Ed & Tech must-reads 200126

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage from The Guardian

Hello must-readers. Welcome back. I hope you had a great holiday break - in spite of gestures wildly at the world around us. Cory Doctorow has written compelling takes about our technology driven world in both fiction and non-fiction for a few decades now. He takes a bird’s eye view of GenAI companies, the myth of endless growth and who it really serves in this spicy article for the Guardian. (Doctorow also coined the term enshittification)

Tamagotchigogy: A pedagogical framework of care, feedback and responsiveness from Brainstorm in Progress

For those of you not as ancient as myself, tamagotchis were a 1990s toy fad where people carried around and nurtured small digital pets which died if you didn’t ‘feed’ them often enough. Applying the idea of tamagotchis to this proposed approach to pedagogy feels like a bit of a reach at times but the ideas in this article are sound. Author Geoff Cain advocates for treating the learning process as your tamagotchi (though I think treating students that way would have been more fun), bringing a constructivist melange of presence, small assessments, UDL, cognitive load theory, self-assessment checkpoints and recovery opportunities to the model. Mainly it is a fun new framing for some core practices.

How people with disabilities use the web from W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

For my sins, I sometimes pop in to the Professors subreddit/community on Reddit to stay in touch with some of the issues impacting teaching academics. It seems to be heavily US flavoured and I’m not going to lie, it is often a dark and saddening place. Many many posts (and supportive comments) about how lazy and deceitful their students are, questions about the best ways to punish or trick students and an unfortunate tendency to be highly resentful of students seeking accessibility accommodations. So, finding this resource on the WorldWide Web Consortium site felt like a good thing to share. It offers a number of personas of students with different disabilities - visible and invisible - and the ways they experience life online.

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted from Politico

There has been a bit of chatter on socials in the last week about this long form article about the fustercluck that a bunch of right-wing grifters in the US went through in the process of setting up their shiny new ‘free speech for all*’, anti-woke university* - the University of Austin Texas (based in Dallas). It’s written by a conservative libertarian who constantly finds himself shocked that it wasn’t the haven for free speech and open discussion (as opposed to Marxist havens like Harvard) that he was promised. Every beat of the story made me feel just a little more angry that these people hold the reins of power but I couldn’t stop reading.