Ed & Tech "must"-reads 100226

I’ve been trying to practice better mental hygiene by simply ignoring the myriad dumb takes about higher ed from hack journalists and past selll-by senior academics but a couple of them managed to break through my protective shell this week by virtue of the number of responses that I read to them. I speak specifically about a rage-bait article about the problem of GenAI in Australian Higher Education, published in Rupert Murdoch’s imaginatively named national broadsheet The Australian. Also noting it was written by a fluffy weekend features writer who does not write about education normally. This sparked a rash of profoundly ignorant response takes from people who also have no experience in or understanding of contemporary higher education yet somehow feel eminently qualified to provide detailed advice about how to address said issues

I do not encourage you to read these. They add nothing to the discourse and simply further pollute the already fatberg poo-balls befouled water in which we swim.

Instead, read this.

Who loves HE? from Future Campus

Tim Winkler does a perfectly fine job running his Australian higher education newsletter/blog Future Campus - the spiritual antecedent of the newsletter where I started writing these things, the Campus Morning Mail. In this opinion piece, he takes a big step forward, putting the Oz article into the wider context of the reputational crisis that HE is undergoing at the moment and offering a nuanced and thoughtful evaluation of how this has come to pass and some steps that the sector might consider to start undoing some of the damage. One that particular spoke to me was providing new avenues for disgruntled (and always highly articulate when their privilege is under threat) academics who love to spout off in the media about how HE done them wrong.

The Muppets take Academia from BlueSky

For a gentle restorative - chitchat on BlueSky (the good Twitter) is starting to resemble the glory days of actual Twitter and this thread is Exhibit number 1. Adam Rothman mused that “I'd watch a muppet show movie where the muppets infiltrate an academic conference” and the flurry of replies that followed was a thing of joy. Revisions of the theme song, wayward commenters in the Q&A, and of course Beaker and Bunsen Honeydew. A moment of zen.