright, and the fact it gets things wrong even if it’s genuinely built for good and not evil. Some AI’s will be built specifically to help discover vulnerabilities in systems or steal your data – do you know which AIs are which?</p>
<p>If we are worried about students using AI to automatically write and submit assessments, isn’t this just the same as worrying about students using AI to generate submissions for assessments? There’s just the extra step of it all being automated. If this is a concern then maybe thinking about how we assess and whether it’s still fit for purpose is actually a big priority for HE.</p>
<p>So, to summarise:</p>
<ul>
<li>Agentic AI is not necessarily bad, but it might be, and really we need to make sure we educate students and staff to understand the risks.</li>
<li>If we are worried about students using it to cheat, there are many other ways they can cheat (and many other ways they can cheat using AI specifically). We have to remind students of the value of the learning process and consider how and what we are assessing – is it still fit for purpose, the world has changed quite a bit in recent years. Many of our students care deeply about the environment, we can also<a href="https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117"> remind them of the impact AI has on the world</a> – so use it carefully.</li>
<li>AI isn’t going away. And actually may feature pretty heavily in employability of our students going forward. We need to teach them how to use it properly.</li>
</ul>
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<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
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<title>Kaltura Connect – November 2025</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:13:10 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=376</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). <a href="https://corp.kaltura.com/video-collaboration-communication/enterprise-video-portal/">Kaltura</a> is the service we use to provide our own <a href="https://media.ed.ac.uk/">Media Hopper Create</a> service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up with a few people we hadn’t seen for a while and met some new people who were using Kaltura in innovative ways. Kaltura is our Media Hopper Create service, providing our media streaming and management service.</p>
<figure id="attachment_377" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-377" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-377 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg" alt="The view by the Science Gallery at KCL (including the tip of the Shard in London and a nice blue sky)" width="600" height="264" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg 600w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-300x132.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-455x200.jpg 455w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-377" class="wp-caption-text">The view by the Science Gallery including the tip of the Shard on a glorious sunny, autumn day</figcaption></figure>
<p>The keynote first thing was very thought provoking, ‘The innovation masquerade’ – <a href="https://www.solent.ac.uk/staff/governor/sarah-jones">Sarah Jones (Southampton Solent University)</a> who was questioning whether innovation was really innovative and whether we needed to question why we were doing ‘innovation’ and make sure we are doing it for the right reasons. She was more inclined to be disruptive than innovative and her arguments were powerful. I think I particularly agreed with her view on questioning why we are doing things more regularly – we don’t ask this question enough.</p>
<p>There were presentations from the University of Bergen on <a href="https://www.vitentv.no/">Viten TV</a> (trusted academic video) and then from Rob Pashley at International Baccalaureate about digitising assessment by 2032, including media in the assessment possibilities. Interesting project which I hope to hear more about in the future.</p>
<p>We did a fun breakout activity in a group where we were thinking (blue sky) about the possibilities for AI in teaching & learning. We had a lot of different ideas around the room, some of which I agreed were a priority. I’m really keen we use AI to complete the less creative aspects of our jobs like writing metadata (with a human check) or checking accessibility. We did talk about it as being a possible way to help create more personalised content for students but there are a lot of risks and dangers with AI and I think we’d need to really think it through before we did something like that. But hey, this was blue sky thinking and we were trying to think about the positives……</p>
<p>Nelly and I presented on <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/accessibility/best-practice-for-making-media-accessible/captioning">our captioning service</a> – both the human captioners (our wonderful intern team, see this<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/04/14/captionediting/"> blog post by Ellie in the team</a>) and also the research we’ve been doing on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/05/01/correcting-academic-language-with-ai/">how to improve the accuracy of the automated captions</a> (without human intervention) and got some really good questions and comments, including someone who’d been using Google Gemini to create audio descriptions for media when it was requested (apparently it did a pretty good job). We also spoke to someone from the University of Amsterdam who were trying to solve a similar problem to us and then someone from <a href="https://www.sunet.se/en/about-sunet">SUNET</a> (who provide a national on premise version of Kaltura for HE in Sweden and are also coincidentally working on a ‘scribe’ service which creates more accurate transcripts and captions using Whisper.AI built on their own specialist infrastructure and they were interested in looking at what we’d been trying with LLMs to do some post processing to perfect the captions. We’ll definitely keep these conversations going.</p>
<p>I think it always surprises me when I go to conferences and chat to others that work in a similar role to me how we all seem to be trying to solve the same problem at the same time but completely oblivious to each other’s struggles. Queen Mary University have realised they have staff who forget to wear microphones and they are using posters to try and remind them. KCL are interested in lecture recording quality monitoring, just like us, but implementing it in a different way. I think it’s such a great opportunity at events like this to remember the world outside and hear about what other people are doing. I really enjoyed the day but it was slightly dampened by <a href="https://x.com/LNER/status/1985910248788394438?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">train issues</a> meaning I got home at 2.30am.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-05" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 5, 2025</time>
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<title>A Friday at ALT-C</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:06:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=373</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day.</p>
<p>Some brief highlights from me….</p>
<p>I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people have a bigger lifeload than others and lifeload needs to be considered when thinking about inclusivity. This was in a keynote by Gabi Witthaus where she was talking about rethinking inclusion. She made some really good points highlighting injustices as well as possible solutions and reflections.</p>
<p>Steph Comley and Cat Bailey from JISC ran a great workshop on piloting edtech tools – JISC are planning a framework and the workshop will feed into that. It was a great way to reflect on what works well/doesn’t work.</p>
<p>I then really enjoyed the presentation by Ruth Clark, Leeds Conservatoire, about how they moved from Mahara to WordPress for their student competency tracking. Mahara wasn’t popular and it went from being free (& open source) to having a charge and that was the trigger for a rethink. They felt WordPress was a good option and felt it also provided students with transferable skills given how much of the internet uses WordPress.</p>
<p>After that, another really enjoyable presentation by Johnny Briggs at Glasgow who was building immersive experiences but using simple technology like 360 images and video. Although low tech, was much more accessible and widely usable. Johnny had built some really cool stuff like a virtual tour of Wallace’s monument and was doing an accessibility tour of a new building at Glasgow, aiming to show building users with mobility difficulties how to navigate the building.</p>
