iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Me too, fire truck manufacturer, me too.

A toy fire truck for sale in a supermarket. On the packaging is a slogan "driven by inertia"

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Seen on a well-used bookshelf at Gothenburg University @profsallybrown.bsky.social

Photograph of two folders which have "The Lecturer's Toolkit by Phil Race and Sally Brown" on the spine.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

There is guidance on deciding on submission sizes in my book, Confident Assessment in Higher Education. First screenshot is an extract from specific info about portfolios (there is info for around 18 different assessment types) and the 2nd and 3rd are general ideas. uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/co...

screenshot including this text:
Submission size
The production and maintenance of a portfolio can be time-consuming, and this would normally be taken into account when considering the length of each individual element and the reflective element. You need to decide whether you want to see all of the work that students have completed over the term, or a selection of the tasks. If it is a selection, will you choose which items are submitted (say, the lab reports from weeks 3, 7 and 9), or will you
leave the choice to students (for instance, submit the four article summaries which best demonstrate your progress over the term)? You could make it time-based, and ask for one piece of evidence per week of the course.
The answer will depend on whether you want to focus mostly on regular performance and acquisition of essential skills, or personal development across the module, and this will be linked to the unit learning outcomes. Make it very clear what you are expecting to see in terms of size, and if there are any penalties for submitting too much, or you may receive many appendices which you won't have time to assess properly.

Text from screenshot:
Submission size
You will need to specify the size of the assignment: the number of words for a written piece, or the number of minutes for a presentation, or the size of a poster or an exhibition space, for instance. It is important to give students a sense of what is expected, to help them to put parameters on what is expected. This could be the most challenging decision you make about assessment, or it could be the easiest. Your university may have set assignment sizes for different types of assignment, which makes the decision simple, unless you disagree with the recommendations, of course. If you have free rein to choose, or you have selected an assignment task which is not yet commonly used, then the decision is a little more complicated.
Custom and practice is a good place to start. Assignments of the same type on the same course should normally be comparable in size, otherwise students may become very confused about expectations. You can look at similar assignments in your own university or elsewhere — many universities publish course outlines which include this level of detail.
Think about how much time the students should spend on preparing their assignment submission: a rule of thumb I have used is to say that working directly on the assignment should take up about 25% of the time available for the module. In the UK system, 1 credit point is nominally associated with 10 hours of student work, so for a 10 credit (5 ECTS credits) module associated with 100 hours of student learning, the student should spend 25 hours on the assignment. This gives you a basis for estimating how much they can realistically do in that time, including all reading, data collection, analysis, and so on.
Thinking through the stages which might be needed for the assignment will also help you to break down the processes you think will need to be completed and to explain them to colleagues and to students.

Text from screenshot, which follows on from previous image:
However, whatever approach is taken, it will just be a rule of thumb: all the studies done on student workload shows that there is a huge variation between individual students as to the time it takes to actually complete assignments and as to students' perception of how much time it takes (Crook & Park, 2004; Kember, 2004; Kember & Leung, 2006; Sastry & Bekhradnia, 2007). It is therefore important to give students a clear idea of how long you think it might take them to complete the assigned work, sharing your thoughts about each stage of the process, but also to make it clear that there will be big individual variations.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

So right now I'm focusing on the simple message of balancing validity and security in decision-making, which obviously leads to the Assessment Wheel of Fortune to get discussion going (sorry about the Swenglish - salstenta is a traditional exam hall experience). #AssessmentInHE

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Next up, a feedback workshop for the new AI Literacy framework for primary and secondary education. ailiteracyframework.org

A photograph of the four domains of AI literacy: Engaging with AI, Creating with AI, Managing AI, Designing AI. Full details of the framework in the link in the post.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

New panel now, talking about our preparedness to guide AI implementation

Image if five people sitting in a stage under the banner "trend or here to stay? Education in a digital world"

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Very high-powered panel to discuss the Union of Skills and ideas for progressing it.

