Ed & Tech must-reads 210426

Webinar Thurs April 30 2026 12pm AEST – Who Shapes AI in Education? Capability, Confidence, and Women Leading the Way from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

Our monthly webinar for April provides insights into GenAI and education with a focus on empowering women and underrepresented voices from Juliana Peloche (Edith Cowan Uni) and Nikki Meller (CREDuED). This session explores how educators can influence not just how AI is used, but who gets to lead in an AI-enabled future, ensuring it is not only effective, but equitable and representative.

When teachers become builders: Vibe coding and the future of educational technology from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

As someone who has worked in several different central educational technology teams, this article from James Bedford (Alphacrucis University College) horrified me a little bit. Alarm bells kept ringing about security, privacy, and what I (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) see as the inherent flakiness of vibe coded tools. Bedford assures readers that no student data is stored and claims that no information trains the models. He at least acknowledges that collaboration will be needed with institutional teams and systems for “a sprawling ecosystem of educator-built applications” to be added to university teaching and learning systems. That this will require changes to institutional security and privacy protocols - is handwaved as them needing “to catch up”. Discussion of ongoing maintenance, technical support and training is virtually absent entirely. There has long been a history of shadow technology - some of it very good - in higher education but for the most part, this was at least built by people with some understanding of what they were coding. Or IT systems. Or university processes and procedures and policies. Nonetheless, this article is worth a read for what it tells us about the rapidly expanding and wildly confident world of vibe coding

Fixing teachers’ problems? exploring teachers’ repair and maintenance work around generative AI technologies from Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

The NeededNow piece pairs nicely with this new journal article from critical ed tech scholars Ljungqvist, Sonesson and Selwyn (Lund University/Monash University). It examines the so-called hidden labour undertaken by academics and students as they use GenAI tools in learning and teaching - in this instance in terms of fixing instructional quality and practice gaps, ensuring that learners stay engaged, and attending to social relations. They interview 28 Swedish secondary school teachers with decent experience in using GenAI in their classes. They conclude that amidst all the excitement about what GenAI promises, the workload to achieve this largely undersold.

Read like Stanford teaches from Instagram

I have a love-hate affair with Instagram and other purveyors of short-form videos. To the extent where I will install and uninstall the apps multiple times a week. But there can be some real gems, including this video from heavymeta_4 which outlines the value of pairing readings to foster greater cognition and comparison in processing, accommodating and interpreting the competing ideas from multiple sources. Maybe this is nothing new but it spoke to me.