When it comes time to take a day out to attend a conference, it helps to travel by train on a beautiful day.

There are many problems with delivering and engaging with professional learning in a school. Common availability, catching up with absences, providing previous training to new starts, are just some of the standard personnel-focused problems; even with dedicated Professional Learning days in the annual calendar.

It’s worse though. Some of this ’learning’ is statutory or based on compliance rather than personal or professional development. Not that it’s not important, but fire regulations are just not most people’s cup of exciting tea. And it gets even worse. Mandatory training on cybersecurity, for example, is typically dull and tends to be generic - neither sector nor locale specific, let alone tailored to your own institution.

Like many/most schools, we use REDACTED¹ for some of our compliance training. It’s functional, but not especially engaging. It’s funny that we go to great lengths to avoid this situation for our students, but for staff…

Anyway, it was interesting to have demonstrated an approach taken by a school from Edinburgh. Using AI-voiced materials based on a script alongside video, slide deck, and interactive content.

A major benefit of this being that that editing the script allows the audio to be updated effectively instantaneously, without time needed to rerecord and update audio tracks. Perfect for evolving materials, or to change specific details such as key contacts for a topic. But also useful for iterative drafting/redrafting materials without having to worry about recording time and processing.

And there’s more.

Some AI voice tools can now to be trained to mimic a real person’s voice.² You can make your own materials in your own voice, created and edited in text only, and output ‘your’ voice as audio. After a few training sentences, the results are remarkably good.

All of that has the potential to make it super easy to create online training and development resources that are tailored to a school, perhaps even 90% based on something made elsewhere. Edit a script, change some pictures, Fold the materials into an Learning Management System to track completion (vital for those exciting compliance courses) and Roberto’s your Aunt Susan’s Benidorm holiday crush.

And the opportunity for easy collaboration and sharing is great.

Time to have a play.

Of course I would like to be able to use the latest and greatest generative AI / machine learning / LLMs and the like¹ to make my life and work easier. To that end, I periodically take to ChatGPT (or an alternative) to test out its powers as an educational tool - either to support learning or aid administration.

I have set a pretty low bar for success, mostly because the results have not been especially impressive, but even so I have usually been disappointed.

Today, we were talking about general knowledge in a class, inspired in part by a pair of old academic studies on the topic.² It was a fun discussion, and as part of the prep for this I had taken to technology once again, asking the question:

What is the easiest question to answer that the fewest people know the answer to?

I chose the option to have a ‘reasoned’ response rather than a regular query - and so it reasoned:

The user’s question seems philosophical and a bit tricky to interpret. I’m thinking it could mean: "What's an easy question that few people actually know the answer to?"

Trying not to feel like a character in a generic 90s BBC sci-fi show, “the user” read on:

It might also be a meta-question, where its simplicity makes the answer elusive. There are a few ways to interpret this!

So far, so good. But today the ghost in the machine impressed me like it had not managed to before; after a little meander it landed on a final answer:

Some might respond with a self-referential twist, saying that the easiest question of that description is simply:

“What is the easiest question to answer that the fewest people know the answer to?”

Genius.

Although the class still managed to best the machine, with the delightfully simple:

What is a woman?

And the beautifully metaphysical:

Are you okay?

Thank you, Chat Gippity. You were close.

Been playing Chess and doing Sudoku again. It’s the dark nights.

It’s back #DoddieAid 2025 - the cold and snow kept me on Zwift today.

Take part by signing up and doing some exercise!

Or donate to Team Scotland to help cure Motor Neuron Disease.

Or both. It’s good for you.

Happy New Year!

Completed the final 10k of the year. That’s at least one a month for a year. 395km distance covered over the year - the furthest so far.

All thanks to parkrun giving me some focus 18 months ago, and friends/family for company through all weathers.

2025 target: a half marathon, hopefully in April.

“Don’t criticise my jet interior. That hurts.”

— Siobhan ‘Shiv’ Roy, S4E6, Succession

📺 Succession

The protagonists in this ‘corporate family drama’ are uniformly unlikeable, both visceral and human - expertly written, cast, directed, and acted. Their stories set in an intimate, beautiful aesthetic; with the most exquisite pacing and accompanied by a sublime soundtrack.

Recommended.

Three bridges, from the train to Edinburgh

In selected cinemas…

NT Live: Vanya 🎬🎭

Incredible. Andrew Scott’s performance is sublime. Thank you, Uncle Vanya.

The titular uncle has regrets. If I have any it is that I did not see this in person.

Can’t help but be intrigued by what Humane and others are doing in trying to refine personal computing. Of course, Humane might not succeed with their science fiction inspired ai pin, or at all, but I see more companies embracing the ethos of their mission:

We believe in building innovative technology that feels familiar, natural, and human.

But for me, today, a more compelling, evolutionary product in this space is the Rabbit R1. With natural language processing and Playdate-esque whimsy in their hardware design. I just hope it’s as functional as it is cute.

Micro.blog bookshelves, but for music. With Discogs integration.

No idea what the Discogs API/restrictions look like - but would be interesting to see something in this space.

There is never enough time. The art is in the choices we make about how to spend whatever we have.

Live well. Make good choices.

Tuesday tunes: Freak Out! by The Mothers Of Invention 🎵

I am so far the only person I know that is not one extreme or the other when it comes to Frank Zappa. People tend to be zealots or indifferent. Me, I rock the middle ground. Freak Out! remains a favourite, however. Both of and before its time.

More human than human. Slàinte mhath!

Under electric skies

Apple’s iOS 17 Preview:

The new Journal app looks interesting, but from the limited demo it seems entirely local, with no sharing - unless I’ve missed something?

No one but you can access your journal.

With the integration with Shortcuts, and the potential for third party apps to contribute via the Journaling Suggestions API, all it needs is a little love for ActivityPub and it would be a powerful source for (micro-)blogging platforms like micro.blog.

When implementing humane gun laws is beyond your society’s ken, I suppose you can always try the Winnie the Pooh gambit. But maybe, just maybe, try a bit harder on the gun laws?

“Danger is scary, but our legendary friends Pooh and his crew are here to help us through,” reads one page.

— Winnie-the-Pooh book teaches kids to ‘run, hide, fight’ in a shooting, Washington Post

Scone Palace

Today I ate a scone in Scone.

Travel notes:

• jam first, then cream
• the use of both ‘sandwich’ and ‘palace’ demonstrate a degree of hubris
• lovely peacocks and grounds
• never realised how much I didn’t know about Douglas firs
• yet more evidence that Queen Victoria fair got about

Moot Hill, Scone Palace