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Anonymous assessment, introduced to higher education over the last twenty-five years to reduce attainment gaps, is a now common place. This paper suggests some ways in which anonymous assessment could be reconceptualised. We argue that there is scant empirical evidence of anonymity having worked in reducing attainment gaps in higher education. It encourages a student-teacher relationship characterised by mutual loss of trust. The rise of AI-powered language models urges a different perspective on who (and/or what) is carrying out learning activities, and how. Our provisional contentions are that we need to know ‘the work, not the words’ of learning processes; and that as university instructors we can afford to have an ambitious perspective on generative AI. Finally, we ask, when AI can support mutual knowledge-creating processes, how much longer it will make sense to work with notions of individual success, knowledge as a possession, and gradated outcomes based on fixed criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse a 'friendly fire' incident from the second Gulf War and the controversy which came to envelop it during a coroner's inquest in 2007. Focusing on the cockpit video of the incident that was leaked to the media during that inquest, we examine what the military and civilian investigators were involved in reconstructing: the incident as it unfolded in real time. Our analysis is grounded in a praxeological perspective that draws on and links ethnomethodological studies of work, research into 'normal' accidents, disasters and risks, and recent ethnographies of the military. Based on our analysis, we suggest that the accounts offered after the event by the military and civilian inquiries should be treated less as competing descriptions than different ways of problematizing particular aspects of the military-political 'machineries' the pilots' actions were enmeshed within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]