Ed/Tech must-reads 280125

Assessment of Indoor Acoustic Performance: Impact of Interior Materials on Classrooms in Higher Education Buildings from International Journal of Sustainable Development & Future Society

This is possibly one of the most niche articles that I have (or will) share in my time working on must-reads and if for some weird reason you decide not to click through, well I guess I understand. But it is an incredibly rich resource for anyone working in the ed tech space with an interest in how you can evaluate and adjust the acoustics in a teaching space. (Spoiler, rockwool for the win). I’m including it partially because I like to think that someone out there will say “oh my God that is exactly what I need right now” and partially to make a point about the work that educational technologists do, which people blithely swanning about in the critical ed tech field miss - we think about a LOT of things to enable better learning and teaching.

Join us for Critical Studies of Education and Technology event in Canberra from TELT @ SMP (ANU) (17-21 Feb)

This upcoming week of events is designed to create opportunities to “discuss the current concerns and hopes for education technologies”. This specific event is for people in the Australian Capital Territory but a host of parallel events are also being organised around Australia and internationally. I am all for keeping up with the discourse around education and technology - it’s why I’m here - and I do intend to make it to as many of these (local) events as I can. As I alluded to, my experience to date of reading a lot of work from this movement (some of which I share here) is that there are some valuable ideas shared but there can also be a fundamental lack of understanding of how things work in practice and an overwhelming tendency to problematise things without offering any solutions.

These are the broad questions which will be the focus of these events - solid, worthy questions (if perhaps a little leading)

#1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

#2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

#3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policy making? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

#4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

The Learning Development Project podcast - Maha Bali on troubling generative AI - from Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education

Maha Bali is a fantastic, thought provoking speaker on many aspects of education and technology. In this 53 min recording, she deftly points out that GenAI may make some things more efficient but this is not the same as it being transformative. Despite this, we shouldn’t entirely turn our backs on the tool for our use and for our students, rather look for ways that it may have purpose.