Ed/Tech must-reads 200525

How do they like it? Higher education teachers’ professional development preferences for blended learning and technology acceptance profiles from Computers in Human Behavior Reports

Professional development for academics is generally a one-size fits all affair, because Teaching & Learning Centres are understaffed and everyone is busy. This paper from a collection of mostly Europe-based researchers (and one from the University of Wollongong) compared PD preferences with technology acceptance profiles among 217 HE teaching staff. It suggests that the educators’ comfort with educational technology aligned with their preferred approaches, where those with high technology acceptance preferring professional inquiry approaches, those in the middle wanting the university to take the lead for them and those with low technology acceptance needing to be convinced of the value.

Teacher recognition: Avoiding reductionist temptations and developing an ecosystem approach from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

I was interested to read this post from David Sadler, DVC(A) at Notre Dame, because it was one of the first times that I have seen someone in the Australian HE sector not call for the return of the vaunted Office for Learning and Teaching. The OLT was shut down in 2014 after providing national leadership in tertiary teaching practice and innovation through grants programs, awards and other initiatives. Sadler noted that there are easily a dozen or more schemes in place which recognise innovation in teaching, I can’t say that I agreed with the hand-wavey perspective presented on the number of learning and teaching units that are being closed down, nor do I necessarily believe that awards and recognition schemes necessarily do a lot to lift standards overall. (I suspect they create more opportunities to take no action on teaching quality because “hey, look how well this tiny proportion of our educators are doing”). But it is nonetheless an interesting read and worthwhile for getting a rare insight into perspectives at the top of the tree.

Goodbye, Google Chrome: Replacing My Mobile Browser for 30 Days with GenAI from Leon Furze

It took me a minute to work out why this experiment horrified me as much as it initially did - before it fascinated me. It was partially the willingness to trust systems which have been profoundly unreliable in providing trustworthy information and it was partially the handing over of all connection to knowledge with bots owned by big corporations. But this presumes that we still live in some kind of early WWW utopia where content published by ‘Fred in the shed’ was as accessible as that from OmniMegaCorp, when in reality we are drawing our water more and more from a well in one of the big walled gardens. Anyway, Leon boldly handed over his knowledge acquisition to a combination of Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini and spins an entertaining tale of his experiences.