Ed & Tech must-reads 21st July 2026

TELedvisors Network webinar Nobody told me... Confessions of third space professionals Thurs 30th July 1pm from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

Third space professionals (or practitioners, if you will) are those behind the scenes folk working to enable better learning and teaching in roles including learning designer, educational technologist, academic developer and a plethora of similarly named roles. This is vitally important work but with very few formal courses to enter the field, most people find themselves here almost by accident after working in other jobs. This webinar, hosted by third space dynamo Diana Saragi Turnip (UNSW) will explore the hidden curriculum and provide attendees with new insights into working in this space. It features two UNSW education developers, Carrol Besseling and Aylwin Sim. If you work in this space, this session is a must-see and if you don’t, a great opportunity to get to know more about your third space colleagues and how they can help you.

Five ways to help first year students become better learners from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

Uni of Sydney education designer (and 2022 most ultimate LMS designer award winner) Kria Coleman highlights just some of what it is that 3rd space folks bring to the party in this helpful piece in Needed Now. She examines some of the challenges that students face as they transition from secondary education to tertiary education, with all the heightened expectations and freedom that this change brings. Kria draws on some key concepts from Self Regulated Learning to ease this path, encouraging students to visualise what they are working towards, providing explicit performance of study guidance, fostering reflection, responding to feedback and creating a safe space to feel challenged.

Let’s talk 5 ways to set up creative online assignments in college classes and avoid cheating and AI from Instagram

While my doomscrolling ebbs and flows, I have found myself increasingly watching shortform videos. Happily, I seem to have trained the algorithm to give me some vaguely useful content from time to time, including this practical video from US College history teacher Rachel Gunter (phdrachel). As with many educators today, she is looking for ways to minimise students’ use of GenAI, and here she describes activities in her unit centred around sending students to online interactive resources and having them document and reflect on their experiences learning in these interactives. Simple but handy.

Twine and Generative AI in Interactive Learning Ecosystems: A Framework for AI-Assisted Narrative Game Design in Higher Education from Learning and Collaboration Technologies

On the topic of interactives, Twine is (relatively) simple to use open tool for creating decision-tree games which can incorporate text, images, multimedia and simple coding. Some friends and I used it to create a 25-30 min game letting people experience the highs and lows of choosing and implementing an education technology - Untitled Ed Tech Game. This conference paper describes work to build a tool to add GenAI to simplify the creation process of Twine (and H5P branching scenarios). It is probably one of the best places to learn what is happening now with Twine and to explore some options to create rich interactives for learning.

Coming soon: ed.advisors from me

The more observant among you might have noticed that from time to time I discuss the roles and contributions to tertiary learning and teaching of third space professionals/practitioners like learning designers, educational technologists, academic developers and myriad other folks in similar roles. This is something that I spent a chunk of my life doing my PhD research on and in the course of this study, I coined “EdAdvisors” - educator advisors - as an umbrella term to categorise and appropriately respect these three (or so) complementary but different roles. (EdAdvisor was derived from Edvisor, which some colleagues (particularly Kate Mitchell) and I developed back in the day).

I’ve been wanting to write and research more about this space and to promote and celebrate the valuable works of people doing the same. So I am currently setting up a parallel newsletter - ed.advisors. The plan is to also do a weekly must-reads type post as well as some longer form pieces which take more of a deep dive into key issues. I would also be delighted to publish relevant contributions about third space / EdAdvisor roles and issues from people in the community or interested in it. Thematically appropriate art work could also be fun.

There isn’t much to see there yet but there is a subscription option, so please consider signing up so that I know that this is not, in fact, utter folly.

Ed & Tech must-reads will continue as normal