“ I have learned much from my teachers and even more from my friends, but from my students I have learned most of all ” Graduation is one of the most enjoyable milestones in the academic calendar. It’s a chance to celebrate and reflect on what students have learned and how they have grown during the time they have spent at University.

All your dreams are made, when you’re chained to the lesson and the teaching trade. Was that lecture, lab or lesson just a dream? Exactly what did you learn from the experience? When you reflect on it, how will you tell yourself and others the stories of your study? The stories students tell about what they have learned, the teaching they experience and research they are exposed to are a key part of the story of every University.

Any list of 100 best anything is going to be riddled with biases, flaws and omissions, but here’s a list of albums you might enjoy listening to from 100best.music.apple.com. I’ve posted them here because my family are listening to three albums a week throughout 2025, and discussing them as we go. The albums are listed in reverse order of “greatness“ below, as we’re starting from the top.

Have you ever been asked WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU GO TO? I was once asked this in a high-stakes job interview and my answer was that of a startled rabbit caught in the headlights before becoming squashed roadkill on the highway to hell. Nobody has asked me that question before or since. How can such a simple question be so difficult to answer?

Forty two years ago I wrote my first bit of software on a BBC Micro in the Code Club at Fitzmaurice Primary School.

How can we get better at listening to student voices to improve teaching and learning in our Universities? This post summarises a talk I gave at the inaugural ITL Teaching & Learning conference at the Pendulum Hotel in Manchester on July 6th 2023 tackling this question.

Last week I attended the first Teaching and Learning conference in the Pendulum hotel, Manchester. It was really good and I got lots out of it. The sessions I attended were enjoyable and well organised, I learned heaps, made lots of new contacts and got some useful questions from the audience on my lightning talk about podcasting the student voice.

There’s a community of people here who use the R language to get stuff done known as the R Usergroup Manchester (RUM). We meet monthly to learn from each other. At the last meetup on 29th June, I gave a joint talk with Stavrina Dimosthenous about quarto.org and its predecessor bookdown.org. Following Stravrina’s quick introduction to Quarto, I gave a lightning talk about some of the pros and cons of using bookdown to write books.

The textbook has long been a mainstay of education. Although online textbooks can give students easy (and sometimes free) access to increasingly interactive resources, authors have a bewildering array of tools and publishing models to select from.

Maybe you wrote that code and maybe you didn’t. If Artificial Intelligence helped you, such as the OpenAI Codex in GitHub Copilot, how did it solve your problem? How much did AI help or hinder your solution? Join us to discuss a paper by Michel Wermelinger from the Open University published in the SIGCSE technical symposium earlier this month in Toronto on this very topic.

It’s all very well getting an AI to write your code for you but reading code and writing code is not the same as understanding code. So what is going on in novices brains when they learn to actually understand the code they are reading and writing?