Image of four speakers and a moderator on stage
Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen ‐ Director-General, DG Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, European Commission

Barbara Nowacka ‐ Minister of Education, Poland

Nela Riehl ‐ Chair of CULT Committee, European Parliament

Helena Lovegrove ‐ Senior Director for Operations & Projects, DIGITALEUROPE

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

He says we should all learn to code- I think someone should talk to employers laying off junior coders, how will they ever become proficient and expert?

Slide saying that now that AI can write code, it's more important than ever to learn to code.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Whether you agree with his ideas about the future where robotics do all the boring work, I agree with him that education needs to evolve.

Hadi Partovi talking about the new Digital Divide between those who do and don't learn about computing and AI.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Roxana Minzatu is setting digital skills in the context of European citizenship as well as employability. We need digital skills to work together for the future: she mentions disinformation, participation in society, STEM education. #diged2025

Picture of Roxana Minzatu opening the European Commission Digital Education Stakeholder Forum 2025.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

One great thing about working at @lunduniversity.bsky.social is free access to Skissernas, the museum of sketches, and free guided tours of new exhibitions. Currently on is "The Museum Fauna", a look at how animals are represented in art. skissernasmuseum.se

A description of the work of the artist EvaMarie Lindahl and her artistic process, described on the website linked to those post.

A huge graphite drawing which replicates an 18th century picture of a horse standing with a man. One difference with the original is that the horrible docked tail is replaced with a drawing of a rose.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

If it's useful for anyone, here is a list of ideas for rubric adjectives from my book Confident Assessment in HE. Of course context is relevant. I prefer having fewer grade bands and less complicated differentiation, but if you have bands, good language is important for sharing expectations.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Ah - last. time I looked it said otherwise (at least for paid accounts, in the EU). To be clear, since discussion is so often binary about this, I pay for an account because it's part of my job to advise other teachers about this tech. I am not endorsing or rejecting it.

Screenshot of OpenAI data controls. Toggle for 'Improve the model for everyone' is off, and underneath it says 'Allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone else'.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Strong vibes of Tiffin, J., & Rajasingham, L. (1995). In search of the virtual class: Education in an information society. Psychology Press. Still waiting.

Screenshot from the publisher page for the book, with the text: 'Shirley zips into her skin-tight school uniform, which on the outside looks something like a ski suit. The lining of the suit in fact contains cabling that makes the suit a communication system and there are pressure pads where the suit touches skin that give a sense of touch. Next, she sits astride something that is a bit like a motorbike, except that it has no wheels and is attached firmly to the floor. Her feet fit on to something similar to a brake and accelerator and her gloved hands hold onto handlebars. She shouts, "I'm off to school, Dad". Her father, who is taking time out from his teleworking, begins to remind her that the family are going teleshopping in the virtual city later in the day, but it is too late, his daughter has already donned her school helmet. She is no longer in the real world of her real home, she is in the virtual world of her virtual school.'
Is this the shape of the future of education? This book presents a vision of what will happen to education and training as information technology develops. The argument is simple. To prepare people for life in an information society they need to be taught with the technology of an information society. But what shape will that take? Can the classroom as we know it - a communications system which has been in place for four thousand years - be replaced? The authors argue that through the development of telecommunications for telelearning a genuine revolution in education is in the making. The book describes how, through the convergence of a cluster of new technologies including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and the superhighways of telecommunications, a new educational paradigm will emerge in the form of a virtual class. Teachers, trainers and educators who worry about how best to prepare students for life in an ever-changing world will find much inspiration in this engagingly written and jargon-free book

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

This is my 3rd worldbook day as a solo book author but the first where I've seen this done - I like it! I will also be dressing as the author of Confident Assessment in Higher Education for the whole day. Also as the person who published a book about assessment 3 weeks before ChatGPT was released 🤦.

Cover of the book "Confident Assessment in Higher Education" written by Rachel Forsyth and published by Sage, 2022.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This screenshot summarises the challenge for non-specialists in making decisions about AI use.

