Ed/Tech must-reads 150725

Murdoch University student fights accusation of illegal AI use in assignment from ABC News

Given the known unreliability of AI detection tools, it surprises me in some ways that we haven’t seen more stories like this. A nursing student at Perth’s Murdoch Uni got pinged for academic integrity breaches, partially based on Turnitin’s AI detector and partially on the investigator’s expertise (identifying weird copy/paste behaviour and low editing time). The students swears up and down that they only used the non-AI parts of the uni supplied Grammarly tool. He didn’t appear to offer any other defence to the issues of strange copy-paste behaviour, attributing that to Grammarly. I guess maybe it might work that way but it seems a little odd. But this uncertainty is where we live now and I have a feeling that we probably need to focus on ensuring that non-cheats aren’t falsely accused, even if that means that a few cheats slip the net.

Why Understanding AI Doesn’t Necessarily Lead People to Embrace It from Harvard Business Review

This article “conversationalises” a paper in the Journal of Marketing by Tully, Longoni and Appel indicating that lower AI literacy predicts greater AI receptivity. Interestingly, they also found that these people saw AI as less capable and more ethically concerning than did those with greater knowledge of the technology, but they still wanted to use it more regardless. The discussion presented about how and why this might be the case, alongside the tendency of more tech savvy users to be a bit ‘meh’ about it all, is worth a read.

Using student evaluations of teaching as a tool for continuous professional development from The Educationalist

Niels van der Baan guest authors this issue of the always thought provoking The Educationalist with his ideas about making use of student evaluation survey results in academic professional development. He describes a process used at Maastricht University to provide peer-to-peer coaching informed by these surveys which seems quite sensible. (I was curious whether the survey results were pre-screened by someone to remove unhelpful feedback though). The article ends with links to some useful further resources about making effective use of these surveys.

TELedvisors Network webinar – Thurs 31st July 2025, 12pm AEST: Beyond Agile: Stop Iterating, Start Prototyping

One of my former Monash colleagues, Nik Alksnis, will take us on a deep dive into project management methodologies with education technologies in this stimulating session - highlighting the benefits of Rapid Prototyping over the de rigeur Agile approaches. Anyone wanting to better understanding how to make the most of ed technologies needs to attend this session.