Ed/Tech must-reads 060824

Banning lecture capture would not free students from loneliness from Times Higher Education

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in! The debate around lecture capture will probably continue until the heat-death of the universe so I have been drifting away from it but then Emily Nordmann (Uni of Glasgow) and her colleagues Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel (Glasgow), Louise Robson (Sheffield) Jill MacKay (Edinburgh) and Kasia Banas (Edinburgh) entered the fray responding some nonsense published recently about poor lecture attendance. They forensically dissect those assertions and make (yet another) strong case for using technology to support students.

Academic Fracking: When Publishers Sell Scholars Work to AI from AI + Education = Simplified

This slightly meandering piece does a solid job of exploring the deeper impact of GenAI on the academic publishing marketing, with an eye on the recent announcement that Taylor and Francis sold access to all their pubs to Microsoft to fuel the GenAI beast. (Yes I am aware of the irony of me using GenAI to create my header images - humans are complicated like that). For me the most striking part of the entire story is how little MS paid - $10 million dollars.

Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher Education from Games and Culture

A friend of mine recently bemoaned the fact that the marketing department at his institution was hell-bent on telling prospective students that his new course was a clear pathway to a career in game design. It was not a game design course but had computery, interactivey parts. Like most discussions with marketing, it was a losing battle. Pathways into Game design and development are rather appealing to the young people - in this study Brendan Keogh and Taylor Hardwick (QUT) review offerings in 119 programs in Australian tertiary education in 42 institutions to see how disciplinary cultures and values shape the way this is taught.

‘Publish or Perish’ is now a card game — not just an academic’s life from Nature

This short article brings together elements of the last two bits and describes what looks like a darkly fun card based game about getting ahead in scholarly publishing. It doesn’t appear that the game is actually out yet but evidently there is a Kickstarter to look out for.