<p>After lunch, a workshop about reviewing a <a href="https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/digital-education/vle-review-toolkit">VLE review toolkit developed by UCISA</a>. The penultimate session of the afternoon I went to was Joseph Spink from the University of Birmingham did a presentation on their business continuity plan. It was really interesting, and quite similar to what we’ve been doing – which is always a relief. He talked through their priority 1 incident process and what they did to create a Business Continuity Plan and Business Impact Assessment. He highlighted the importance of reviewing these documents regularly because things change.</p>
<p>The final session I found particularly interesting and useful. Andrew Larner from Manchester Metropolitan and his colleagues had been working to review and provide advice on assessment in the age of AI. They’d reviewed all the assessments in a department and attempted them with AI tools and then categorised them in a way which showed how easy it was to use AI to complete them and looked at the ones which had been harder and extracted the parameters of those to help them redesign the other assessments.</p>
<p><a href="https://aiinhighered.com/assessments">Summary of the work done and findings </a>(really worth a look).</p>
<p>Then I headed home. With thanks to Scotrail for getting me home …. Eventually…..</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-26" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 26, 2025</time>
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<title>Ada Lovelace Day – my reflections</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:56:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorised]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=364</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14<sup>th</sup> of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an even more packed schedule than usual.</p>
<p>I may be a bit biased but I had a thoroughly lovely day.</p>
<p>In a packed (standing room only) room in the Main library, we started with some lightning talks by students and staff which were amazingly interesting. Milly (PhD researcher, the Paleontology Society) talking about the challenges of being a woman while digging up dinosaurs in the Badlands of Montana. It was a really brave and honest discussion of topics rarely discussed and she came prepared with solutions! Next was a talk by Anna (CompSoc Vice President) about fleeing her war-torn home in Ukraine and sharing a stage with President Bill Clinton. Anna’s positive mindset made me feel quite emotional – always turning challenges into opportunities. A truly inspiring young woman.</p>
<p>Ariadna (PhD student, Natural Language Processing NLP) gave a really informational talk where she compared her time in industry to her time in academia. I found it particularly interesting from an NLP perspective, Ariadne worked on text to speech and in particular voice cloning which could be controversial but was also an absolute game changer for disabilities where people lost their ability to talk. Not only could they speak but they could get their own voices back.</p>
<p>I was also pleasantly surprised that Lucia (EFI) was doing a talk with Beccy (Society of Scottish Antiquaries). Lucia was a PhD student who I supported in my days working in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and I remembered her love of data and databases! She and Beccy are now working on a project to get more female Scottish antiquarians of the 19th and 20th centuries into Wikipedia, trying to navigate around complexities such as name changes after marriage, a difficulty I hadn’t considered at all prior to their talk.</p>
<p>We then had an editathon, arts and crafts (I made myself some new stickers for my computer), badges, <a href="https://html5.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/">our women in STEM interactive tour</a> and Cari worked with staff in uCreate to provide women in STEM activities such getting your photo taken with a well known woman in STEM. Here, Satu is showing exactly how it’s done, hanging out with another amazing woman in STEM, Mary Sommerville. I feel like Satu and Mary would be firm friends if Mary was still with us. Kudos to Cari Romans for the great photo.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-366 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg" alt="Satu in a photo with Mary Sommerville with a Spiral nebulae of 51 Messier in the background" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-356x200.jpg 356w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>And after all that excitement, as if that wasn’t enough, the evening concluded with a panel of women climate scientists.</p>
<p>Our Director, <a href="https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/">Melissa</a>, chaired the panel which featured <a href="https://www.waveenergyscotland.co.uk/about/more-on-elva-bannon/">Elva Bannon</a> Research and Engineering Manager at Wave Energy Scotland), <a href="https://www.nms.ac.uk/profile/hermione-cockburn">Hermione Cockburn</a> (Science communicator with a career spanning television, radio, teaching and writing), <a href="https://geosciences.ed.ac.uk/people/profile?person=1613">Gabi Hegerl</a> (Professor of Climate System Science) and last but not least <a href="https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/dr-encarni-medina-lopez">Encarni Medina-Lopez</a> (Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering who leads the ‘Coastal and Environmental Remote Sensing Group’). The conversation explored imposter syndrome and confidence, the importance of having male allies in STEM subjects, how to balance being a leader but not losing your own femininity and personality, the impact of climate change on women and girls and even the marketing and consumerism targeting women and how to resist it. I’m sure Elva then said it was ok for me not to clean my house. I’m sure she did. Or was it a warning about harsh cleaning chemicals and their impact on the environment? Either way, I got the message. Less house cleaning, more reading, blogging and litter picking.</p>
<p>It was such a great panel and I felt we could have continued to talk for many more hours but all good things must end. We finished on a high and had some snacks and individual chats. I had a thoroughly lovely time and felt the panel really chimed with my own experiences as a woman in IT. It gave me some other food for thought with respect to our own work in the area of digital sustainability too.</p>
<figure id="attachment_367" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367" style="width: 900px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-367 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg" alt="A photo of the particpants of the panel" width="900" height="758" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg 900w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-300x253.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-768x647.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-237x200.jpg 237w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367" class="wp-caption-text">From left to right: Hermione, Encarni, Elva, Melissa and Gabi</figcaption></figure>
<p>When I got home, I was exhausted but relieved it had all went well and so happy to have been part of the experience. I’ve got a recording of the panel and will try to make at least bits of it available for a listen. Watch this space.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-16" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 16, 2025</time>
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<title>More adventures with Claude</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/more-adventures-with-claude/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:31:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=433</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my first blog post about Claude. We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Claude and I have been working together to do more stuff since my <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/">first blog post about Claude</a>.</p>
<p>We’ve added a whole lot of new things to our <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">prototype Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> including a chatbot to ask questions about the data (a challenge received by Lesley Greer), ‘stories’ which are AI summaries of the people recorded in the database where we have the most data and a few new visualisations and bug fixes.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-435 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png" alt="Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 'Ask the database' screenshot." width="1024" height="847" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-1024x847.png 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-300x248.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-768x635.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853-242x200.png 242w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182853.png 1138w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>I tried to build an <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/oer/">OER search</a> – it was fun but I think it’s a good example of how to do things really badly. OER repositories sometimes have APIs to allow outside code to search them but not all of them do. So in the cases where there were no APIs or we couldn’t get an API key, we are scraping search results which is pretty horrible. I think this is one I’d need a bit more time to sort out – I’d need to go and grab some API keys and honestly think I’d need to speak to repository owners because scraping search results is a really horrible way to do what’s needed and they might not like it very much.</p>
