Belong

A quick-fire round of everything WonkHE and Cibyl have been working on with SUs about belonging – this was an absolute treasure trove of data I did not stop to take much notes on as I was 1) getting nervous about my panel and 2) just absorbed. There was a whole host of data about how much students are working – how much time this actually takes out of their schedules, and differences in how meaningful and both emotional and physically draining it is across both home and international students.

Feedback!

Y’all, this is my panel, and so it seems weird writing about it (and you have made it SO far through the blogpost) so lemme break it down for you in a few points

• We know everyone is being over surveyed
• Yes we hate it too
• So lets get them cut all the way down and with SPECIFIC questions – they assess exactly what we want and are more friendly to a whole host of folk

“Last night a chatbot eased my strife”

I saw the person next to me write the title of this as “saved my life” and y’all – it does seem like it was meant to be close to that right??

Anyway, this was about the future of chatbots for student services and the like. Did you know by the way that these have apparently been around since the 60’s ??

A lot of the emphasis of this session was on “hey we aren’t gonna be asking AI to conduct therapy, we just want it to be there to direct you at any time of day” – and making sure there is this kinda internal model that draws from what the University knows/publishes so there aren’t loads of hallucinations etc.

By this time, I am just massively overdone on caffeine and yet I still have one last massive session to go to on the main stage – again, little notes here on account of the pure absorbance into it all – but I am at least 60% sure Jiji will have something super cool to write about it all.

Until then my loves, I hope you have a lovely week ahead – and I can’t wait to get back to less chonky blogs !