Ed tech must reads: column #42

First published in Campus Morning Mail, 5th July 2022

Flexible learning spaces or flexible learning places? from Peter Goodyear (Twitter)

Universities have long needed to consider the practical affordances of venues for learning and teaching but perhaps never as much as now, as we come to realise that physical presence on campus is not the be-all and end-all. This series of tweets from education notable Peter Goodyear summarise some of his recent work looking at the nature of rooms dedicated to flexible learning and what impact our decision to consider them as spaces or places has on learning and research.

Desperately seeking citation (patterns) from Mirya Holman (Twitter)

Another handy Twitter thread during the week came from a call out for suggestions on ways to track reciprocal research citations. This rapidly spun off into a discussion of a range of tools and whether they did exactly what the original poster was asking for but it led me to at least half a dozen handy tools that I’d never heard of. A couple of respondents even figured that would could just code their own solution and share the results. Community in action.

The Higher Ed Guide for the Corporate Community – Online course from Educause

Higher Education structures and processes can seem Byzantine to the outsider (and perhaps more than a few insiders) but as universities increasingly work with external partners, there is a need to offer clarity around them for more effective collaboration. This online short course from Educause is US focused but based on the course outline may offer some more universal insights. It runs from July 11 – 29.

Building the Behavior Change Toolkit: Designing and Testing a Nudge and a Boost from Behavioral Scientist

The idea of using ‘nudges’ to change behaviour by changing the environment may only have been formalised in 2008 when economist Richard Thaler introduced ‘Nudge theory’ but it has certainly taken off since then, winning a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. This paper describes work undertaken by Behavioural scientists on ‘boosts’, which are more focused on the agency of individuals. While the article doesn’t explicitly spell out the application of one over the other in a teaching context, it offers some interesting provocations.

30 Higher Education IT Influencers worth a follow from EdTech

This list of people – some of who would be mortified to be labelled as ‘influencers’ – is pretty US-centric but covers a wide range of some very interesting people working on the tech side of Higher Education that share their thoughts and ideas on social media, blogs and podcasts. Some of my faves are Ann Gagné, Casey Fiesler, Tanya Joosten and of course, the only Australian to make the list, Sarah Thorneycroft.