<p>Finally, as I mentioned in <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/">my previous blog post</a>, I’m leaving the University and I was thinking, what could I leave Myles, the new Head of DLAM, as a present? When I initially started the role myself, I always thought, what would <a href="https://ammienoot.com/about-2/">Anne-Marie</a> do in this situation? Well. I still don’t really know for certain what Anne-Marie would have done (I could take a guess) but Myles needs not to wonder what Karen would do because ….. I’m leaving him <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/karen-bot/">‘Karen-Bot’</a> to help guide him in his first few days/weeks.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-434" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png" alt="Karen-Bot in action. Purple AI chatbot." width="961" height="924" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758.png 961w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-300x288.png 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-768x738.png 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-23-182758-208x200.png 208w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 961px) 100vw, 961px" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Please use her wisely and also ask your questions now. She, like myself, will be leaving soon.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
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<title>What’s a couple of decades between friends?</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/04/23/whats-in-a-couple-of-decades/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:02:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=428</guid>
<description><![CDATA[After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After almost 22 years working in a variety of different roles at the University, I’ve made the decision to leave. It’s been a hard decision as there is so much I love about my job but I need a chance to catch up with myself. I’d like to have a bit of time to swot up on other areas I’m interested in such as sustainability and AI (or even the sustainability OF AI). In the last few days, I thought I’d think about how much things have changed since I started in Biological Sciences in October of 2004 as an eLearning Project Officer ….</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Roles</h1>
<p>I was initially brought in funded by a Principal’s eLearning Fund project officer and I was on a fixed term contract to encourage the uptake of ‘eLearning’ in the School because the Principal believed it was something useful to be invested in. There were quite a few of us across the Schools at the University which made it a nice environment but it was a bit ‘new’ and some parts of the University were maybe not massively enthusiastic about it. Nowadays ‘eLearning’ is just synonymous with learning. It’s just part of what we do at the University. The University now has a much larger number of learning technologists and related roles – both centrally and in Schools.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Hardware</h1>
<p>There have been massive changes in tech since 2004 unsurprisingly. Everything is much smaller now and despite being smaller, can do much more. I was very involved in a college project to roll out ‘clickers’ when I was in Biology, supporting Schools across the college and even in Biomedical Sciences. We had to hand out these infrared devices to students, either on loan (I developed a barcode reading application to allow them to be signed out) or hand them out at the start and back in at the end of the lecture. If you want a wee blast from the past, you can <a href="http://www.stg-inc.com/prs.shtm">see how they look and an old web page with marketing information</a> about them. I can’t believe pages this old still exist!</p>
<p>Ironically, one of the procurements my team did when I took on my Head of DLAM role was to replace our audience response system, 18 years later! We procured <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/learning-and-teaching-technologies/electronic-voting-system/wooclap">Wooclap</a> which has no infrared and no separate keypad because everyone just uses their smart phones to interact with it. To explain why we had these infrared ‘clickers’ in 2004, this is the sort of phone I had in 2004. The only thing ‘smart’ about it was that it had a retro game called ‘Snake’ on it and the battery lasted for about 6 times as long as my new iPhone’s does.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-429" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg" alt="An old Nokia mobile phone" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b-150x200.jpg 150w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/3184340500_46a002ce78_b.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02/3184340500" rel="noopener noreferrer">2009 01 06 – Russett – Old Nokia 1</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/25622716@N02" rel="noopener noreferrer">thisisbossi</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Platforms</h1>
<p>Our VLE used to look like this:</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-430 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg" alt="WebCT, our old VLE from yesteryear." width="1023" height="345" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b.jpg 1023w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-300x101.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-768x259.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/04/4048343544_ecf0cd7938_b-593x200.jpg 593w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1023px) 100vw, 1023px" /></p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03/4048343544" rel="noopener noreferrer">WebCT</a>” by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13518023@N03" rel="noopener noreferrer">michaelseangallagher</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>. [How clever of the University’s own <a href="https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/people/dr-michael-gallagher">Michael Gallagher</a> to make an openly licensed graphic of WebCT for future posterity, way back in 2009! ]</p>
<p>Now it looks way better (although we have higher expectations!). Platforms are generally more accessible. So that’s all good. But some changes have been less positive as time has passed – our websites need to be far more secure and locked up now and sometimes more recent developments have meant sites are more bloated in terms of the size and impact on the environment. I think we are more aware of this now but one of my fabulous interns, Otis, compared the size of some websites now vs the late 90s early 2000’s and found the size had massively increased. We have more stuff now, things look better but as a result often the size has grown. There was a time where we had to compress files we used for websites or uploading to the VLE because we’d have killed our internet or printers if we didn’t. Now we mostly have faster internet and much more generous storage allocations, we’ve forgotten that it’s good to compress things/throw digital things away. It’s something I, myself, need to be better at and working with Otis has shown me where small changes can make big impacts.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Data</h1>
<p>In 2004, data was hard to come by and not joined up. People ran different systems and things were pretty messy. Data analysis was hard. Now, things aren’t perfect but they are better and improving all the time. Tools like PowerBI make it easier for non-data-specicalists to join and visualise data in ways which tell deeper stories. An intern in DLAM, Hera, has been doing just that with loads of our data, putting it into PowerBI so we can share it with Schools. It’s amazing what she’s done in a small amount of time. If you are based in a School and want to look at the LTW data we have about the school, please put a call into the IS Helpline and ask for access to the LTW Dashboards.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Accessibility</h1>
