Ed tech must reads: column #44

First published in Campus Morning Mail, 19th July 2022

Some thoughts on ‘home’ pages for individuals within communities (and social networks) from Open Thinkering

One of the more common concerns raised in discussion of online learning and teaching centres around building community. Creating a warm and active space when your interaction with people is via pixels on a screen can be a huge challenge. This post from Doug Belshaw isn’t specifically about education but the principles are highly relevant. One interesting point the author makes relates to ‘notification literacy’ – community members’ ability to feel connected but not overwhelmed by activity.

Innovating Pedagogy 2022 from The Open University &  Open University of Catalonia

This collaborative report from Europe offers a rich state of the actual in terms of current and emerging pedagogical approaches. It includes the still controversial ‘hybrid’ mode, microcredentials, influencer-led education, video ‘watch parties’, wellbeing, and pedagogies of the home, autonomy and discomfort.

EdTech procurement is the most boring…and most important thing we should be studying from Ben Williamson (Twitter)

A lot of popular discourse around education technology can be heavy on philosophical principles and light on practicalities. This branching discussion thread brings a lot of experienced commentators together to discuss how and why the processes behind evaluating and implementing education technologies are poorly understood and underexamined despite this having some of the most significant impact on actual learning and teaching.

Edtech procurement matters: It needs a coherent solution, clear governance and market standards from EDDS & LSE

This working paper from the London School of Economics and education consultancy/think tank EDDS is focused more on education technology procurement in the schools sector but many of the questions raised are highly relevant to the tertiary sector. Of particular note are questions around how technologies are evaluated before purchase and how their value is measured in practice.

The DALL-E 2 Prompt book from Dallery Gallery

If you are yet to discover the wonders of AI generated art – fantastical images created by computers from simple text prompts – a quick google image search for DALL-E 2 is time well spent. This 82 page guide from Dallery Gallery showcases some of the many prompts that might be used to create imagery in the style of impressionist painters or the TV show Starsky & Hutch. Now I just have to wait for my access to the beta to come through.