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Advice and Guidance

Microsoft Copilot and Data Protection – an update

  Microsoft are making a change to the data protection offered by Copilot (the web version) which, we think, will make it even more attractive as the default option for most Universities and Colleges. Until now, there has been a difference in the level of data protection offered for the version of Copilot available at […]

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Advice and Guidance

A Generative AI Primer

Publishing an intro to generative AI is a challenge as things are moving so quickly.  However, we think things have now settled down enough for us to bring together information in a single place, to create a short primer.  This blog post will be updated as needed, and we have also produced a version as […]

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Advice and Guidance

What is AI Sovereignty and why does it matter for education?

The phrases ‘Data Sovereignty’, ‘Digital Sovereignty’, and ‘AI Sovereignty’ are coming up more and more, so I thought it would be useful to try to unpack them, and understand why they matter.  The terms sound similar, but I’d argue that they are in fact, quite different, with very different concerns. Data Sovereignty is concerned with […]

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Advice and Guidance

What do we mean by open-source AI?

I’ve been writing a blog post about AI Sovereignty this week, and as I did it felt that I was going to get responses that ‘open-source was the answer’, so I thought it would be useful delve into this as well.  The particular issue I want to explore is that some of the concepts behind […]

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Examples of AI in education

Licensing Options for Generative AI

(note: last updated 26th June 2024 – see here for the update history.) We are getting a lot of questions about licensing options for generative AI tools, so we thought it would be useful to summarise the current situation.  It’s fair to say that things are still moving quickly,  and there are a fair number […]

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Advice and Guidance

AI and Jisc’s Leadership Survey

Each year at Jisc we run a leadership survey, which is sent to leaders in HE and FE, with responses from vice-chancellors and principals, technology and library strategic leaders and more.  The latest was sent during the spring of this year. The survey asks several questions about the perception of Jisc and our services, the […]

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Advice and Guidance

Etiquette for AI meeting note-taking services

Our team love AI meeting note-taking tools! We have access to them via Microsoft Copilot for 365, and it’s probably our favourite and most useful feature – it does a fantastic job of summarising key points and actions. We’re increasingly seeing AI services such as Otter and Firefly added to meetings, and understandably this is […]

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Advice and Guidance Examples of AI in education

Some thoughts on Google’s recent AI for Education work

Google’s  Generative AI work has perhaps tended to slip a little under the radar, at least in discussions I’ve been involved in, which have tended to focus on ChatGPT and Copilot.  They have just put out a lot of new info though, including, for me, probably the most interesting paper on LLMs in education for […]

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Advice and Guidance

RAG: Can we stop LLMs making things up?

When ChatGPT was first released, there was (and perhaps still is) some confusion with what it was doing. We mostly got used to the fact that it was, in effect, a text prediction tool, albeit one trained on vast amounts of data, with often quite amazing abilities.  This meant that it was prone to making […]

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Advice and Guidance

Initial thoughts on Microsoft Copilot for 365 (and AI FOMO)

  I thought I’d share some very initial thoughts on Copilot for Microsoft 365, as I’ve had it for a few weeks. It’s been fairly easy for people to try most of the AI tools. That’s not the case with Copilot for Microsoft 365, as it can only be purchased and enabled by central IT […]