Our April collection of articles and announcements to share this month.
Accessibility
Bananas Rubber Ducks and AI: How generative conversational and agentic AI can support neurodivergent people. AI is changing everything. But for disabled and neurodivergent people, the changes aren’t just interesting; they’re personal.
Artificial Intelligence, British Sign Language and the British Deaf Association A report from the British Deaf Association on the opportunities and challenges AI is presenting to the future of British Sign Language (BSL).
Assessment, and Academic Integrity
SQA publishes first AI student plagiarism data The number of students breaking SQA assessment rules increased in 2024, with plagiarism being the most common type of candidate malpractice. 33% of plagiarism cases involved AI
LSE: A Student Manifesto for Assessment in the Age of AI. A manifesto from LSE students on principles for AI and assessment and how they want their institution to work with AI and assessment
Study: Human Graders Cannot Detect Text Created by Computers, “Authentic Assessments” Are No “Panacea” for AI Cheating human educators and graders are not good at spotting AI text, even when they’re told it’s there. Perhaps more significantly, the study also shows that authentic assessments are neither a shield for academic integrity nor an immediate solution to the GenAI challenge.
The impact of generative AI on academic integrity of authentic assessments within a higher education context The study explores how generative AI (GenAI) impacts academic integrity in higher education assessments, revealing that markers struggle to detect GenAI usage and that authentic assessments alone are insufficient to safeguard against it.
Education
From ‘Overwhelm’ to Opportunity: Rethinking AI and Digital Skills in FE discusses how AI and digital skills can transform the Further Education (FE) sector by enhancing productivity and confidence among staff and students.
Bridget Phillipson eyes AI’s potential to free up teachers’ time. Exclusive: education secretary exploring tools to compile student reports and assess writing and vocational skills
LSE partners with Anthropic to shape the future of AI in education. All LSE students will have have access to Claude for Education for 1 year alongside 250 academic licenses
Academic libraries cannot afford to carry on with transformative agreements. Highlights several key impacts on universities due to the financial crisis in UK higher education and the unsustainable costs of transformative agreements with commercial publishers.
Environmental
Energy and AI – Analysis and key findings. The International Energy Agency has released a new report on energy and AI, providing the first of its kind analysis examining all aspects of the links between energy and AI.
Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference. Ironwood is Google’s most powerful, capable and energy efficient TPU yet, designed to power thinking, inferential AI models at scale. This chip more than doubled energy efficiency compared to the Google Trillium TPU announced in May 2024.
Vendor News
Microsoft launched Your AI Companion a major upgrade to Copilot, featuring enhanced memory capabilities, web browsing actions, vision tools, and a range of new features designed to integrate more deeply into users’ digital lives.
Hugging Face have released an interactive demo that estimates the energy consumption of different models across different tasks and modalities. It displays real GPU energy consumption (in Wh or Joules).
Anthropic has introduced Claude for Education, which has features like Learning Mode to promote critical thinking and broad university access through partnerships with major institutions and education platforms
NotebookLM has launched Discover Sources, which lets you add sources from the web to your notebook
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