Ed/Tech must-reads 140524

Save the date: Third Space Symposium - Nov 15- Dec 1, 2024 - Online and in-person (Melbourne, Australia)

The beauty of running your own newsletter is getting to plug your own stuff. The third space describes people working across academic and professional domains in higher education - such as educational technologists, learning designers and academic developers (in this specific definition, anyways - other third space folk include lab techs, study skills teachers, librarians, people working on student employability and many more). 3S workers use their experience and knowledge of pedagogy and technology to enable better learning and teaching but the poorly understood nature of their work (and other factors) means that they (we) face many challenges in doing so.

This symposium involves two events - an in-person 1 day event on the Sunday before the 2024 ASCILITE conference kicks off at the University of Melbourne focusing specifically on 3S people in teaching support area, and a global online asynchronous ‘slowposium’ about the wider HE 3S community. More information will be coming soon about options to present and volunteer.

Are edtech platforms threatening academic freedom and intellectual property rights? from Education International

This blog post from Janja Komljenovic and Ben Williamson for Education International, a global umbrella organisation of education unions, summarises their recent report about some of the implications of licensing conditions of educational technologies. For what it is, it’s fine - there’s nothing particularly new in there though there is a call for greater transparency of license conditions and procurement processes which makes some assumptions that leave little hidden about the authors feelings. (Maybe it is a matter of writing for an audience but it always seems telling when discussion of ed technologies focuses almost entirely on the academic and hardly at all on the students)

Awarding digital badges: research from a first-year university course from Higher Education Research & Development

This article from Goulding, Sharp and Twining (Uni of Newcastle) describes the implementation of digital badges with an undergraduate Initial Teacher Education course. They learnt several important lessons and it is great to see research describing an initiative that didn’t go so well. Takeaways included that they should remove marks altogether when awarding badges and not use badges as a substitute for feedback.

Exploring the impact of gamification on students’ academic performance: A comprehensive meta-analysis of studies from the year 2008 to 2023 from BJET

Continuing with the gamification theme, this comprehensive review of studies into gamification from 2008-2023 highlights the impact of regional and implementation differences when applying gamification on student engagement and achievement. It settles on gamification being good overall but more work should be done on providing more effective feedback.