I am a total sucker for messing with AI tools especially on a Friday afternoon. This was made with Heygen and I never recorded this and I never spoke these words. It’s a digital version of myself, I don’t smile anywhere near as much as this (!) but aside from that it’s pretty good.

You can read my weekly Friday Medium piece here if you like. This week I looked at “When Generations Collide in the Synthetic Workplace“. There is the usual accompanying podcast link at the bottom of the article. medium.com/@ajfirr/when...

Do any educators of primarily international students produce secondary or additional resources for their students in their first languages? That’s what I’m asking here. www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew...

For anyone with an interest in entrepreneurship education a small old dataset that I managed to save from being lost on a hard drive! zenodo.org/records/1773...

#SocialMedia The European Parliament has proposed an EU-wide minimum age to access social media, video-sharing platforms and AI companions, as countries worldwide follow the Australian model to protect children on the internet.

I’ve found some old slightly tatty datasets from my Young Enterprise days and have managed to turn them into a short Descriptive Archive. Will publish them up on Zenodo for anyone who has interest in that sort of thing, better than then left rotting in a drawer.

Pause before you post; www.linkedin.com/posts/john-d...

Future idea- AI cannot produce an idea without a human seed, and it cannot produce a human seed without lived experience. Hmm.

We often see conversations about how AI can or cannot help educators. It’s almost a never ending dialogue and that’s no bad thing.

Development in the open

Introducing a small extension of my Open Scholar Ecosystem work: the Journal of Transparent Scholarship (JTS).

Have you tried Nano Banana yet? Wow!

Interesting, time, cost, quality dilemma in action.

Coming. This is quite an exciting little project I am working upon.

Welcome to Open Scholar Cards. 24 cards capturing the methods, tensions, and values behind modern open research practice. Card 1- Transparent Process.

Coming next week.

You can read my Friday Medium writing here, if you like. This week I looked at- Why we flinch at AI? Machine or Mirror? The medium writing is here- medium.com/@ajfirr/why-... or if you would like to listen to the accompanying podcast you can also find that link within the Medium piece.

Bluesky is kind of wild. That’s what I’ve discovered in my six weeks. And let’s not pretend it’s always ‘kind’ it’s absolutely not.

Just finalising this Fridays Medium writing piece. This week I’ll be looking at- Why We Flinch at AI: Machine or Mirror? You can follow all of my Medium stories and thoughts / writings on other various platforms here- lnk.bio/AndrewFirr

The debate continues about whether PhD students should be required to publish before they graduate. It raises a bigger question, how should advanced scholarly work be recognised fairly?

I’ve been exploring how advanced scholarly practice might be recognised across global frameworks, not just the EQF, but AQF, NZQF, CDQF, CBE, UNESCO and more. A short ‘Recognition Futures’ opener is coming soon, hopefully January.

This morning I shared my first open drafted vision statement for Open Scholar Ecosystem (OSE). This evening I share our first drafted Mission Statement.

Today I am sharing a draft vision for my Open Scholar Ecosystem work, sharing it openly as part of the process.

What’s your favourite current go to AI tool if you are working in Higher Education? For me, today, I’m going for Google NotebookLM, I think it’s awesome. But I may have a new one tomorrow!

My thoughts on #2wai not positive! www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew...

You can have a read of my latest Medium story here, if you like. This week I was looking at Relational dark patterns, when AI systems pretend to care. I think we’ll see more and more of this in the future. It’s not all bad but it needs very careful monitoring. medium.com/@ajfirr/rela...

My ultimate goal- To assist in the creation of a standardised way to map open, published, practice-based scholarship to EQF Level 8 descriptors and have that formally recognised.

The six principals of Open Scholarship Ecosystem.

Orcid profile finally setup- orcid.org/0009-0006-41...

Pleased to have signed this, because I think it matters and is important. The Paris Declaration postulates the equality of recognition practices: just as informal learning is not an inferior form of learning, informal recognition is not an inferior form of recognition. paris.openrecognition.org

Have formalised OSE framework as wasn’t quite happy with tone in earlier edition. For transparency have logged as new Zenodo piece and this will be base level going forward. Would love to see if this has the potential to assist with EQF mapping going forward. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Thinking in public. Scary but part of a scaffold I’m trying to build. #OSE #OpenScholarship #OpenScience #ScholarlyCommunication #OpenRecognition #LifelongLearning #HigherEducation

Exploring the ethics of how learning is recognised, not just what is learned. This week I’ve signed both the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration and the Paris Declaration on the Equality of Recognitions, two milestones shaping a more open, inclusive approach to valuing knowledge and practice.

Recognition doesn’t always begin with an award, sometimes it begins with a conversation about what recognition could become.

First step into something new, just contacted the Open Recognition Alliance to explore whether an open, peer-endorsed doctorate could validate my ongoing work on ethical AI and open scholarship.

100 followers isn’t much, but it’s the right 100. I’m more interested in signal integrity than scale, a network that actually thinks with you. Small, steady, relevant. That’s the goal. I’m impressed with Bluesky and hope to continue to build and share my ideas.

Small win, thank you for my first 100 followers on Bluesky.

Are there any guys out there who have done a DProf? I’m just thinking could I do this…

Currently working on this- Zenodo Within the Open Scholar Ecosystem: Building Reflexive Layers of Publication. Why? Because I’m a huge fan of the opportunities Zenodo offers and want to share this with others who maybe less aware.

As well as my normal AI ethics style stuff I like to share some of my favourite ever books on here as well. Starting with these two.

Possible future idea- When AI learns to monetise insecurity. AI algorithms / dubious skincare organisational marketing practices and being a dad of a ‘tween’ is a concern. This might need looking into in more depth around the whole skincare craze for young people. Ps AI generated image.

Idea for future- We used to know when someone was filming, a phone raised, a gesture we all recognised. Smart glasses change that. The watchful act disappears, but the surveillance stays. What happens when being recorded feels… normal? #AIethics #DigitalSociety #WearableTech #Privacy

Coming soon: Existential–Synthetic Ontology (ESO), my next open preprint. It explores how reality itself changes when AI starts to co-produce it, when human and synthetic perception overlap and meaning becomes collaborative.

This is cool!

If we keep this in mind we don’t need to worry so much about AI detectors.

Are people still requiring students to cite and subsequently reference AI tools in the same way as other traditional source material, or are more standardised short AI declarations more common? Asking for a friend!

Coming to my Medium next week- Relational Dark Patterns, When AI Systems Pretend to Care. I’ve been exploring how some ‘empathic’ AI tools use emotional design to keep users hooked, simulating care, creating dependency, and blurring human boundaries.

I’ve been quietly tracking how my Bluesky network has evolved as part of the OSE experiment, and it’s starting to take shape. Even at this small scale, clear clusters are forming.

Friday writing now live on Medium, The Hidden Infrastructure of Open Scholarship: What I Learned About DOIs (and Everything That Can Go Wrong). A practical reflection on what metadata, indexing, and broken links can teach us about the invisible systems behind open research.

Have cleaned up these various platform links into one tidy area, now that’s better to keep all major parts of the Ecosystem together. lnk.bio/AndrewFirr