Natalie Lafferty

Ancora Imparo, still learning ... Open education practitioner in higher education, co-organiser of @pressedconf, Trustee of @A_L_T, #FOAMed

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

So the seed of an idea to run a conference on WordPress in education & research in HE planted 6 years ago with @Pgogy comes to fruition at 10am today 😃 It’s called PresssED, it’s free & open to anyone just follow #pressedconf18 trough out today @pressedconf

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Yet another empirical investigation concludes no validity to VAK learning styles. https://t.co/6HhT5ITxzB

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

Modern languages & music closing at Nottingham. What consideration is there of civic & cultural impact of these closures on Nottinghamshire. Likewise with Dundee stopping teaching & research activities in the Botanic Gardens. Anyone looking at the broader impact of the HE crisis?

[Jack Grove @jgro_the]

Nottingham was 6th for modern languages in the 2021 REF and is the only university in East Midlands providing language courses. The closure of an objectively brilliant department by a Russell Group university raises questions about the 2015 decision to uncap student numbers and leave UK HE provision entirely to market forces https://t.co/U4bfyefBo8

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

Crazy scenes at Dunhill Cup in St Andrews, group of guys with balaclavas ran up to the edge of the course and lobbed tennis balls at Dermot Desmond on the 15th hole.

[UCU Coventry Uni @CovUCUBranch]

What’s happening at Coventry University should concern EVERYONE working in UK higher education.

2,788 TUPE transfers in three years. Repeated restructures and redundancies. Academic work moved into subsidiaries. Collective agreements eroded. Trade union recognition fragmented.

We wrote about what has been happening at Coventry – because this isn't just about one university.
In a sector in crisis. The ���Coventry Way” offers a warning of what the future of UK higher education could look like:

Keep the students.
Keep the courses.
Keep the buildings.
Keep the brand.
Move the workers.

Coventry is the canary in the coalmine.
Read our Coventry UCU report in the latest University Worker 👇
https://t.co/Q7qSX8fxaq
#HigherEducation #UCU

[Doug Lemov @Doug_Lemov]

2025 PISA analysis:

"[T]he strongest readers of complex digital material were not the students with the greatest exposure to technology, but those who had read books longer than 100 pages. Reading deeply requires students to sustain attention, construct meaning, connect ideas, and critically reflect on information, precisely the capacities they need to navigate a world overflowing with digital content and AI-generated answers."

https://t.co/PIxx1pEreQ

Thx Kevin Grijalva for sharing this!

[Pamela Snow @PCSnow1604]

I’ve observed many times in recent years that instructional shifts in schools are being driven more by classroom teachers than they are by education academics.

This new guest Snow Report blog post (on honest use of data) by a secondary teacher is a great example of such leadership.

https://t.co/6rl1yehJ4b

[Margaret McCartney @mgtmccartney]

do you have clinical expertise, love EBM, and want to serve the public better?

a tiny but brilliant job:one session a week for 6m to work with me and a fantastic team on a Pandemic Sciences Partnership Scotland grant, Making Social Media Better.
https://t.co/FQDdx4KAoF

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

@RachelFeather10 @wartsandbrawls Always remember one of my lecturers saying that we should be doing at least 10 hours of reading around their lectures and module per week. Had about 32 hours of lectures and lab practicals each week.

[John Reeks @wartsandbrawls]

Genuinely, though, what sort of teaching time do students expect to have? Lectures about books you haven’t read, seminars discussing books you haven’t read? If you take English Literature expecting a packed timetable you must be really a rather silly person.

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

@eric_mazur @EPFL Was your keynote by any chance recorded? Would love to hear more of what you said. Agree about the motivation problem.

[Eric Mazur @eric_mazur]

From my keynote at the @EPFL Faculty retreat — AI doesn’t create a cheating problem; it exposes a motivation problem we’ve been ignoring for much too long

[Natalie Lafferty @nlafferty]

@grantkmurray @ChrisLawSNP @larabirdsnp @DaveDooganSNP @LloydAMelville @FlyLoganair Let’s hope it goes back to flying to London City

[Jane Hart @C4LPT]

After running the Top Tools for Learning survey for 20 years, it is now coming to an end. This year's survey closes on Thursday 27 August 2026, and the Final Top Tools for Learning list will be published on Monday 7 September 2026 https://t.co/kIhOd3fAba

[Empire State Building Observation Deck @EmpireStateBldg]

The Empire State Building shines red and white tonight in celebration of @Arsenal’s Premier League Title and trophy celebration.

See the lights live: https://t.co/iavtXSm3Fx

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

An auditor for the Ontario, Canada government found that AI agents tasked with turning doctor/patient conversations into structured notes routinely hallucinated false treatments, replaced drug names with entirely different drugs, and missed crucial information

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Warning: GenAI-induced cognitive surrender may kill innovation.

Consider the following, from CEO @wadhwa’s newsletter:

“I have been speaking with recent graduates in India, many of them highly recommended, and on paper they look exceptional. The emails are polished, the resumes are perfect, the proposals are structured and articulate. To filter for real thinking, I even created a job description that required candidates to answer a series of questions before I would interview them, and I explicitly told them not to use AI.
Of course, almost everything I am getting back is AI slop.

The moment you get into a real conversation, it becomes obvious. They cannot explain what they wrote, cannot walk through their reasoning, and fall back on vague generalities when pushed. After seeing this repeatedly, I have come to a difficult conclusion: AI has already done real damage. It has taken people from a weak education system and given them a powerful crutch, and instead of using it to improve their thinking, many are using it to avoid thinking altogether.

And before my American friends think they are any better, they should know it is no different here.”

[Chris Nickson @precordialthump.bsky.social @precordialthump]

“Catalyst - critical ideas in action” is happening in Melbourne 23 July 2026. Early bird registrations is closing at midnight today. Spots still available for advanced ECMO but FBI is sold out. https://t.co/WwjoWQvPbX

[Sinan Aral @sinanaral]

🚨Breaking: New Paper on "AI Skills Erosion"🚨
We just released "The AI Augmentation Trap" which asks: with evidence mounting that AI erodes skills, what are the long- and short-run implications of this AI skills erosion for workers and firms?

Our dynamic model, based on differences between worker and manager incentives, produces several important results:

[Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay @PernotLeplay]

🚨🇫🇷🇪🇺 This is big: the French government and agencies are officially getting out of Windows & non-EU tech.

Each ministry has to present their exit plan before Autumn: collaboration tools, antivirus, AI, databases..

It's starting with the Digital Ministry dropping Windows for Linux across its own infrastructure.

It's the latest step from France to reduce its tech dependency as much as possible. Previously:

> 80,000 French social security agents migrating to sovereign tools: Tchap, Visio, FranceTransfert.

> the national health data platform moving to a European cloud solution by end of 2026.

There will also be a dependency mapping across all public procurement, and a definition of what counts as a "European digital service" (which could be followed by other EU states as well)

This is coming from the Prime Minister's initiative, signed off by three ministers.

They call this move #GAFAMdetox