Ed/Tech must-reads

Fostering AI literacy: A teaching practice reflection from Journal of Academic Language & Learning

This article from Lyn Pretorius, one of my current colleagues at Monash (in the Education faculty), reminds us that nobody yet really knows what we are doing with GenAI in learning and teaching and that’s ok. After providing a handy backgrounder on the state of play, she discusses her approach to incorporating GenAI into the learning process with her research students, building on prior work in using Turnitin as a teaching tool. She discusses prompt design with her students and encourages the responsible use of GenAI tools for brainstorming and research question generation. I must confess, seeing her discussion of the institutional response to GenAI - knowing that I contributed to this - and hearing that it is on the right track is quietly satisfying.

Adoption of learning analytics in higher education institutions: A systematic literature review from British Journal of Educational Technology

Poor old Learning Analytics must still be a little shell-shocked at how quickly it lost its cock-o-the-walk status in the ed tech space with the rise of GenAI. For a few years there (pandemic aside, I guess), you couldn’t open a journal or peruse a conference program without a flurry of LA related content. Maybe this quiet time has been good for it and simply means that we have crested the hump of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. This rich article from Márquez et al. (Universidad Austral de Chile) offers a detailed overview of recent work in this space and more importantly, a highly practical list of factors that must be considered in effective LA application, including stakeholders, institutional and pedagogical processes, ethical considerations, legacy system-linkage and cross-organisational planning.

2023 Australasian Academic Integrity Network Forum - Friday 22nd September, online. (Free)

This upcoming day long forum features a host of notables from Australian Higher Ed and further afield covering issues ranging across assessment design, non-text based academic integrity, GenAI (naturally), leadership and strategy and student partnerships. I am particularly pleased to see that a student panel exploring integrity concepts is listed prominently on the page.

RMIT Culture and Future Play Lab screening: Tron (1982) - Tuesday 19th September, 6pm AEST, Melbourne ($10)

In the time before I got sucked into the maelstrom of researching Third Space work in Higher Ed, I had quite the fascination with the possibilities of games in learning. (Hence my @gamerlearner handle). RMIT’s Future Play Lab has been doing groundbreaking work in this space (and way beyond) for more than a decade and will be screening this seminal classic in the gorgeous Capitol Theatre. In addition they will host a discussion of playable spaces and game design and provide playable demonstrations of new local games that let players race to catch a tram, learn Indigenous language, and make music from emojis, among other things.