Ed/Tech must-reads

Hologram lecturers thrill students at trailblazing UK university from The Guardian

I had to include this image to highlight how silly this story is - from the ‘torn from the pages of a press release’ heading to the breathy exuberance of the prose. I have a growing understanding of the cynicism of some people about gimmicky EdTech. My very first response to this was that it reminds me of attending talks/conferences in Second Life that were held in spaces that perfectly replicated teaching spaces and wondering - ‘with all the possibilities of the virtual world, why this?’

The use of ‘trailblazing’ in the heading also reminded me of past experiences with vendors where their biggest selling point was primarily - ‘nobody else is using this technology in this country, you will be the first, a pioneer’ - which, sadly was far more effective than we might have hoped.

I am happy to defend ed tech companies but this does not make it easy.

Governance of artificial intelligence and data in Australasian higher education: A snapshot of policy and practice from ACODE

Now that we are about a year into the age of GenAI in education, this seven page whitepaper offers a handy overview of how Australasian Higher Ed is dealing with it in policy and practice. It includes results from a survey of 36 member institutions of the Australasian Council on Open and Digital Education around GenAI use and management. Some standout figures for me were that 55% of institutions have policy in place on ethical use of GenAI and 27% of respondents broadly agreed that their institutions make the tech accessible to all students. We still have work to do people.

Cyber-security homography attacks from Instagram

This isn’t entirely about EdTech but as someone who thinks he is a little bit cybersafe, it took me by surprise. Hopefully we are all mindful of checking the actual URLs of links before we click them, but this person points out that in a ‘homograph attack’, scammers may replace letters in a URL with identical characters from another language - such as the Cyrillic lower case a, which is indistinguishable from a Latin a but has a different unicode.