Ed/Tech must-reads

Academic workers talk about Severance, Padlet, Needed Now and Learning and teaching centres

August 07, 2023

four professionally dressed women sit with a laptop with a stylised background of round shapes in pastel colours

I had a job interview yesterday (internal promotion) that this article would probably have been perfect for. I mean, my interview was more on the ed-tech side of things but everything is entangled these days and looking at ways to ensure that the things that we do actually have meaningful impact was certainly a big part of it. This particular article from Ellis, Brown and Tse (University of Waterloo, Canada) provides a valuable framework of five planning questions and five guiding principles (defensible, holistic, prioritised, collaborative and adaptable) to use in ensuring that a support centre meets the needs that it is intended to serve.

Online collaboration tool Padlet has been around long enough to slip into “is that still a thing?” territory - though I know more than a few people that swear by it. (Hello Kate). They have launched an impressive set of new features in their most recent update, including scheduled posts, polls, Google Drive integration, mention tagging, AI image generation, AI content moderation, export to slideshow, and some new commercial/classroom plans that warrant a revisit.

UTS Video Meetup #15 - Tuesday 15th August, 2pm-3.30pm In person and on Zoom from UTS LX.Lab

For people with an interest in creative ways to use video in HE teaching, the UTS Video Meetups are a highlight. This session includes presentations from Nicolene Lottering (Bond) about Lightboards, Jonathan Hunter/Tim Harland (USyd) about presenting on camera, Joyce El-Haddad (UNSW) on Instagram and Jackson Shoobert (UNE) on digital reconstruction of learning objects.

While this isn’t overly ed-techy, it was nice to see that my former CMM colleague Sally Kift has set up a new shingle here on Substack for her excellent series of Higher Ed think pieces Needed Now in Learning and Teaching. Already published work covers topics across indigenous learning, peer mentoring, professional practice standards, and student equity in online delivery.

I have been waiting for this podcast to drop ever since Inger (Thesis Whisperer) Mewburn mentioned it on socials a few months ago. If you missed it, Severance is a beautifully dark, corporate-dystopia dramedy(?) series last year about workers implanted with brain chips that let them disconnect their work selves from their outside selves for productivity. Inger, alongside her sister Anitra Nottingham and academic podcaster extraordinaire Narelle Lemon produced a series examining the Netflix show about academia “The Chair” and this is their sophomore effort. Very much looking forward to this.