After what felt like a very long courtship with a Word document and PebblePad, I finally submitted my CMALT proposal in April 2026. I started this journey in Autumn 2024, with good intentions, professional ambitions, and what I now recognise as a wildly optimistic belief about how quickly I could pull it all together. I […]

In the Digital Skills Team, a significant part of our job is to develop courses and webinars. I mainly develop courses in Microsoft Excel, the powerful spreadsheet application that enables people to quickly organise and format data and perform calculations. I find course development to be one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. […]

Quick recommendations Llama 3.3 Choose if: you want the most sustainable option your task is straightforward you want a fast response you are doing everyday writing or support tasks Perfect for simple office tasks. Switch if you need more capability for complex tasks, you work with longer documents or your need a model with reasoning […]

We know that many students are involved in activities alongside their studies such as volunteering, part-time work, and getting involved in the University community. To help these activities to stand out from the crowd, our University has had an Award for “Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia” to sit beside other available Edinburgh Awards for the last […]

Over the years, I have tried more productivity systems than I can count. Todoist, Notion, NotePlan, markdown files, plain text files, and plenty of others. I tried free versions, paid versions, systems I was curious about, systems I wanted to love, and systems I convinced myself might work if I just used them properly. I […]

On Tuesday 21st April 2026 our Digital Skills Specialists Edinburgh Award students celebrated and toasted their success. Over the past 6 months they have thrown themselves into the depths of the digital unknown with hope that they’ll come out the other end with a working project that not only gives back to the community but […]

Introduction On March 16th, I attended the AI for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH) Conference at the Clare College at the University Cambridge. I am very grateful for the generous invite by the organisers of the conference. Hosted by Cambridge University Libraries in collaboration with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and funded by […]

We have made some updates to the JISC Digital Skills Discovery Tool to make selecting your school or department within the university simpler. The Discovery Tool is an interactive questionnaire that identifies your Digital Skills Capability ratings, highlighting strengths, and areas for improvement.  Existing users: We need you to update your Discovery Tool Department!  Follow these easy steps to complete this process:  Open the […]

As someone who is really interested in developmental psychology, I often find myself thinking about how different tools shape our habits and influence our cognitive behaviours, particularly when it comes to thinking and learning. The kind of thinking I’m referring to is the kind that happens when you’re halfway through solving a problem or trying […]

This year’s Digifest conference in Birmingham has just wrapped up, and my brain is buzzing with ideas. The 2026 theme, ‘From disruption to direction’, landed exactly where my head has been at lately. As I attend talks and workshops, I tend to map what I’m hearing to the work our team is doing back at […]