<p>I’m ashamed to say that back in 2004, accessibility wasn’t a big feature of my life. I was aware of basic website accessibility and the tools to check it (<a href="https://jimthatcher.com/bobbyeval.htm">remember Bobby</a>?) but I didn’t truly get it. I have done a lot of work in the area now and do understand it a lot better – sometimes I wonder if we are so focused on the regulations that we forget about the people. We have our intern David working on accessibility and his project on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/07/31/educated-prompting/">making music accessible</a> for his friend, really brings a tear to my eye. This is what our goals should be in terms of accessibility.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Digital Safety and the Truth</h1>
<p>So much is better and has moved on since 2004 but not everything is a positive. There’s more digital crime – hacking, fraud, scams and now we have to contend with fake news, deep fakes, online bullying and harassment. It’s a digitally dangerous place out there. We have training and support but this was never something I really worried about very much in 2004. We have a Digital Safety Officer here in LTW (<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dsdt/author/rfillhar">Ricarda Fillhardt</a>) to keep us all in the know about Digital Safety. She has a huge job on her hand….</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So, a lot has changed – some good, some bad. The world is a different place. The main thing is that in the 22 years I’ve worked at Edinburgh University, I’ve learned so much and have a wealth of experience to take away with me as well as some brilliant colleagues and friends, who I’ll miss very much indeed.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-04-23" itemprop="dateModified">Apr 23, 2026</time>
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<title>My new pal Claude…</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/03/04/my-new-pal-claude/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:19:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=406</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been using ELM at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been using <a href="https://elm.edina.ac.uk/">ELM</a> at work and finding it really helps speed up anything I have to write. ELM is ‘Edinburgh access to Language Models’ and it provides secure access to a number of different LLMs. It’s available to all staff and students at the University so if you haven’t had a look at it, I’d highly recommend it. I never copy what it says verbatim but it often gives a really helpful starter for ten for report or paper writing – the hardest bit can be just getting started.</p>
<p>However, I’ve spent a few evenings, the past couple of weeks, playing with Claude Code. I’ve heard a few people talking about how amazing it is. I came at it from a very sceptical place – I mean, <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1">Claude (as Claudius) couldn’t even run a small vending machine</a> without going bankrupt… so how on earth could it do anything complicated. I’m also worried about the impact of AI on the environment and on how it has been trained, I didn’t want to like it. This blog post will (at least start) cover what I tried and how it went…</p>
<p>Executive summary…. I’m a bit blown away…..</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Some background information</h2>
<p>So, you know, we have some pretty ancient but really interesting data at Edinburgh University. My favourite dataset of all time is our Survey of Scottish Witchcraft data. If you haven’t seen it, I’d strongly recommend you have a look. It is a digitised dataset, which was collected from primary source materials more than 20 years ago, really led by <a href="https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/julian-goodare">Professor Julian Goodare</a> from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and a large number of other contributors over the more than two decades the dataset has existed. It’s a dataset which provides information about those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. There are a number of different sites where you can find out more, I’ll list them below:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://witches.hca.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site</a> – this is the modernised version of the original web interface to the data and it has a great ‘about’ page which talks about the project and who’s contributed over the years.</li>
<li><a href="https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/">The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft map site</a> – a sister/companion site which we developed here in IS with an interactive map showing all the locations talked about in the original database.</li>
</ul>
<p>The data is so so interesting and I’d really urge you to read about it but I won’t say much more in this post about it because having a 30 page long post will be unmanageable. I’ll add a few interesting links to the bottom of this post if you want to find out more.</p>
<p>The data is Creative Commons licensed and available on <a href="https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/45">Edinburgh’s DataShare service</a>. The other brilliant thing about this data is that it’s a reasonable sized dataset but it’s well structured and has a corresponding database schema. You can download the database tables as CSV files and the schema tells you how they link together. It is also available as a Microsoft Access Database too if you like Access.</p>
<p>I wanted to test out Claude Code but I wanted to use a dataset which contained no personal data and so this well structured data was ideal – there is personal data but it’s for people who existed hundreds of years ago so I think it’s safe from a data protection perspective.</p>
<h2>What I did</h2>
<p>I grabbed all the data from the dataset (CSVs) and the schema and started reading about Claude code. I signed up for a Pro license (£20 a month), installed it all on my personal laptop at home using Visual Code Studio as an editor and installing a plugin to allow Claude to work through the editor. That was literally the trickiest part, mainly because for a few hours Claude didn’t seem to understand that I had a pro license, but once it got over itself, I was flying…..</p>
<p>I fed in all the CSV files and the schema and asked it to set me up with a website to allow me to view the data with an administrator interface which would allow me to edit the data. It needed to be in PHP and using a MariaDB – mainly because it’s what I know but also people in my team who are better developers than me (which isn’t hard) know it too. It’s a set up that’s available on our University web servers. It went into planning mode, reviewed the CSV and the schema and came back with some suggestions which I asked it to implement. It (with my permission) installed a XAMPP stack on my local computer for testing out the site and then happily started beavering away. With Pro you have a limit so that first project took a few evenings – although mainly I just got on with my life whilst Claude was doing its work. A few nights later, it was ready and I ran it on my localhost and to say I was gobsmacked was an understatement. Whilst I’d made my dinner, played with my dogs and vegged out in front of the telly, Claude had been busy designing a website, writing the code and creating style sheets. I’ve done 9 different iterations of the site now – just trying things out to see how it coped. Some of these features are not necessarily features I’d have in a live site but together Claude and I have added:</p>
<ul>
<li>an image for each of the accused. Each accused has a different image. I wouldn’t do this on a live site, it makes the site feel less serious (and it should be serious, it’s a shameful part of our past) should have but there are nearly 4000 accused people in the database, and they all have an individual image now. That took about 10 minutes.</li>
<li>I added an accused witch AI chatbot. I hooked it up to ELM and it’s now possible to have a conversation with an AI with a very basic prompt to respond as a Scottish Accused witch. Again, not necessarily something I’d do on a real version of the site but it was so easy to do, just plugging the ELM API key in and it worked.</li>
<li>for the admin interface, I had to wait until I had SSO installed on the web server and Claude didn’t really understand how that would work at first but once I explained it, again, I just uploaded the files it had created and it just worked.</li>
<li>I had a request to add dark mode which I asked Claude to do. This took a bit of wrangling – mainly just pointing out bits where it hadn’t quite worked right, but was quickly resolved.</li>
<li>I’ve (or should I say Claude….) changed the list pages so they can be ordered by any column on the pages.</li>
<li>We added in some more static pages (not currently populated) and a simple WYSIWYG editor for them (About)</li>
<li>Last night, we added in some visualisations including a basic map (with only the data in the original database, not the data from the more recent map site).</li>
</ul>
