Large language models such as ChatGPT can be seen as a major threat to reliable assessment in higher education. In this point of departure, I argue that these tools are a major game changer for society at large. Many of the jobs we now consider highly skilled are based on pattern recognition that can much more reliably be carried by fine-tuned…

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler's recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The "Neganthropocene", 2018 and "Qu'appelle-t-on" Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes…

According to Bernard Stiegler, social innovations in the educational field are an antidotical cure for social pathologies wrought by the digitalisation of society. This article explores how Stiegler's social pharmacology links to the human-technical co-constitution thesis that he first expounded in "Technics and Time, 1." Not only do we…

This article synthesises progress made in the description of spoken (especially conversational) grammar over the 20 years since the authors published a paper in this journal arguing for a re-thinking of grammatical description and pedagogy based on spoken corpus evidence. We begin with a glance back at the 16th century and the teaching of Latin…

Anybody who has lived through the past decade of technological developments will know how quickly our world is changing. And what happens outside our teaching contexts, out there in the real world, will inevitably -- at least some of it -- end up having an impact on what we do inside our classrooms, lecture halls, schools and colleges. Some of the…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to show how multilinguality is permanently present in organizations in this global world, and how they should take into account the multilingual phenomenon specifically from the perspective of knowledge management in order to gain presence in markets. Design/methodology/approach: The approach followed by the…

The computer marking of short-answer free-text responses of around a sentence in length has been found to be at least as good as that of six human markers. The marking accuracy of three separate computerised systems has been compared, one system (Intelligent Assessment Technologies FreeText Author) is based on computational linguistics whilst two…

Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the…

Iceland's language policies are purist and protectionist, aiming to maintain the grammatical system and basic vocabulary of Icelandic as it has been for a thousand years and to keep the language free of foreign (English) borrowings. In order to use Icelandic in the domain of information technology, there has been a major investment in language…

Computer corpora have many potential applications in teaching and learning languages, the most direct of which--when the learners explore a corpus themselves--has become known as data-driven learning (DDL). Despite considerable enthusiasm in the research community and interest in higher education, the approach has not made major inroads to…

Abrami et al. (this issue) provide a review of e-learning in Canada from 2000 onwards by synthesizing information drawn from multiple sources, not only primary research. In total, there were 726 documents included in our review: 235 views expressed in the public printed media (an expression of general public opinion); 131 views from…

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based…

The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this explosion of information are needed. While it is only possible to read one paper or…