Ed/Tech must-reads 250225

Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US from Wired

Beneath all of the LLMs driving the GenAI ‘revolution’, there has been a bomb quietly ticking away for years now. While artists and other creators and copyright holders have regularly flagged that GenAI platforms are generally all built on dubiously acquired materials - 81.7 terabytes in the case of Meta, allegedly - these issues have tended to land in the too hard basket. (We have other things on our minds). But now the old media copyright holders are racking up some wins, it will be interesting to see whether they just take a cut of proceedings or shut things down.

LinkedIn discussion on AAUP post: Academic Integrity undermined by non-academic management in Australian universities: A threat to students and society 

There is a tedious line of argument raised in higher education from time to time that academics are the only people equipped to undertake most of the work in the sector and professional staff will be the ruination of everything. Fortunately this tends to come from the more deluded and privileged members of the sector but for whatever reason, their power will generally ensure that their views get a good public airing. This thread on LinkedIn, kicked off by Guy Curtis (UWA) discusses such a post about the impact of having specialist professional staff involved in investigating academic integrity issues. (The ‘other’ AI). For those blissfully out of the loop, higher education is rife with AI issues and things are only getting worse. Having people in dedicated, full-time investigator roles to address this is eminently more sensible that adding investigative tasks onto the already towering workload of day-to-day academics. This was the vibe of the discussion - maybe it was an echo chamber but knowing many of the people who contributed, I would put them up against those on the other side of the debate any day of the week.

Ten persistent academic integrity myths from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

Need further convincing? This timely post popped up just yesterday from one of Australia’s top AI investigators Kane Murdoch (Macquarie Uni) and Ass Prof Mark Bassett (CSU), running through some common misconceptions about where we currently are in the academic integrity mire.

Senator Lambie’s cunning plan for VC pay from Future Campus

While this post from the doyen of Oz HE journalism, Stephen Matchett, might be a stretch for an ed/tech column, it is a cracking read. In a nutshell, Tasmanian “independent” senator Jacqui Lambie suggests that VC pay be indexed to the top levels of Australian public service pay scales. This would put them on $430k max. What I think is the most interesting part of this - not discussed - is the flow on effect that this would have on the pay of other senior institutional leaders. After all, you wouldn’t have DVC-A earning more than the VC. In many unis, there isn’t a huge buffer between these levels and those of E level professors - so I would imagine that we would be seeing some fancy financials.