<p>I have not shared any of the passwords or keys with Claude. They are all safely stored and not accessible to Claude and I’m manually moving the files onto the server.</p>
<p>All in all, I’m pretty amazed with what Claude did. I had to provide clarity or guidance a few times – for example, I wanted the database connection file outside of the webroot on the server for security and I had to suggest things like that. But apparently you can train it so it learns how you want to work so I need to look into doing that too.</p>
<p>Next thing I’ll be looking at is getting it set up to push code to github – I can then share it with my team – and specifically Andrew and the others in his team who are PROPER REAL DEVELOPERS who I’ve asked to do a code review and give me some feedback – so we can see what they say, and that will probably be another blog post.</p>
<p>You can see what Claude and I built together – <a href="https://www-test.karen-witches.is.ed.ac.uk/laravel/witches/">Test Survey Site</a>.</p>
<p>At some point I’ll close this site down, it’s just a prototype/experiment so after that date, I’m leaving a few screenshots so you can see how it looks. Amazingly responsive too on a mobile device.</p>
<p>Now I need to think about …. what is next?? I may be a Claude-Addict. If that’s not a thing, it soon will be.</p>
<p>Screenshots are clickable so you can see more of the detail:</p>
<p><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-408 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180013-150x150.png" alt="AI Chat Bot" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-409 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180028-150x150.png" alt="Basic map" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-410 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180043-150x150.png" alt="Basic timeline" width="150" height="150" /> </a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-411 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-180109-150x150.png" alt="Admin interface - edit a person" width="150" height="150" /></a> <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-412 size-thumbnail" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-04-175817-150x150.png" alt="Front page of the site" width="150" height="150" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Other links with background info</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/witchcraft_visualisation/">The Witchfinder General blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://curiousedinburgh.org/history-of-witchcraft-in-edinburgh/">History of Witchcraft in Edinburgh Tour</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6054672/">Julian has also been involved in a few TV shows</a> that are definitely worth watching</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-03-04" itemprop="dateModified">Mar 4, 2026</time>
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<title>Goodbye Argyle House..</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2026/02/20/goodbye-argyle-house/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:27:52 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[hybridworking]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=399</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure id="attachment_401" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-401" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-401 size-medium" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg" alt="Brutalist Argyle House from the outside" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924-267x200.jpg 267w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-401" class="wp-caption-text">Argyle House (photo by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Argyle_House_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3789924.jpg">Richard Webb</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>)</figcaption></figure>
<p>I moved to Argyle House when I changed job and moved to IS in 2018. I remember being nervous about the open plan office space and wondering if I’d be able to concentrate given the general hubbub of industry. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually enjoyed it – it helped me feel part of something bigger. It’s quieter now since COVID but there’s still a lot going on and LTW does more social things on the wing now like bake sales, charity food collection (thanks to prize winner Stratos!), bring a dish type events (so it’s not all about cake… although my favourite things do always revolve around cake….) which is really nice.</p>
<p>Lots of things happened in Argyle House in the time I’ve been with IS.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li>We were based on the west side for the first few years I was with IS and I remember being totally freaked out when I realised the fire escape route was out onto the roof….</li>
<li>COVID happened – I got the train home with a monitor under my arm thinking ‘this will all blow over in a week or two’ (what an idiot eh!!)</li>
<li>When we eventually did return, there was the great flood of Argyle House which caused significant damage to our space.</li>
<li>There was the incident in the lobby. If you know, you know. *shudder*</li>
<li>New staff inductions usually ended up with me stranded in the basement with our new staff member as I showed them where the bike store was. The basement is a little bit like the scene of a zombie apocalypse movie, so thanks to everyone who rescued me (and the new person) over the years. The zombies never got us.</li>
<li>We got an impromptu concert by Suede and the Manics one afternoon, a rehearsal in advance of their evening show. It was awesome.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>My last day in Argyle House was Tuesday, it’s closing for us, forever, today. I have a tinge of sadness – not a fan of the brutalist architecture but it looked better from the inside.</p>
<p>The meeting rooms have been amazing (thanks Lesley and team!), I’ve eaten so much good cake over the years in AH and the view….</p>
<p>… I leave you with this final photo of that glorious view, the sun shone on Tuesday – I think it knew…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-400 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg" alt="View of Edinburgh Castle from Argyle House on a sunny day." width="1024" height="387" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-1024x387.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-300x114.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-768x291.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23-529x200.jpg 529w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/02/Image-23.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2026-02-20" itemprop="dateModified">Feb 20, 2026</time>
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<title>A review of 2025 from a DLAM perspective</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/12/22/a-review-of-2025-from-a-dlam-perspective/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[virtual classroom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=393</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year. It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As 2025 comes to an end (and yes, I can barely believe it’s nearly 2026) it’s worthwhile to reflect on the past year.</p>
<p>It’s been a quite a whirlwind. Not only has news and politics been pretty shocking and horrible this year (again!!!) but news about finances in UK HE institutions has been depressing and frustrating alongside balancing it all against the rise of AI and how quickly technology is changing as a result of it.</p>
<p>However, as usual, my team have achieved so much. Our Director asks us for our 6 top achievements before our LTW all staff which happens on a 6 monthly basis. It’s a brilliant way to remind ourselves of what we’ve been up to (because it’s so easy to focus on the next thing and forget everything that’s happened).</p>
<p>So here is a little reminder or us DLAMers (Digital Learning Applications and Media) on our achievements over the last year. Give yourselves a pat on the back and a cheer.</p>
<ul>
<li>Working with other parts of LTW and units around the University, we created a web catalogue for our new <a href="https://shortcourses.ed.ac.uk/">Short Courses Platform</a> (SCP). This has all been a huge amount of work but it’s such a fantastic service. It provides an easy workflow for those who want to be able to offer these courses. Prior to our SCP, units and Schools were pretty much on their own. There was no central place to advertise or find them, no easy way for learners to pay and no online teaching & learning platform for those who needed it.</li>
<li>Our writing up of our digital exams project (<a href="https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/FLORADigitalExams">FLORA</a>). Although paused for now, we pulled a huge amount of data together, the Project Board worked really well together to develop a collection of recommendations and a business case for a follow on project. Hopefully we’ll get the ok to move on with that project at some point. The FLORA findings are on SharePoint, so only available to users within the University but if you are interested and are from outside the University, drop me a line.</li>
