I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
M-H
It’s often called ICT in Australia too, especially in education circles. We have a committee at my university called the “ICT in Teaching and Learning Committee”.
Ali
I’m using the wordpress.com hosted blogs for my teaching this year. Only problem is that the system doesn’t like hotmail adresses so a number of my students aren’t getting signed up properly. Don’t know if this will be a problem for you, but something to be aware of.
Ali
Jill
I hadn’t realised it was ICT in Australia too – or maybe I had but hadn’t noticed or something… And WordPress and bloggign worked just fine, except their server’s rather slow. But it seems to be going well. We had fun!
Stephanie
I have done the same thing, Jill. Every semester we have a beginning blog course of some sort in the lab and this last time I switched from Blogger to WP hosted. Seems like a great alternative!
Ali, have you had any problems with gmail? I usually have 3 or 4 gmail accounts ready for those who can not access their email from the lab. No problems so far, but you never know…
Jill
I hadn’t thought of creating special gmail accounts – one of our students had his msn email refused, and so used a different address. The students who used uib.no address had to wait a few extra minutes while the UiB spamfilter’s greylist considered whether to let the email through, but apart from that all went well.
b¯rge
This is great!
I don’t know who else has suggested it (obviously), but at least I too suggested wordpress.com way back when you blogged about using Blogger.
Jill
Maybe a lot of people suggested it and I finally acted on it 😉