Ed/Tech must-reads 090724

The Google Jamboard is dead! Long live the Padlet Sandbox

Padlet has been a stayer in the online learning collaborative tools space - though I must confess, I rarely ever go back to Padlets that I have contributed to, so I’m not sure what that means. Anyway, they have a more whiteboardy kind of tool up now in open beta which looks like some kind of competitor for your Miros and Murals. You will need to be logged in to your Padlet account before you open the link and it doesn’t like Firefox yet but it looks promising to me, just by the variety of resources that can be added.

Universities continue to struggle with datafication from WonkHE

For a sector whose bread and butter is data, higher ed does seem to produce far more than it could ever use. This article from Janja Komljenovic (Uni Edinburgh) explores the impact of data saturation and asks whether too much faith has been put into educational technologies to solve universities’ woes. (I wonder if attitudes to data vary depending on the disciplinary background of institutional leaders?)

Political Expression of Academics on Social Media from Research Square

I came across this preprint article for Garg (Imperial College) & Fetzer (Uni Warwick) via a Twitter thread by Matthew Yglesias and while there need to be a bunch of caveats applied, it’s kind of interesting/fun reading. The authors mapped a number of characteristics of academic tweeters (see, saying Xers is just silly) and found that STEM academics were more egocentric but less toxic than those in the humanities and the higher your uni ranking, the more obnoxious you are. (Subjective rankings perhaps but I would LOVE to see a deeper by discipline)

Third Space survey from the National Tertiary Education Union (Australia)

This is an important survey because it will hopefully fill some gaps of knowledge about third space workers in Australian tertiary education and help to kickstart union activity to support these kinds of employees. If your work has elements which cross academic/professional boundaries (or include both), they are keen to hear from you. This includes roles such as learning/educational designers, academic developers, educational technologists, learning developers/study skills workers, para-academics, research/technicians, work integrated learning folks and many more. It should take 15-20 mins.