MaxBruges.com

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Cloning in your classroom

4 May 25 ~Digital twins could transform the way we teach English. Dolly the sheep (left). “But what’s the right answer, sir?” I’d barely been teaching a week before being brought to a dead stop, mid-lesson. I’d done all the right things: pre-taught the vocabulary, broken down the context, painstakingly annotated the iambs and trochees. But that had all been vanity. Rafael wanted an answer. And he wanted the right one. No … read more ⇝

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Revenge of the knowledge-based curriculum

16 Feb 25 ~Unknown knowns and known nonsense. The ever-interesting Ben Thompson has been playing with OpenAI’s new Deep Research tool. His write-up of how he used it to generate a report on Apple’s earnings announcements is worth reading, but this section stood out to me: The issue with the report I generated […] is that it completely missed a major entity in the industry in question. This particular e… read more ⇝

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Launching the A.I. Academy

24 Jan 25 ~Preparing for the future, one after-school club at a time The best thing about my day job is the boredom. Not my boredom (how could I be bored when I’m literally paid to talk about words and witchcraft all day?), but the boredom on the other side of the desk: the students’. There is no creature on this Earth more motivated, more inquisitive, more hungry to learn what’s next than the child who’s bored with what the… read more ⇝

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Machine learning in the margins

20 Jan 25 ~Using AI to explain words and scaffold reading Decoding vocabulary is often the first stumbling block for a developing reader. But with some help from GPT-4o and some trusty HTML, we can give our learners a chance to vault these blocks and stay in the flow. What immortal LLM could frame thy fearful symmetry? Preempt, pre-teach, prepare🔗 When reading, one doesn’t need to know every word, but if a critica… read more ⇝

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Printing a nano newspaper

16 Jan 25 ~All the news that’s fit to thermal print with GPT-4o-mini. Reading things on paper is better for your brain, and I’ve got a thermal printer in a box gathering dust. Rather than blearily scrolling through BBC News first thing, why not get the news from a miniature newspaper, freshly printed each morning? It’s not quite “sky before screens”, but “paper before pixels” has a ring to it. Behold, a literal doom scroll I… read more ⇝

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Small sites and short trips

11 Jan 25 ~Crafting little webpages for quicker connections. Chances are you aren’t reading this from a satellite-connected oil-platform, deep in the North Sea, but if you are… you’re welcome. Almost all[1] the HTML pages that make up this site weigh in at under 14 kilobytes.[2] Why does that matter? Because it’s much faster for our imaginary drilling friend. For those downloading from the sea 🎶 It’s all terribly com… read more ⇝

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Making a little, local LLM

4 Jan 25 ~How to set up a tiny and useful AI on the most knackered of hardware. I’ve been using my nifty terminal helper to write the bash commands that my brain refuses to remember. It’s quick and accurate (enough); the best tool yet I’ve built using an LLM. The only downside is its reliance on the Claude API, which means it’s useless without an internet connection and a credit card[1]. But can we get another version to run locally? N… read more ⇝

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Kickstarting, not controlling

30 Dec 24 ~Using AI to start the creative process - not consume it Try Kickstart 🛵 here, the app that goes with this post. This Hacker News comment started turning a cog in my brain: are we going about LLMs all wrong, by plonking them straight in the hands of the end user? AI, in its current state, really isn’t a tool meant for an end user to interact with… The best use cases seem to be those that don’t require an end c… read more ⇝

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Reading the dictionary and other lies

8 Dec 24 ~How to train great readers in a world of cheap words. Don’t tell them, but I’ve been lying to my Year 11s. What started as a joke is now well on its way to becoming an essential part of our daily routine. Every morning they push me further into it, and every day I desperately try to bluff my way out of it. In fact, it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to believe it myself. The lie? That I’ve read and me… read more ⇝

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The AI I use every day

29 Sep 24 ~The simplest question is always the best It’s been nearly two years since I started fiddling with LLMs. In many ways, they’re the perfect technology to tinker with: zero up-front cost, straight-forward documentation, with plaintext input and output. As with most overhyped start-ups, my tinkering has largely been in the form of writing fancy wrappers around an API. I’ve tested out a few - some sill… read more ⇝

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Turning radio into podcasts

28 Sep 24 ~An exercise in pettiness, podcasts and programming. A boy needs his bongs I love the BBC. But I do not love BBC Sounds. It is clunky, it lacks automatic downloads, and it has an unbearable habit of advertising the podcast you are listening to during said podcast, with a bonus reminder that you can listen to the podcast on the app you are currently using. As more and more BBC programmes vanish from open podca… read more ⇝

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AI for Me, but not for Thee

30 Jun 24 ~When it comes to using LLMs, educators need to lead by example. The temptation to ‘just get ChatGPT to do it’ is as strong for teachers as it is for students. So should we be surprised when pupils reach for the AI to finish their homework, when we do the same with our paperwork? The end of term is always a rush, with exams to mark, units to finish, reports to write. That last bullet-point on the To-Do list is often the … read more ⇝

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I ♥ Markdown

1 Mar 24 ~Let the writing do the talking No matter how often you do it, starting the process of writing is agonising. It is slow and full of false starts. Not because we don’t know what to write, but because we could write anything. The blank page is infinite, without footholds or signposts. So we start doodling in the margins. Death to .docx🔗 Children are most susceptible to this trap. Students w… read more ⇝

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AI will eat your English Department

22 May 23 ~And Humanities will be for pudding. TL;DR: The Times has been good enough to publish my letter on this topic - so just read that if you want. Otherwise: given the infinite space afforded by a personal blog, I thought it worth elaborating my thinking here. Given all the problems faced by British head teachers - the yawning gulf between pay and inflation, opaque inspection frameworks, crater… read more ⇝

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The case for banning Google

13 May 23 ~You’re Bard, sunshine. We can’t control the tides, but we can at least stop our students playing on the sandbars It seems incredible to say now, but I once received lessons in How To Google. And yesterday, Google rang the death-knell for that way of traditional searching. Friday was Google’s annual I/O conference. Between the perennial updates to mobiles and tablets was arguably … read more ⇝

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Trial by Error

4 May 23 ~Learning the hard way, failing the right way A trial by ordeal This website is a place about learning and a place for learning: as the playground page testifies, this is as much a learning experience for me as it is a resource for anyone else. Based on my previous musings, I’ve tried to put the principle into practice. Allow me to introduce my latest experiment in GPT and JS: What Am I Doing Wrong? S… read more ⇝

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Coding on The Titanic

26 Apr 23 ~If the robots can do it better, why bother learning at all? Less “rearranging the deckchairs” and more “putting on your white tie, sitting down in the flooded dining room and wondering if there’ll be scallops to start.” You can’t move for the doom-laden coding headlines at the moment: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’ Meta layoffs show how coding jobs are no longer safe Will A.I. Steal All… read more ⇝

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Hello World

18 Apr 23 ~You have to start somewhere. As it says on the tin: I’m a teacher. It’s an incredible career, and one I’m proud to be part of. But a niggling feeling started to at the back of my mind a few months ago. Teachers don’t do much learning. That’s perhaps unfair - hardly anyone, really, does much learning past the age of 25. I don’t mean in the self-knowledge, incremental gains kind of way; … read more ⇝

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Schools' labours lost

20 May 20 ~Rebuilding routines will be the hardest and most important job of schools after the pandemic. In the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, schools in the city faced an unthinkable challenge: how do you return to normal? 15,000 pupils had been wrenched from their usual routines overnight - how do you bring them back? Kiwi educators recognised that – above everything – school provides “a calm space,” essential after a traumatic crisis. That t… read more ⇝

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