Ed & tech must-reads 280426

I had a lovely visit to Flinders Uni last week, guest speaking about sustainable innovation in higher ed and also about collaboration between academics and third space practitioners. Many thanks to the organisers, Michelle Picard, Melanie Worrall, Wendy Taleo, and Carly Peterson for your generous hospitality. A couple of notable articles this week echo some key themes that emerged in some robust (but civil) discourse.

Reframing Third Space Roles in UK Higher Education from European Review

Patron saint of higher ed professional staff and third space practitioners, Celia Whitchurch continues her impressive body of work with this article drawing on the views on senior institutional managers and 3S staff about ways that HE is changing. She notes a shift toward more collaborative working practices (rather than service-based ones) and an increased appreciation that evermore complicated institutional systems and processes require deeper and more holistic understanding of the component parts. Certainly nice to see some confirmation of some key ideas that people in my workshop found hard to believe.

An attack on teaching and learning centers from Bryan Alexander(‘s blog)

To by crystal clear, as the heading format could be misleading, Bryan Alexander is discussing the attack, not doing the attacking. He discusses a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong)(paywalled). Alexander breaks down the self-serving flaws in the Chronicle author’s argument (Paul Schofield, a philosophy prof - of course - at a small private liberal arts uni) in forensic detail. The weird cartoonish presentation of CTLs as some all-powerful, inescapable black hole which dominates pedagogical discourse, childish complaints about learning from colleagues in other disciplines, a basic smorgasbord of entitled rage. Disappointingly this is not the first time that I have seen such silly takes, even among people loosely in my own circles who should know far better. [I do realise that this newsletter is ostensibly about broader things in the ed & tech space than the people who work to facilitate learning and teaching and I’ve had plans to start a dedicated space for this - stay tuned.]

Entangled Education: Technology and pedagogy in universities as a mash up from Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Networked Learning 

Maybe it is just the circles that I move in or the state of higher ed in Australia but reading this paper really made me feel that we are a bit ahead of the curve in this sector here. Threstrup, Robinson (Aarhus Uni) and Shumar (Drexel uni) do a solid job examining the ways that the pedagogical and the technological aspects of contemporary learning and teaching are now so deeply interconnected that it is difficult to discuss one without the other. They also put forward some interesting future directions for new forms of student interaction but many of the issues in the current state of the actual that they raise feel like things that were dealt with some years ago. Definitely worth a read, if for nothing other than giving me the first clear definition of “post-digital” that I have read in the literature. (Making the point that clearly digital hasn’t gone away but the fact that it is everywhere means that we can probably stop focusing on it so heavily - in the same way that we no longer really talk about eCommerce).

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

Quick reminder of this very cool looking webinar that we are running this week.