Martin Kleppmann

I like to annotate the slides by hand during the lecture, so just draw on an iPad to make it a little bit more interactive.

But other than that, it is fairly theoretical.

That's partly the way the Cambridge system works.

It kind of favors theoretical and pen and paper courses over, say, implementation practical courses.

I think it would be possible certainly to do a practical course on this, and I may incorporate a bit more practical exercise in the future, but right now it's mostly a theoretical pen and paper course, and that is fine.

The cryptography course that I do, that's much more hands-on, so that's about actually getting the students to implement some elliptic curves from scratch, for example.

Yeah, I mean, prior to AI explosion happening, actually, rate of change is very slow in computer science teaching.

Partly that might be Cambridge.

You know, Cambridge is over 800 years old.

Like, everyone thinks on longer timescales.

People...

don't tend to rush into the latest fads and instead try to focus on the fundamentals and the ideas that a lot of the fundamentals of computer science were developed in the 1930s already and are still true today.

And, you know, lambda calculus and those types of things, for example.

And so we have quite a bit of a focus on those sort of fundamentals rather than chasing the latest fashionable thing.

That said, AI has totally changed the way we can assess coursework, for example, because, of course, now we can try banning AI, but it's impossible to actually enforce such a ban.

And also it's kind of counterproductive because we do want students to engage with new technologies and figure out how to use them productively for themselves.

But we want to somehow do that in a way that supports their own learning and doesn't undermine it.

So how do we get the students to use AI in a responsible way, in a way that's mature?

And we can't necessarily rely on the students being mature enough to know for themselves what is a helpful use of AI and what is a form of use of AI that undermines their own learning.

because some of them are quite mature and able to decide that for themselves but many are not and so we need to provide some guardrails for them and we do need to make sure that when we have assessed work for example it's fair and it's perceived as fair by the students and if the students feel that some of their co-students are getting really good marks without doing any work