Episode 27

The 27th episode of Delivering Development, our podcast on continuing professional development for language teachers and administrators, takes an initial, high-level, look at AI and its impact on the languages field. You can listen to the episode below on the embedded player, and you can also listen and subscribe to this and future podcasts at the various locations shown at the bottom of the show notes.

We welcome comments and feedback, which can be left either here or at the various other locations where you can get our podcast. We also welcome information on specific CPD opportunities, such as online courses, webinars, conferences etc., and also suggestions for future topics.

Introduction

It’s the 4th of June 2024. Welcome to episode 27 of the Delivering Development podcast, helping language teachers and others in the field to enhance their professional development. My name is Kevin Westbrook, and with me today are Laura Styles and Neil Bullock and a special return appearance of Pete Sharma!

According to Neil and Pete, the IATEFL conference this year was heavily about AI and I gave in to the pressure to do a podcast on the subject. This is still a very new aspect of our business, so I plan to interleave the blended learning podcasts with AI over the coming episodes. It can also result in widely differing opinions, so today’s episode will be a very different format than usual. As we record this, there are upcoming elections in the UK and the EU, so I thought we could do this in a kind of election debate format. So, each of us is going to give a two-minute pitch, after which we will have questions addressed to us individually by the other participants. I will go first, followed by Neil, then Laura and finally Pete.

We didn’t quite manage to avoid discussion completely, but I think the format worked well and allowed a range of issues to be presented without getting bogged down in very specific aspects, something we will undoubtedly do in later episodes!

Our podcast is hosted on Spreaker. This is the link to the show page: https://www.spreaker.com/show/delivering-development

Links

Pete’s web site: https://petesharmaai.org/

Quote from Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@theluddite/112519362567869414

Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/30/ugly-truth-ai-chatgpt-guzzling-resources-environment

Conclusion

This is a monthly podcast. You will be able to access it at the web site in the blog section. The address is psa.eu.com. It is also available from spreaker.com and the usual podcasting aggregators such as Apple and Google. Links are below. Thank you for listening to Delivering Development. Check out our web site if you want to know more, and join us next month.