<li>We had a record breaking academic year for lecture recording, when I looked at our numbers in June, we’d had the biggest number of captures in the history of the service for the 24-25 academic year. Although I don’t have the official stats from our supplier yet for December, i can see that the calendar year numbers for 2025 are almost the same as the full 2024 numbers so I’m confident we’ll be celebrating the biggest calendar year yet for lecture recording at Edinburgh.</li>
<li>2025 has also been a great year for interns in DLAM. They’ve just been so awesome giving us insights into caption and lecture recording quality, sustainability, accessibility and extracting new views of our services (through data) which we’ve never seen before. I’m hoping we can continue this work going forward.</li>
<li>We also did a huge amount of work (with support from Info Sec and folk in Apps and ITI) to switch MFA on for our services.</li>
<li>Our development team rewrote a feed from our timetabling system to push groups into our Learn VLE. It had been misbehaving a bit and it wasn’t providing logging with the detail we needed. It’s now way more efficient, sustainable (and environmentally friendly as an unexpected bonus!) and just much easier to manage.</li>
<li>We restructured our unidesk queues too – this sounds minor but it’s been in my to-do list since I started this job back in 2020. I can’t claim the credit and need to credit Mark Findlay (with our Service Management Team) for getting it over the line.</li>
<li>And we did more work (with colleagues in Applications Directorate) on data retention and deletion. And more will follow in 2026. Trying to keep our services cost effective and sustainable.</li>
<li>And we had the best DLAM Festive Quiz ever. Joe is an excellent quiz host and is 19 Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers tall. Read into that what you will.</li>
<li>And of course, we did what we do every year, managing our services, working with suppliers, helping users with issues. Keeping the show on the road.</li>
</ul>
<p>And obviously there’s loads more I haven’t mentioned, but I’ll stop there.</p>
<p>Phew. A big round applause for everyone. Well done! See you in 2026.</p>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-12-22" itemprop="dateModified">Dec 22, 2025</time>
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<title>An appeal to HE suppliers</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/an-appeal-to-he-suppliers/#comments</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:28:34 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=389</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc. That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a blog post containing an appeal for pretty much every supplier who provides HE with IT services of some sort, teaching & learning, finance, email, communication tools, etc etc.</p>
<p>That big long list of features we’ve requested and the bug fixes we are desperate for….. we’d very much appreciate you talking to us to consider the priority of those compared to a shiny new AI tool. Yes, the tool might be very cool and we might agree it’s a tool we want but you might be surprised if you ask us to make an ordered list in priority order, and force us to think about which we want most.</p>
<p>One mistake I’ve seen made year after year (with some suppliers, not all) is getting us into a workshop and saying ‘blue sky thinking, whaddya want?’. We go mad and write down every idea we’ve ever had. The workshop finishes and we go away and get on with our life. The supplier takes an unprioritised list and then makes a bit of a stab at prioritising themselves. We then moan about how they never fix the bugs or build the features we want.</p>
<p>A Head of School in a department I worked in before always used a beans metaphor. I thought this was a brilliant way to work with people – it simplifies the prioritisation task a lot. You only have 10 beans. How many beans would you allocate to that <insert feature/change/budget spend….>? Now you have 7 beans left, what about this one….? The beauty of this is it shows the reality of the world. There are limits to the beans, no one has unlimited beans, and everything needs to be prioritised.</p>
<p>So suppliers….before you go away and build something… make sure you count your beans!</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
</span>
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<title>Some reflections on AI Agents</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/12/some-reflections-on-ai-agents/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:51:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[security]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=381</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this helpful description by Amazon). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about AI agents/agentic AI. If you don’t know already, AI agents are AI systems which can collect data, make decisions and take autonomous actions to achieve goals (see this <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/ai-agents/">helpful description by Amazon</a>). They can do this on your behalf without your intervention. Clearly however, you need to give them access to whichever systems you’d like them to support you with and that means providing them with access to the system(s). The agents might be built into the system you are using already but more likely an agent will sit outside and help you across different systems. In order to use the agent, you’ll need to share your login credentials for the system with it, so it can act on your behalf.</p>
<p>This is both where the strength of the agent and the problems lie. This is what allows it to do things seamlessly on your behalf. It’s logged in as you, the actions look like actions you are taking. Very hard to detect by the system the agent is running in as it just looks like you logged in and are doing whatever things you usually do.</p>
<p>Part of my brain thinks of all the useful things I could ask an agent to do for me. Things like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Set up a complicated group meeting, looking at busy diaries and finding the best time (avoid lunch time, be mindful of people who are part-time, these people are mandatory, these are optional, make it start 5 past the hour and end 5 to the hour to give everyone a comfort break) – this is always a time consuming job to do and it’d be so helpful to have an agent to give you the possibilities.</li>
<li>Log into our HR system, pull a report of my team’s leave and email all of those with more than 10 days of leave left to book before the end of the annual leave year to remind them. That’s a pretty clunky job to do manually.</li>
<li>Log into the VLE, that assignment that’s due on Friday… Write the essay and submit it.</li>
</ul>
<p>….Wait!! Stop!</p>
<p>The critical thing for me here is ….. you’ve given your login credentials to an agent to do stuff on your behalf! YOUR CREDENTIALS! It’s now logging into University systems and doing things, logged in as you. It can do anything you can do. Is it a reputable/safe agent? How do you know it is? Even reputable agents can do things you wouldn’t do…. worst case you use an agent that isn’t reputable and safe and it does a whole bunch of things behind the scenes you didn’t expect. Like a virus. You’ve given it an entry point and now it’s hacking your servers, sending rude emails to your boss and writing blog posts selling watches. You gave it access to our HR system, now it has all the personal data for your team. You gave it access to the VLE and it’s submitted the essay but it is not a good essay and you fail – it’s rubbish and clearly AI generated. Would you hand your password to a random person on the internet?</p>
<p>We need to work with staff and students to remind them of the risks of using AI like this. Remember the inherent issues with AI – bias, confusion about copyright, and the fact it gets things wrong even if it’s genuinely built for good and not evil. Some AI’s will be built specifically to help discover vulnerabilities in systems or steal your data – do you know which AIs are which?</p>
<p>If we are worried about students using AI to automatically write and submit assessments, isn’t this just the same as worrying about students using AI to generate submissions for assessments? There’s just the extra step of it all being automated. If this is a concern then maybe thinking about how we assess and whether it’s still fit for purpose is actually a big priority for HE.</p>
<p>So, to summarise:</p>
<ul>
<li>Agentic AI is not necessarily bad, but it might be, and really we need to make sure we educate students and staff to understand the risks.</li>
