I’ve been experimenting with using artificial intelligence apps to help me format documents. Look, |I will freely admit it: my artistic design skills are notable for their absence. (I wrote about this in I miss the old website!.

So when I decide that I would like to create a flyer for my forthcoming creative writing courses, and that I would like it to have the look of a zine. In case you are not familiar with zines, they were publications created by fans of one thing or another — hence “fanzines” or fan magazines. Back in the eighties they were, to an extent, the social media of their day. They had a hand-crafted look and feel, probably because they were largely hand-crafted. Here is a photo I took of a collage of football zines on display at the British Library:

So what I did was, I uploaded three flyers about the next three courses I’m running, and instructed Claude to create a flyer out of them with a zine vibe to them.

It very quickly produced a nearly-decent flyer in both HTML and pdf formats. This is what it looked like:

OK, not a bad colour scheme, but not the down and dirty look I wanted either. Also, the course descriptions have a page break in the middle, and there is a lot of white space.

I instructed Claude to give the thing a monochrome look, and it came up with this:

OK, so this is much better, but there is a glaring error, as you can see: the word “WHO” is upside-down.

Claude tried to get around this by including an illustration, but for some reason nothing it tried would show up. The next iteration, in a Word version, looked like this:

By this time I had played a more active role, by doing the following:

• Increased the size of the font in the small print section. In one of them it was a size 9 and in the other it was a size 7. These are ridiculous sizes, especially considering that the font, Couirier New, is monotype. That means that the space taken up by each letter is the same as that taken up by every other letter, which makes it harder to read.

• Added some colour.

• Added a photograph of myself.

• Created shorthand URLs and tur5ned them into live links.

• Changed the quotation.

• Changed some of the text. One of the course descripters read “No lectures. No waiting. Write from the first minute.” I changed that because I am going to be introducing each technique and activity with a short talk of perhaps five minutes. So that could be construed as a lecture by some people! Also, there is no way that people can start writing from the very first minute — unless I were to cheat by asking them to write down their names! So those bits were changed to: “No long lectures. No waiting. Just words on the page from the very first lesson”.

The next iteration looked like this:

As you can see, I’ve added a few comic book-type touches, such as speech balloons. I’m not convinced that this enhances the flyer from a professional look point of view, but it does give it more of a handmade feel I think.

There are several interesting things to come from this exercise I think:

Firstly, the designs Claude came up with were much better than anything I would have thought of. As I say, I’m a wordsmith, I’m no graphic designer.

Secondly, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to include a quotation. I loved the idea. In the end, I didn’t use the one that Claude had provided, but the principle is sound, obviously.

Thirdly, Claude came up with a few interesting ideas unprompted. For instance, it did a pretty good job on my bio, and it came up with succinct — and still accurate — descriptions of what the courses cover.

Fourthly, this siort of thing works much better if you treat Claude (or whichever AI app you choose to use) as a partner rather than a boss.

If you would like to see what the final iteration looks like in its entirety, click the button below in orde to download the PDF.

Terry Freedman's Creative Writing Courses

Making Good Progress?: The future of Assessment for Learning

If only assessment were as easy as just setting a quick end-of-term test! The author, Daisy Christodoulou, carefully picks apart the pitfalls of various kinds of assessment, drawing on different subject areas to do so. Many of the points she makes are extremely valid, such as the existence of Goodhart’s Law, which is that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

We can see this by noting that many school pupils are in effect drilled for success in the end-of-year or key stage measure rather than being educated as such. Indeed, as Christodoulou points out:

“Excessive exam preparation is not the same as teaching a based curriculum; in fact, it is almost the opposite. Exams complex skills and tasks, but these complex skills depend body of knowledge. Focussing solely on exam tasks means this hidden knowledge stays hidden, and pupils can only ever develop skills in a superficial and limited way.”

There is also an interesting section on descriptive assessment criteria. I remember, when I worked in the Quaklifications and Curriculum Authority, having interesting discussions with colleagues and other professionals about what the criteria in the ICT Programme of Study actually meant, and how to distinguish between them. Ultimately it depended on a probablistic approach based on evidence. That is to say, if a student demonstrates an ability to do or understand X, Y and Z, she is probably a Level 5. I, along with my colleagues, tried to be as robust as possible with our guidance, but you couldn’t apply that sort opf approach in other areas. (Imagine discovering that the person you’ve contracted to rewire your house is probably adequately qualified!)

I like the end-of-chapter summary diagrams. I’m not sure what the point of the photographs is, except maybe to make the book look pretty. There are good reference sections too, and a sound basis in research.
A good and easy-to-read introduction to assessment.

Principles and Practices of Assessment: A guide for aqssessors in the FE and skills sector

The first thing I should say is that the edition I have just read is the 3rd edition rather than the 4th. So hopefully the newer edition contains information about the General Data Protection Regulations, which came into effect in 2018. The edition I have read was published before that and therefore has reeferences to the old Data Protection legislation which pre-dated the GDPR.

This book, as its subtitle suggests, is geared towards post-compulsory education and so you may think it has limited application in schools. You would be righht to an extent. However, it is worth pointing out that there is plenty in this book to like.

For example, there are a lot of worked examples, so to speak, and each chapter ends with a summary, a bibliography, and a list of relevant websites.

Althioughh it has a very short section on assessment for learning, it does have an excellent list of questions the teacher or trainer should ask themselves regarding their questioning practice. ,And then it gives examples of closed, open, probing and other kinds of questions.#

Well worth considering.

In a couple of weeks’ time I shall be teaching a course called Creative Writing Using Constraints, at the City Lit in London. I felt that the blurb on the City Lit’s website was a bit mundane. It read:

Does your writing need a boost of inspiration? While it may seem counter-intuitive, setting creative constraints can be a way to free your imagination. Learn about the ideas of the French Oulipo movement and see what happens when you experiment with interesting – and challenging – limitations.

I posted it to Claude.AI, instructing it to improve the blurb, making sure to include the phrases creative writing for the adventurous (which was coined by my wife), and Leave the safety net at home (which was coined by Claude on a previous occasion. Here’s what it came up with:

Creative writing for the adventurous. Leave the safety net at home!

What if the secret to unleashing your imagination was working against it? Discover the radical ideas of the French Oulipo movement, where creative constraints become a springboard for surprising, inventive writing. Experiment with challenging limitations — and find out what you're really capable of.

I really liked that, and sent it to my head of department. He included the new blurb — but minus the bits about adventurous and safety net, which I thought were the best bits. Oh well, you can’t win them all I suppose.

If you’re interested in doing the course, click the button below in order to download the course outline (pdf).

Creative Writing Using Constraints

A PR person recently sent me an email asking if I would like an article about something called Bare Minimum Monday. Apparently, this is an “initiative” that involves doing the bare minimum when you return to work after the weekend, so as to ease yourself back into work.

I’ve worked with people who do the bare minimum, aka the least amount of work they can get away with, and not only on Mondays. The result tends to be either that their colleagues pick up the slack, or the end-user, such as the customer, is not given the quality of service they’re entitled to.

Apparently this is a thing embraced by, in particular, Gen Y and Gen Z — those people born between 1981 and 1996, and 1997 and 2012 respectively. Perhaps they think this is a great way of maintaining good mental health.

I should have thought that in these fragile and uncertain times, with AI taking jobs left, right and centre, doing as little as possible is perhaps not the wisest strategy.