Ed & Tech must-reads 100326

AI raises the dead, webinars on preparing grads for AI, third space identity and Blackboard returns from the dead

Author

Colin Simpson
March 10, 2026

wide shot of a band on stage, many people and inflatable dancers

I’ve never seen inflatable dancers at a gig before and now I want to know why. (Pulp, Melbourne)

This is a short post from Vanessa Heggie (Uni of Birmingham) echoing others that I’ve read elsewhere in the last week or so. She notes that Grammarly, which has gone in heavily on AI functionality of late, is now offering “expert review” bots trained on the work of individual academic specialists, living and dead, without their consent, to provide feedback on your work using their voice. Unsurprisingly the commenters on the post are horrified. The ethical side of this is not addressed in the FAQ on the Grammarly site but I have no doubt they would lean heavily on ‘these works are in the public arena’ and whatever other vibe heavy corporate justifications they find appropriate. It seems as though we are being rushed towards some kind of post-morality version of the world which we don’t yet have the language to fully articulate the wrongness of because it is so much, all at once.

While we grapple with the ethics of GenAI, it isn’t going away any time soon, so the question of how we ensure that our learners have their best shot in this grave new world is something which has occupied many people working in education. This seminar from the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital LEarning at Deakin Uni will examine some of the work that people such as Danni Hamilton, Lauren Hanson and Phill Dawson have been undertaking in concert with discipline academics and industry to answer some of these questions.

(For what it’s worth, I would have promoted this even if I hadn’t recently picked up a small fellowship to do some research with the CRADLE team at Deakin - which I am quietly chuffed about.)

We are back for our 10th year of webinars and are kicking things off with a double-header of doctoral research findings about what it is like to be someone working in the third space between academic and professional practice in higher education. My former colleague from my Monash days, Ingrid D’Souza will regale all with tales of the education/learning designer life and identity in Victorian universities. I will follow up with my own model for meaningfully distinguishing between learning designers, educational technologists and academic developers. Even if you don’t work in this space, third space practitioners make a vital yet poorly understood contribution to learning and teaching and this session should add some useful insights into the help and advice they (we) offer.

News of the slow death and resurrection of Blackboard (formerly Anthology, formerly Blackboard) has no doubt occupied some space in the minds of anyone who is still using the Blackboard LMS. This article provides what appears to be a pretty comprehensive accounting of the toing-and-froing that has been happening in the last year or so, with their various (non L&T) parts being sold to other businesses and new owners marching in. To be perfectly frank, someone with a better financial brain than mine might make more sense of it but the overall headline seems to be that the deals are done and they now have $70m of new money to play with. No specific plan for what to spend it on (publicly) yet but it appears that it will still be with us for the next little while.

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