<li>If we are worried about students using it to cheat, there are many other ways they can cheat (and many other ways they can cheat using AI specifically). We have to remind students of the value of the learning process and consider how and what we are assessing – is it still fit for purpose, the world has changed quite a bit in recent years. Many of our students care deeply about the environment, we can also<a href="https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117"> remind them of the impact AI has on the world</a> – so use it carefully.</li>
<li>AI isn’t going away. And actually may feature pretty heavily in employability of our students going forward. We need to teach them how to use it properly.</li>
</ul>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-12" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 12, 2025</time>
</span>
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<title>Kaltura Connect – November 2025</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/11/05/kaltura-connect-november-2025/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:13:10 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=376</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). Kaltura is the service we use to provide our own Media Hopper Create service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Nelly and I were invited to speak at Kaltura Connect in London today (at the fantastic Science Gallery @KCL). <a href="https://corp.kaltura.com/video-collaboration-communication/enterprise-video-portal/">Kaltura</a> is the service we use to provide our own <a href="https://media.ed.ac.uk/">Media Hopper Create</a> service for media storage and streaming. It was a fun day, we got a chance to catch up with a few people we hadn’t seen for a while and met some new people who were using Kaltura in innovative ways. Kaltura is our Media Hopper Create service, providing our media streaming and management service.</p>
<figure id="attachment_377" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-377" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-377 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg" alt="The view by the Science Gallery at KCL (including the tip of the Shard in London and a nice blue sky)" width="600" height="264" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL.jpg 600w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-300x132.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/11/KCL-455x200.jpg 455w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-377" class="wp-caption-text">The view by the Science Gallery including the tip of the Shard on a glorious sunny, autumn day</figcaption></figure>
<p>The keynote first thing was very thought provoking, ‘The innovation masquerade’ – <a href="https://www.solent.ac.uk/staff/governor/sarah-jones">Sarah Jones (Southampton Solent University)</a> who was questioning whether innovation was really innovative and whether we needed to question why we were doing ‘innovation’ and make sure we are doing it for the right reasons. She was more inclined to be disruptive than innovative and her arguments were powerful. I think I particularly agreed with her view on questioning why we are doing things more regularly – we don’t ask this question enough.</p>
<p>There were presentations from the University of Bergen on <a href="https://www.vitentv.no/">Viten TV</a> (trusted academic video) and then from Rob Pashley at International Baccalaureate about digitising assessment by 2032, including media in the assessment possibilities. Interesting project which I hope to hear more about in the future.</p>
<p>We did a fun breakout activity in a group where we were thinking (blue sky) about the possibilities for AI in teaching & learning. We had a lot of different ideas around the room, some of which I agreed were a priority. I’m really keen we use AI to complete the less creative aspects of our jobs like writing metadata (with a human check) or checking accessibility. We did talk about it as being a possible way to help create more personalised content for students but there are a lot of risks and dangers with AI and I think we’d need to really think it through before we did something like that. But hey, this was blue sky thinking and we were trying to think about the positives……</p>
<p>Nelly and I presented on <a href="https://information-services.ed.ac.uk/learning-technology/accessibility/best-practice-for-making-media-accessible/captioning">our captioning service</a> – both the human captioners (our wonderful intern team, see this<a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/04/14/captionediting/"> blog post by Ellie in the team</a>) and also the research we’ve been doing on <a href="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/dlam/2025/05/01/correcting-academic-language-with-ai/">how to improve the accuracy of the automated captions</a> (without human intervention) and got some really good questions and comments, including someone who’d been using Google Gemini to create audio descriptions for media when it was requested (apparently it did a pretty good job). We also spoke to someone from the University of Amsterdam who were trying to solve a similar problem to us and then someone from <a href="https://www.sunet.se/en/about-sunet">SUNET</a> (who provide a national on premise version of Kaltura for HE in Sweden and are also coincidentally working on a ‘scribe’ service which creates more accurate transcripts and captions using Whisper.AI built on their own specialist infrastructure and they were interested in looking at what we’d been trying with LLMs to do some post processing to perfect the captions. We’ll definitely keep these conversations going.</p>
<p>I think it always surprises me when I go to conferences and chat to others that work in a similar role to me how we all seem to be trying to solve the same problem at the same time but completely oblivious to each other’s struggles. Queen Mary University have realised they have staff who forget to wear microphones and they are using posters to try and remind them. KCL are interested in lecture recording quality monitoring, just like us, but implementing it in a different way. I think it’s such a great opportunity at events like this to remember the world outside and hear about what other people are doing. I really enjoyed the day but it was slightly dampened by <a href="https://x.com/LNER/status/1985910248788394438?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet">train issues</a> meaning I got home at 2.30am.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-11-05" itemprop="dateModified">Nov 5, 2025</time>
</span>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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<title>A Friday at ALT-C</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/26/a-friday-at-alt-c/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:06:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[accessibility]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[assessment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[lecture recording]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[vle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=373</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day. Some brief highlights from me…. I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I attended the Friday of ALT-C today and I’m glad I did, it was a very interesting and fun day.</p>
<p>Some brief highlights from me….</p>
<p>I learned a new term today which I thought was really poignant – ‘lifeload’ – sum of all pressures a student has in their life INCLUDING university – some people have a bigger lifeload than others and lifeload needs to be considered when thinking about inclusivity. This was in a keynote by Gabi Witthaus where she was talking about rethinking inclusion. She made some really good points highlighting injustices as well as possible solutions and reflections.</p>
<p>Steph Comley and Cat Bailey from JISC ran a great workshop on piloting edtech tools – JISC are planning a framework and the workshop will feed into that. It was a great way to reflect on what works well/doesn’t work.</p>
<p>I then really enjoyed the presentation by Ruth Clark, Leeds Conservatoire, about how they moved from Mahara to WordPress for their student competency tracking. Mahara wasn’t popular and it went from being free (& open source) to having a charge and that was the trigger for a rethink. They felt WordPress was a good option and felt it also provided students with transferable skills given how much of the internet uses WordPress.</p>
<p>After that, another really enjoyable presentation by Johnny Briggs at Glasgow who was building immersive experiences but using simple technology like 360 images and video. Although low tech, was much more accessible and widely usable. Johnny had built some really cool stuff like a virtual tour of Wallace’s monument and was doing an accessibility tour of a new building at Glasgow, aiming to show building users with mobility difficulties how to navigate the building.</p>
