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  I heard it first on Facebook, it sounded so sublime. A virtual world beyond what we see in space and time. A place where we could live and work and play. A digital dream where anything was okay.  But now AI's killed the Metaverse. and we never saw it coming at all. AI killed the Metaverse.  And now we're left with nothing at all. Remember the Metaverse ? That place that resembled Second Life but which was actually many places (Meta Multiverse?) and where you could use VR, and where the avatars didn't have any legs ? What's happened to it? I think the buzz around ChatGPT, MidJourney, and all things AI has basically killed it off as anything to get excited about. To use Gartner hype-cycle-speak, the Metaverse is probably languishing in the Trough of Disillusionment with little chance of dragging itself up the Slope of Enlightenment.  It doesn't surprise me. Although, I briefly got excited that the initial flicker of virtual worlds becoming the next big thing again,

I'm currently attending the 2023 TESOL Convention in Portland, Oregon, USA. At the opening on Wednesday, the Presidential Panel was on 'Inspiring the Future of Research in ELT ' and featured Joyce Kling (President, TESOL International Association (2022–23); Senior Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden) and Jun Liu (President, TIRF; Rector, City University of Macau, China; Past President, TESOL International Association (2006–07) as modeators, and David Nunan (Trustee, TIRF; Professor Emeritus, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; Past President, TESOL International Association - 1999–2000), Peter De Costa  (Coeditor, TESOL Quarterly; First Vice President, AAAL (2022–23); Associate Professor and MATESOL Program Director, Michigan State University, USA), Shondel Nero (Inaugural Recipient, TIRF James E. Alatis Prize (2016); Professor of Language Education, New York University, USA). and  Özgehan Uştuk  (Chair, TESOL Research Professional Council; Postdoctoral Fellow, Th

"ChatGPT-3 does not provide you with an answer to your prompt, it provides you with an output. That is a different thing altogether" (Kate Lyndsay, 2022) Continuing the series on ChatGPT and Assessment ( Pt 1 and Pt 2 ), let's look at how the emergence of tools such as ChatGPT has disrupted the nature of education (see ChatGPT and Education ), especially University Assessment.  Designing Assignments in the ChatGPT Era has this to say:  "Some instructors seek to craft assignments that guide students in surpassing what AI can do. Others see that as a fool's errand - one that lends too much agency to the software...Either way, in creating assignments now, many seek to exploit ChatGPT's weaknesses."  The article then goes into detail of how to do this. Either way, it recognises that assignments, and clearly (although not stated here) assessment in general has been disrupted and there is no going back.  Educators have started initiatives to take advantage o