Screenshot showing someone's BlueSky feed with a post from Justin Cerenzia asking people to check out different AI tools before vilifying AI followed by one saying that all examples of AI use show it is futile.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Even in Sweden! (Batch 1 in background)

Bowl of Seville oranges in foreground, with pan of marmalade already cooking behind.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Not a bad location for my last scheduled meeting of 2024.

Image of a traditional library with pillars, comfortable seating and soft lighting

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

In evidence I will share this clip of a workplace start to the day which lifted me for the whole day (only once a year, but worth it). Can't post a whole clip as too long but more here if you want it youtu.be/x0LdxSn02PU?...

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Getting the right balance is hard. Building trustful relationships with students means designing for those at the bottom of this pyramid and not treating everyone as though they were at the top. But we still need to ensure learning has happened. Ellis, C, & Murdoch, K (2024) doi.org/10.1080/0260...

The educational integrity enforcement pyramid by Ellis & Murdoch, 2024. There are five main categories of student: champion (bottom of triangle), compliant, careless, confused, chancers (top of triangle). Towards the top students are more likely to cheating.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

And as for this extract ⬇️ - your job as an educator is to reduce and not raise those social barriers. Ask why students in your class find it difficult to ask questions and make it easy.

Extract from Inside Higher Ed article about an AI textbook: Alexander Kusenko, a physics and astronomy professor at UCLA who co-founded Kudu, believes these textbooks have the potential to “make teaching more personal and more tailored to the students’ needs.” He added that a research project underway at UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences is already showing that AI tools are especially helpful to underrepresented minority students who may “face a social barrier asking questions from their peers or TAs or professors.” By contrast, “there is no social barrier for asking a computer to help.”

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Presumably for this reason, GenAI images of "Librarians discussing GenAI" generated by Bing in November 2023 were also quite "interesting".

AI-generated cartoon of three people sitting round a table with bookcases behind them. The largest person is a man, sitting in the middle and with a speech bubble with images of 1) a speech bubble saying 'Bing', a megaphone (maybe) and an odd creature sitting in a tea cup. The two women sitting either side of the man look at him admiringly.

AI-generated cartoon of three people standing in a room with bookcases behind them. The largest person is a man, sitting in the middle and with a speech bubble with an image of a blue heart in it. One woman, much smaller than the man, stands to his side and looks at him admiringly. He is looking at another man who is laughing appreciatively. The two men are holding an open book with a computer tablet inserted as an extra page. On the top of one bookcase is a woman kneeling in front of a computer and holding a mobile phone. She has only one eye. Another woman is sitting next to a bookcase and looking admiringly at the man talking.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

Enjoying this by @randomwalker.bsky.social and @sayash.bsky.social right now because it's giving me language to explain the hype. I am not as opposed as @lawriephipps.bsky.social - there are some interesting uses with standard GenAI but I agree about all the built-in slop-generators.

Photo of the cover of a book called 'AI Snake Oil - what artifical intelligence can so, what it can't, and how to tell the difference' by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. The book cover only has text except for 2 snakes draped down rhe sides of the cover and facing each other.

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 02/09/2024

Thanks for this, I also thought it was excellent and can be applied to educational tasks too (which are of course art in their own way). My favourite extract:

Screenshot of part of an article which reads "It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something."

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Rachel Forsyth @rmforsyth.bsky.social · 14/08/2024

This is good, though it almost falls into the binary puddle, by assuming that educational developers are pushing GenAI use rather than encouraging teacher engagement so that they can make an informed decision about how to talk about it with students, so they in turn can be critical.

A terrible AI generated image showing an ostrich with its head in the sand outside a traditional looking university building with alarm clocks and computer tablets dotted around in the sand, and a camera or something on a second head coming out of the ostrich's back. Image generated by Bing in May 2024, meant to represent professors with their heads in the sand about GenAI.

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