<p>After lunch, a workshop about reviewing a <a href="https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/digital-education/vle-review-toolkit">VLE review toolkit developed by UCISA</a>. The penultimate session of the afternoon I went to was Joseph Spink from the University of Birmingham did a presentation on their business continuity plan. It was really interesting, and quite similar to what we’ve been doing – which is always a relief. He talked through their priority 1 incident process and what they did to create a Business Continuity Plan and Business Impact Assessment. He highlighted the importance of reviewing these documents regularly because things change.</p>
<p>The final session I found particularly interesting and useful. Andrew Larner from Manchester Metropolitan and his colleagues had been working to review and provide advice on assessment in the age of AI. They’d reviewed all the assessments in a department and attempted them with AI tools and then categorised them in a way which showed how easy it was to use AI to complete them and looked at the ones which had been harder and extracted the parameters of those to help them redesign the other assessments.</p>
<p><a href="https://aiinhighered.com/assessments">Summary of the work done and findings </a>(really worth a look).</p>
<p>Then I headed home. With thanks to Scotrail for getting me home …. Eventually…..</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-26" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 26, 2025</time>
</span>
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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<title>Ada Lovelace Day – my reflections</title>
<link>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/</link>
<comments>https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/2025/10/16/ada-lovelace-day-my-reflections/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[khowie]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:56:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[dlam-feed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorised]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/?p=364</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14th of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an …]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Ada Lovelace Day was on the 14<sup>th</sup> of October this year. We’ve been celebrating her day here in IS for a decade now (long before I joined IS) and this year, like the last 2 years, I was on the organising team for our celebration. This year we had an even more packed schedule than usual.</p>
<p>I may be a bit biased but I had a thoroughly lovely day.</p>
<p>In a packed (standing room only) room in the Main library, we started with some lightning talks by students and staff which were amazingly interesting. Milly (PhD researcher, the Paleontology Society) talking about the challenges of being a woman while digging up dinosaurs in the Badlands of Montana. It was a really brave and honest discussion of topics rarely discussed and she came prepared with solutions! Next was a talk by Anna (CompSoc Vice President) about fleeing her war-torn home in Ukraine and sharing a stage with President Bill Clinton. Anna’s positive mindset made me feel quite emotional – always turning challenges into opportunities. A truly inspiring young woman.</p>
<p>Ariadna (PhD student, Natural Language Processing NLP) gave a really informational talk where she compared her time in industry to her time in academia. I found it particularly interesting from an NLP perspective, Ariadne worked on text to speech and in particular voice cloning which could be controversial but was also an absolute game changer for disabilities where people lost their ability to talk. Not only could they speak but they could get their own voices back.</p>
<p>I was also pleasantly surprised that Lucia (EFI) was doing a talk with Beccy (Society of Scottish Antiquaries). Lucia was a PhD student who I supported in my days working in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and I remembered her love of data and databases! She and Beccy are now working on a project to get more female Scottish antiquarians of the 19th and 20th centuries into Wikipedia, trying to navigate around complexities such as name changes after marriage, a difficulty I hadn’t considered at all prior to their talk.</p>
<p>We then had an editathon, arts and crafts (I made myself some new stickers for my computer), badges, <a href="https://html5.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/">our women in STEM interactive tour</a> and Cari worked with staff in uCreate to provide women in STEM activities such getting your photo taken with a well known woman in STEM. Here, Satu is showing exactly how it’s done, hanging out with another amazing woman in STEM, Mary Sommerville. I feel like Satu and Mary would be firm friends if Mary was still with us. Kudos to Cari Romans for the great photo.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-366 size-large" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg" alt="Satu in a photo with Mary Sommerville with a Spiral nebulae of 51 Messier in the background" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary-356x200.jpg 356w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/SatuMary.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>And after all that excitement, as if that wasn’t enough, the evening concluded with a panel of women climate scientists.</p>
<p>Our Director, <a href="https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/">Melissa</a>, chaired the panel which featured <a href="https://www.waveenergyscotland.co.uk/about/more-on-elva-bannon/">Elva Bannon</a> Research and Engineering Manager at Wave Energy Scotland), <a href="https://www.nms.ac.uk/profile/hermione-cockburn">Hermione Cockburn</a> (Science communicator with a career spanning television, radio, teaching and writing), <a href="https://geosciences.ed.ac.uk/people/profile?person=1613">Gabi Hegerl</a> (Professor of Climate System Science) and last but not least <a href="https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/dr-encarni-medina-lopez">Encarni Medina-Lopez</a> (Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering who leads the ‘Coastal and Environmental Remote Sensing Group’). The conversation explored imposter syndrome and confidence, the importance of having male allies in STEM subjects, how to balance being a leader but not losing your own femininity and personality, the impact of climate change on women and girls and even the marketing and consumerism targeting women and how to resist it. I’m sure Elva then said it was ok for me not to clean my house. I’m sure she did. Or was it a warning about harsh cleaning chemicals and their impact on the environment? Either way, I got the message. Less house cleaning, more reading, blogging and litter picking.</p>
<p>It was such a great panel and I felt we could have continued to talk for many more hours but all good things must end. We finished on a high and had some snacks and individual chats. I had a thoroughly lovely time and felt the panel really chimed with my own experiences as a woman in IT. It gave me some other food for thought with respect to our own work in the area of digital sustainability too.</p>
<figure id="attachment_367" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367" style="width: 900px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-367 size-full" src="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg" alt="A photo of the particpants of the panel" width="900" height="758" srcset="https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp.jpg 900w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-300x253.jpg 300w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-768x647.jpg 768w, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/khowie/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/10/ada-panel-comp-237x200.jpg 237w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367" class="wp-caption-text">From left to right: Hermione, Encarni, Elva, Melissa and Gabi</figcaption></figure>
<p>When I got home, I was exhausted but relieved it had all went well and so happy to have been part of the experience. I’ve got a recording of the panel and will try to make at least bits of it available for a listen. Watch this space.</p>
<span class="uoe-published-time uoe-seo-hidden-area">
<time datetime="2025-10-16" itemprop="dateModified">Oct 16, 2025</time>
</span>
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Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
This is fascinating, particularly the idea of "coding without writing a single line." It really highlights the potential of prompt…
N.B. Closing date now extended to 23:59 on Wednesday, 4th of March.
Thanks Stewart for your encouragement!
Thank you Miki. I very much enjoyed reading this with my morning coffee. It was lovely to have such a…
Hi Otis