Ed tech must reads: Column #35

June 19, 2022

First published in Campus Morning Mail 17th May 2022

14 Equity consideration for Ed Tech from Campus Technology

The process of introducing a new education technology to an institution can be lengthy, needing to balance pedagogical benefits with technological suitability and pragmatic requirements. While care is taken to consider bigger picture needs like accessibility, other factors that speak to the question of ‘what does this tool say about our institutional values’ don’t always get their due. This article from Reed Dickson offers a thought provoking list of questions for implementers to ask about fairness in the selection of tools for learning and teaching.

One of my doctoral supervisors tweeted this story on the weekend about her finding a recent publication of hers about AI and human learning with a different title and authors (but the same volume of the same journal) sitting on ResearchGate. She shares screenshots of the two front pages and bewildered discussion ensues about what these (fake) people are actually trying to achieve.

Anne-Marie Scott is the Deputy Provost of Athabasca University (Canada) and always has some entertaining thoughts about technology enhanced learning and teaching. In this post, she discusses how large-scale digital change happens in institutions and the ways that IT departments often put their own spin on things. She proposes a greater role in this work for learning technologists – experienced professionals (like me) who act as bridges between teaching and technology.

This is perhaps nerdy even for this column but I am aware that the programming language Python is often favoured in Higher Ed for its ease of use. A significant development in this language is the recent release of Pyscript, which for the first time allows coders to run Python in web browsers. This punchy tiktok video explains how.

Clancy@stackoverflow from Simon Terry I’ve been a sucker for bush poetry ever since my grade 4 teacher Mr Harris used to regale us with tales from Banjo and Henry on warm afternoons. So it was probably inevitable that I would have to share this updated version of Clancy of the Overflow – ‘Clancy’s gone Web3 coding’ (Thanks for finding this Wendy T)