Ed/Tech must-reads 130824

Designing Learning Experiences for Inclusivity and Diversity: Advice for Learning Designers from CAUL Open Educational Resources Collective

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the launch of this book, edited by Keith Heggart and Mais Fatayer (UTS) last week. There are a wealth of resources out there about how to teach well, but fewer, I suspect, about how to teach kindly. In their own words this resource provides “a comprehensive guide to designing learning experiences that are accessible, equitable, and inclusive.” It touches on a range of topics across open educational practices, designing for equity and cultural responsiveness, and working with students with lived experience of disability. It is written for learning designers but the lessons are far more widely applicable. And it’s free!

Zotero 7: Zotero, redesigned from Zotero

There are plenty of decent referencing tools out there like Mendeley and EndNote but I do like working with Zotero. So it was nice to see that there is a major (again, free) update available. So far I’ve only really noticed the superficial changes - I’m not a big user of ePubs, which it now also supports - but it is tidier, annotation is a little richer and being able to hover over in-text citations to see more information I think is a bit of a winner.

AI potential ‘squandered by universities’ risk-focused approach’ from Times Higher Education

THE reports on upcoming research from Abby Cathcart (QUT) and colleagues detailing a survey of 3400 workers at 28 Oz unis about their use of GenAI tools in the workplace. It notes that so far it is largely not being used in curriculum design (< 10%) or to save time in tedious administrivia. This is partially attributed to institutional caution, ineffective tools and heavily workloads. (Maybe also, people still like doing parts of their work “by hand”?)

The role of online crisis actors in teachers’ work and lives from Critical Studies in Education

Including this article might be a little bit of a stretch but it is a great read and I have largely become aware of these faux teacher ‘unions’ through their invasive ads in my social media feeds. Heggart et al., discuss the astroturfing of teacher unions by a right-wing group of ‘professional associations’ targeting teachers and nurses operating under the banner of Red Union. (Narrator: It was not a union and is definitely not red). It ranges across antivaxxers, the Wieambilla shootings and the nicely phrased “uberfication” of education unions.

The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification from Global Hip-Hop studies

You’ve seen the memes and heard/made the jokes, now read the journal article. Unlikely new Australian cult hero Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn and her colleague Lucas Marie offer some insights into the bigger picture of turning a cultural art-form - breaking/breakdancing - into a competitive sport which offers some clues into the rationale behind parts of a what was a memorable performance.