Ed & Tech must-reads 030326

So last week I made a little bit of a mistake. I thought to myself, well this chapter on academic freedom deserves a little more attention, with its many nooks and crannies. Did you know that there is not just a German word for academic freedom - Wissenschaftsfreiheit - but there is also a German word for the freedom to teach as one wants - Lehrfreiheit? These are things that I learned reading the chapter that I made me suggest coming back to this week. After all, what might possibly happen in a week? I was so taken with this positive, thoughtful new approach that I also suggested doing if for a second article about “assetising academic content”.

Silly man.

In the meantime we saw the rapid rise and crashing descent of a frightening new full service cheating app and a minor party politician in Australia stirred up the discourse by announcing that universities should just scrap group assignments. Maybe one day I will come back to the academic freedom question (but in a nutshell, no I don’t think approaches to teaching should be a vibe-based individualistic free-for-all) but who knows what this week holds for us.

Einstein & The Rise of Nuisance Tech from Marc Watkins

As I mentioned, the hot topic last week was an AI app called Einstein which claimed to be able to navigate your uni course in Canvas (once you had given it your login), read the content, do your quizzes, watch lectures, respond to discussions and read, write and submit your assignments. The creator, Advait Paliwell, a 22 year old college drop out claimed that he aimed to “free humans from the burden of academic labor”. Unsurprisingly, people had some thoughts to share about this. Some of the more interesting takes that I encountered came from Inside Higher Ed, 404 Media, and my former Uni Sydney colleague and supervisor Danny Liu. Overall there was lots of chatter about students cheating themselves, the obligations ed tech vendors have to prevent such things, the death of higher education, yada yada yada. In the end, the site came down after a couple of days following a cease and desist from either the estate of Einstein or from Instructure, the company behind Canvas. Further examination showed that it was essentially just a prettily packaged instance of OpenClaw, a newish agentic service and there was significant doubt about its abilities to deliver on the promises. Paliwell backed off his claims quickly, positioning it more as a provocation raising questions about the purpose of higher education. Fun was had by all. One takeaway from me was that - while the technology no doubt already exists to release another ‘Einstein’- we are definitely still not prepared.

Should unis ditch group assignments? from The Conversation

The second big story last week - at least in Australian higher ed - I first noticed in a very tactful LinkedIn post from a senior uni leader who had been attending the Universities Australia conference where opposition minister for education Julian Leeser decided to urge universities to stop using group assignments. (I’m led to believe that he had a fourth point to make about the standards of student dress at universities but this was cut for time). Leeser is a lawyer with no experience working in education but he very much seemed to think he was on to a winner with this, posting it all over his social media accounts. Happily a few people were able to explain, in - again, unnecessarily polite terms - what the value of group assignments is and how the things that students complain the most about are generally mitigated. Jason Lodge (UQ) must have been parked at his laptop for the speed with which he got this helpful take out and Deakin Uni’s Phill Dawson wasn’t far behind. (There is also some useful discussion at the end of both of these posts)