Tag: writers
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Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere
With growing dissatisfaction about the state of the internet, I spent a few months in 2025 digging into things like the fediverse (Mastodon etc.), self-hosting, and other ways of reclaiming the internet from companies like Google. On my travels, I came across the term POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere.…
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Teaching Writing in the Age of AI: Asking Questions
This is the third post in a series exploring how teaching writing will change in the face of Artificial Intelligence large language models. The first two posts explored the kinds of writing that can and can’t be done with AI, and academic integrity. In my book Practical Reading Strategies, I covered six reading strategies that…
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Reading and Exploring Texts: Key Knowledge and Skills Deep Dive
This is a collection of the posts I wrote earlier in the year which explored all of the Key Knowledge and Skills for the new VCE English Unit 1 Area of Study 1: Reading and Exploring Texts. Bookmark this page and refer back to it as you work you way through this new area of…
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Teaching Writing in the Age of AI
With Victoria the latest state to ban ChatGPT, teachers everywhere are grappling with the implications of the large language model and the impact it will have on the classroom. We know that banning and blocking technology is – at best – a temporary solution. Students will find ways around the blocks, and teachers will be…
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Practical Writing Strategies: Sneak Peak
This is an extract from the introduction to Practical Writing Strategies. PWS is written by myself and Benjamin White, and will be published by Amba Press later this year. Introduction What is writing? When Leon wrote Practical Reading Strategies, he started with a seemingly simple question: what is reading? The question came from a Community…
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Creative but critical: How educators can learn to live with AI
December 2022 represented a step-change in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, suddenly the whole world (or at least the millions of users who logged in within a week of its launch) were talking about Large Language Models. LLMs represent just a portion of AI technologies, but ChatGPT shifted the public…
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Can an AI critique human writing?
My previous post on OpenAI’s latest offering – ChatGPT – demonstrated how far the technology has come in essay writing. ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text based on a given prompt or input. ChatGPT uses a technique called “transformer” architecture to process the input text…
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A New Level of AI Essay
I’ve written a number of posts this year about Artificial Intelligence and education. Next week, I’ll start my PhD exploring AI and writing, and it’s fair to say I’ve been down the rabbit hole. The rate of change is very rapid, and it seems like every week a new app is released which builds on…
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Reading and Exploring: How to write the OC1 Personal Response
I just got back from the VATE conference after two days with some of the best English teachers and presenters in the state. We also heard directly from the VCAA and a handful of the examination panel about the new Study Design. It’s clear that the new SD is looming large for English teachers and…
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Choosing Mentor Texts
Before the new VCE English and EAL Study Design was launched for consultation I had already written a few posts about using texts as models, from students’ own writing through to literary classics. When the SD came out, it was great to see that idea translated into the ‘mentor texts’ for Crafting and Creating Texts.…