Back in July I asked what should happen to the AI Commons now that my ITL fellowship has finished and I've moved into the Associate Dean for Digital Education role in Humanities. Thank you to everyone who got in touch. The answer I've landed on is a mix of two of the options I suggested: the AI Commons will become a Humanities initiative, and much of the conversation will move to a Teams space where colleagues can talk to each other directly rather than just reading a fortnightly newsletter. Colleagues from other faculties remain very welcome to read along.

📝 The Humanities AI Community

This is a new Teams space for colleagues who are integrating AI into their assessment, or thinking about doing so, to share what they're trying, what's working and what isn't. Nobody needs to be an expert. The most useful thing we can do is talk honestly about real assessments in real units: what students actually did, where it went wrong, what you'd change next time. Things that didn't work are just as valuable to share as things that did. If you'd like to join, reply to this email and I'll add you.

📝 The low tech, no tech pedagogy working group

If we are integrating AI with one hand, we need to be protecting capabilities with the other. This new working group starts from three questions: what are the capabilities we want to protect, what are the strategies through which we can protect them, and how can we integrate these strategies into teaching and learning in our Faculty? In practice, this means identifying the creative and participatory teaching already happening across Humanities, developing new activities where there are gaps, and piloting them in a small number of units. Our first meeting is on 21 October.

📝 Critical AI courseware

There is now a mountain of commentary on AI in higher education, but developing teaching materials that engage with it is time-consuming, and it's a real challenge for colleagues who aren't experts in AI. The critical AI courseware project will identify existing teaching resources that can be shared, develop new ones where there are gaps, make them available through Canvas Commons, and pilot postdoctoral support that pairs expertise in critical AI studies with unit leads' disciplinary expertise.

If you'd like to be involved in either the working group or the courseware project, please get in touch directly at [email protected].

Mark