Ed tech must reads: column #58

November 03, 2022

First published in Campus Morning Mail 1st Nov 2022

How to make students read? From The Educationalist

One of the most universal complaints that educators have about their students, regardless of the discipline, is that they ‘never do the readings’. For some, this is where the issue begins and ends. This thoughtful piece from Alexandra Mihai delves into some of the possible reasons for learners not engaging with readings and offers some useful strategies for sparking their interest. She reminds that academic reading requires learnable skills and that educators can ease this path.

Either learning and teaching innovation in the last fifty years has been so minimal as to fit into a fifteen-page article (with 4 pages of refs) or Griffith’s Rob Ellis has the skills to sum up five decades of increasing complexity succinctly. Happily, it appears to be the latter. The paper focuses exclusively on the discussion within this particular journal in this time, taking us from early calls for research into HE learning and teaching to be undertaken to the inevitable discussion of the pandemic response. It offers a rich overview of HE history.

Moving to Mastodon from Steve Fenton

Now that his Muskiness has officially taken over Twitter, many of my online colleagues are looking around warily for what this might mean for our favourite online space. Having been a twit for 11 years, it would be a hard ship to abandon, so, for now, I’m just watching with interest. I know more than a few people are exploring Mastodon, the peace, love and mung beans alternative option. This article offers some useful advice for those considering the change. I also found this handy tool for re-following your Twitter friends, as long as they put their new username in their Twitter bio.

Where there are large education conferences you will inevitably find people with things to sell. The US based Educause conference easily fits into this category. This clever piece of data analysis examines the amount of floor space taken up in the vendor hall by businesses in a range of categories to map broader trends in the sector. Among these we see conferencing tools, general consultancies, customer relationship management systems and general hardware sellers in the ascendent and LMS providers taking 1/7th the space they did a decade ago.

Slowroads from anslo

This is more something for a moment of zen than anything. Slowroads is a simple driving simulator – that looks a lot like a Tesla – taking you through picturesque procedurally generated landscapes in your web browser. You can drive yourself or just set auto-pilot and zone out for a little.